by Neil Gaiman
Gunnlod looked down, and her cheeks reddened.
“Can I sit beside you?” asked Bolverkr.
Gunnlod nodded, saying nothing.
She had food there in the mountain, and drink, and they ate and they drank.
After they ate, they kissed gently in the darkness.
After their lovemaking, Bolverkr said sadly, “I wish I could taste one sip of the mead from the vat called Son. Then I could make a true song about your eyes, and all men would sing it when they wanted to sing of beauty.”
“One sip?” she asked.
“A sip so small nobody would ever know,” he said. “But I am in no hurry. You are more important than that. Let me show you how important to me you are.”
And he pulled her to him.
They made love in the darkness. When they had finished and were curled up together, naked skin touching skin, whispering endearments, then Bolverkr sighed mournfully.
“What is wrong?” asked Gunnlod.
“I wish I had the skill to sing of your lips, how soft they are, how much better they are than the lips of any other girl. I think that would be an excellent song.”
“That is indeed unfortunate,” agreed Gunnlod. “For my lips are very attractive. I often think they are my best feature.”
“Perhaps, but you have so many perfect features, picking the best is so difficult. But if I were to take the tiniest taste from the vat called Bodn, the poetry would enter my soul and I would be able to make a poem about your lips that would last until the sun is eaten by a wolf.”
“Only the tiniest sip, though,” she said. “Because Father would get quite irritable if he thought I was giving away his mead to every good-looking stranger who penetrated this mountain fastness.”
They walked the caverns, holding hands and occasionally brushing lips. Gunnlod showed Bolverkr the doors and the windows that she could open from inside the mountain, through which Suttung sent her food and drink, and Bolverkr appeared to pay no attention; he explained that he was not interested in anything that was not about Gunnlod, or her eyes or her lips or her fingers or her hair. Gunnlod laughed and told him that he did not mean any of his fine words and he obviously could not want to make love with her again.
He hushed her lips with his lips, and once again they made love.
When they were both perfectly satisfied, Bolverkr began to weep in the darkness.
“What’s wrong, my love?” asked Gunnlod.
“Kill me,” sobbed Bolverkr. “Kill me now! For I will never be able to make a poem about the perfection of your hair and your skin, of the sound of your voice, of the feel of your fingers. The beauty of Gunnlod is impossible to describe.”
“Well,” she said, “I suppose it can’t be easy to make such a poem. But I doubt it’s impossible.”
“Perhaps . . .”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps the smallest sip from the kettle Odrerir would give me the lyrical skills to conjure your beauty for generations still to come,” he suggested, his sobs ceasing.
“Yes, perhaps it would. But it would have to be the smallest of smallest sips . . .”
“Show me the kettle, and I will show you just how small a sip I can take.”
Gunnlod unlocked the door, and in moments she and Bolverkr were standing in front of the kettle and the two vats. The smell of the mead of poetry was heady on the air.
“Just the tiniest of sips,” she told him. “For three poems about me that will echo down through the ages.”
“Of course, my darling.” Bolverkr grinned in the darkness. If she had been looking at him then, she would have known something was wrong.
With his first drink he drank every drop of the kettle Odrerir.
With his second, he drained the vat called Bodn.
With his third, he emptied the vat called Son.
Gunnlod was no fool. She realized that she had been betrayed, and she attacked him. She was strong and fast, but Odin did not stay to fight. He ran from there. He pulled the door closed and locked her inside.
In the blink of an eye he became a huge eagle. Odin screeched as he flapped his wings, and the mountain doors opened, and he rose into the skies.
Gunnlod’s screams pierced the dawn.
In his hall, Suttung woke and ran outside. He looked up and saw the eagle and knew what must have happened. Suttung too transformed himself into eagle shape.
The two eagles flew so high that from the ground they were the tiniest of pinpricks in the sky. They flew so fast that their flight sounded like the roar of a hurricane.
In Asgard, Thor said, “It is time.”
He hauled the three huge wooden vats into the courtyard.
The gods of Asgard watched the eagles screaming through the sky toward them. It was a close thing. Suttung was fast, and close behind Odin, his beak almost touching Odin’s tailfeathers as they reached Asgard.
When Odin approached the hall, he began to spit: a fountain of mead spurted from his beak into the vats, one after another, like a father bird bringing food for his children.
Ever since then, we know that those people who can make magic with their words, who can make poems and sagas and weave tales, have tasted the mead of poetry. When we hear a fine poet, we say that they have tasted Odin’s gift.
There. That is the story of the mead of poetry and how it was given to the world. It is a story filled with dishonor and deceit, with murder and trickery. But it is not quite the whole story. There is one more thing to tell you. The delicate among you should stop your ears, or read no further.
Here is the last thing, and a shameful admission it is. When the all-father in eagle form had almost reached the vats, with Suttung immediately behind him, Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splattery wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung’s face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin’s trail.
No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin’s ass. But whenever you hear bad poets declaiming their bad poetry, filled with foolish similes and ugly rhymes, you will know which of the meads they have tasted.
THOR’S JOURNEY TO THE LAND OF THE GIANTS
I
Thialfi and his sister, Roskva, lived with their father, Egil, and their mother on a farm at the edge of wild country. Beyond their farm were monsters and giants and wolves, and many times Thialfi walked into trouble and had to outrun it. He could run faster than anyone or anything. Living at the edge of the wild country meant that Thialfi and Roskva were used to miracles and strange things happening in their world.
Nothing as strange, however, as the day that two visitors from Asgard, Loki and Thor, arrived at their farm in a chariot pulled by two huge goats, whom Thor called Snarler and Grinder. The gods expected lodging for the night, and food. The gods were huge and powerful.
“We have no food for the likes of you,” said Roskva apologetically. “We have vegetables, but it’s been a hard winter, and we don’t even have any chickens left.”
Thor grunted. Then he took his knife and killed both his goats. He skinned their corpses. He put the goats in the huge stewpot that hung above the fire, while Roskva and her mother cut up their winter stores of vegetables and dropped them into the stewpot.
Loki took Thialfi aside. The boy was intimidated by Loki: his green eyes, his scarred lips, his smile. Loki said, “You know, the marrow of the bones of those goats is the finest thing a young man can eat. Such a shame that Thor always keeps it all for himself. If you want to grow up to be as strong as Thor, you should eat the goat bone-marrow.”
When the food was ready, Thor took a whole goat as his portion, leaving the meat of the other goat for the other five people.
He put the goatskins down on the ground, and as he ate, he threw the bones onto his goatskin. “Put your bones on the other goatskin,” he told them. “And don’t break or c
hew any of the bones. Just eat the meat.”
You think you can eat fast? You should have seen Loki devour his food. One moment it was in front of him, and the next it was gone and he was wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
The rest of them ate more slowly. But Thialfi could not forget what Loki had said to him, and when Thor left the table for a call of nature, Thialfi took his knife and split one of the goat’s leg bones and ate some of the marrow from it. He put the broken bone down on the goat skin and covered it with undamaged bones, so nobody would know.
They all slept in the great hall that night.
In the morning, Thor covered the bones with the goatskins. He took his hammer, Mjollnir, and held it up high. He said, “Snarler, be whole.” A flash of lightning: Snarler stretched itself, bleated, and began to graze. Thor said, “Grinder, be whole,” and Grinder did the same. And then it staggered and limped awkwardly over to Snarler, and it let out a high-pitched bleat as if it were in pain.
“Grinder’s hind leg is broken,” said Thor. “Bring me wood and cloth.”
He made a splint for his goat’s leg, and he bandaged it up. And when that was done, he looked at the family, and Thialfi did not think he had ever seen anything quite as scary as Thor’s burning red eyes. Thor’s fist was wrapped around the shaft of his hammer. “Somebody here broke that bone,” he told them, in a voice like thunder. “I gave you people food, I asked only one thing of you, and yet you betrayed me.”
“I did it,” said Thialfi. “I broke the bone.”
Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.
Thor hefted his hammer. “I ought to destroy this entire farm,” he muttered, and Egil looked scared, and Egil’s wife began to weep. Then Thor said, “Tell me why I should not turn this whole place to rubble.”
Egil said nothing. Thialfi stood up. He said, “It has nothing to do with my father. He didn’t know what I had done. Punish me, not him. Look at me: I’m a really fast runner. I can learn. Let my parents be, and I’ll be your bondservant.”
His sister, Roskva, stood up. “He is not leaving without me,” she said. “Take him, you take both of us.”
Thor pondered this for a moment. Then: “Very well. For now, Roskva, you will stay here and tend Snarler and Grinder while Grinder’s leg heals. When I return, I will collect all three of you.” He turned to Thialfi. “And you can come with me and Loki. We are going to Utgard.”
II
The world beyond the farm was wilderness, and Thor and Loki and Thialfi traveled east, toward Jotunheim, home of the giants, and the sea.
It became colder the farther east they went. Freezing winds blew, draining them of any warmth. Shortly before sunset, when there was still enough light to see, they looked for a place to shelter for the night. Thor and Thialfi found nothing. Loki was away the longest. He came back with a puzzled look on his face. “There’s an odd sort of house over that way,” he said.
“How odd?” asked Thor.
“It’s just one huge room. No windows, and the doorway is enormous but it has no door. It’s like a huge cave.”
The cold wind numbed their fingers and stung their cheeks. Thor said, “We shall check it out.”
The main hall went back a long way. “There could be beasts or monsters back there,” said Thor. “Let’s set up by the entrance.”
They did just that. It was as Loki had described—a huge building, one huge hall, with a long room off to one side. They made a fire by the entrance and slept there for an hour or so, until they were woken by a noise.
“What’s that?” said Thialfi.
“An earthquake?” said Thor. The ground was trembling. Something roared. It might have been a volcano, or an avalanche of great rocks, or a hundred furious bears.
“I don’t think so,” said Loki. “Let’s move into the side room. Just to be safe.”
Loki and Thialfi slept in the side room, and the tumbling-roaring noise continued until daybreak. Thor stationed himself at the door to the house all night, holding his hammer. He had been getting more irritable as the night wore on, and wanted only to explore and to attack whatever was rumbling and shaking the earth. As soon as the sky began to lighten, Thor walked into the forest without waking his companions, looking for the source of the sound.
There were, he realized as he got closer, different sounds, which occurred in sequence. First a rumbling roar, followed by a humming, and then a softer sort of whistling noise, piercing enough to make Thor’s head ache and his teeth hurt each time he heard it.
Thor reached the top of a hill and looked at the world beneath him.
Stretched out in the valley below was the biggest person Thor had ever seen. His hair and beard were blacker than charcoal; his skin was as white as a snow field. The giant’s eyes were closed, and he was regularly snoring: that was the rumble-hum and whistle that Thor had been listening to. Every time the giant snored the ground shook. That was the shaking they had felt in the night. The giant was so big that by comparison Thor might have been a beetle or an ant.
Thor reached down to his belt of strength, Megingjord, and pulled it tight, doubling his strength to make sure that he was strong enough to battle even the hugest of giants.
As Thor watched, the giant opened his eyes: they were a piercing icy blue. The giant did not seem immediately threatening, though.
“Hello,” called Thor.
“Good morning!” called the black-haired giant, in a voice like an avalanche. “They call me Skrymir. It means ‘big fellow.’ They are sarcastic, my lot, calling a runty little chap like me Big Fellow, but there you are. Now, where’s my glove? I had two, you know, last night, but I dropped one.” He held up his hands: his right hand had a huge mittenlike leather glove on it. The other was bare. “Oh! There it is.”
He reached down to the far side of the hill Thor had climbed, and he picked up something that was obviously another mitten. “Odd. Something’s in it,” he said, and gave it a shake. Thor recognized their home of the previous night just as Thialfi and Loki came tumbling out of the mouth of the glove and landed in the snow beneath.
Skrymir put his left mitten on and looked happily at his mittened hands. “We can travel together,” he said. “If you’re willing.”
Thor looked at Loki and Loki looked at Thor and both of them looked at young Thialfi, who shrugged. “I can keep up,” he said, confident of his speed.
“Very well,” shouted Thor.
They ate breakfast with the giant: he pulled whole cows and sheep from his provision bag and crunched them down; the three companions ate more sparingly. After the meal, Skrymir said, “Here. I’ll carry your provisions inside my bag. Less for you to carry, and we will all eat together when we camp tonight.” He put their food in his bag, did up the laces, and strode off toward the east.
Thor and Loki ran after the giant with the untiring pace of gods. Thialfi ran as fast as any man has ever run, but even he found it hard to keep up as the hours went by, and sometimes it seemed that the giant was just another mountain in the distance, his head lost in the clouds.
They caught up with Skrymir as evening fell. He had found a camp for them beneath a huge old oak tree and had made himself comfortable nearby, his head resting on a great boulder. “I’m not hungry,” he told them. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m going to get an early night. Your provisions are in my bag, up against the tree. Goodnight.”
He began to snore. As the familiar rumble-hum and whistle shook the trees, Thialfi climbed the giant’s provision bag. He called down to Thor and Loki, “I cannot undo the laces. They are too tough for me. They might as well be made out of iron.”
“I can bend iron,” said Thor, and he leapt to the top of the provision bag and began to tug on the laces.
“Well?” asked Loki.
Thor grunted and h
auled, hauled and grunted. Then he shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll be having dinner tonight,” he said. “Not unless this damnable giant undoes the laces on his bag for us.”
He looked at the giant. He looked at Mjollnir, his hammer. Then he clambered down the bag, and he made his way onto the top of Skrymir’s sleeping head. He raised the hammer and slammed it down on Skrymir’s forehead.
Skrymir opened one eye sleepily. “I think a leaf just fell on my head and woke me up,” he said. “Have you all finished eating? Are you ready for bed? Don’t blame you if you are. Long day.” And he rolled over, closed his eyes, and began to snore once again.
Loki and Thialfi managed to fall asleep despite the noise, but Thor could not sleep. He was angry, he was hungry, and he did not trust this giant, out in the eastern wilderness. At midnight he was still hungry, and he had had enough of the snoring. He clambered up onto the giant’s head once more. He positioned himself between the giant’s eyebrows.
Thor spat into his hands. He adjusted his belt of strength. He raised Mjollnir over his head. And with all his might, he swung. He was certain that the hammer head sank into Skrymir’s forehead.
It was too dark to see the color of the giant’s eyes, but they opened. “Whoa,” the big fellow said. “Thor? Are you there? I think an acorn just fell off the tree onto my head. What time is it?”
“It’s midnight,” said Thor.
“Well, then, see you in the morning.” Giant snores shook the ground and made the tops of the trees tremble.
It was dawn but not yet day when Thor, hungrier, angrier, and still sleepless, resolved to strike one final blow that would silence the snoring forever. This time he aimed for the giant’s temple, and he hit Skrymir with all his strength. Never was there such a blow. Thor heard it echo from the mountaintops.
“You know,” said Skrymir, “I think a bit of bird’s nest just dropped on my head. Twigs. I don’t know.” He yawned and stretched. Then he got to his feet. “Well, I’m done sleeping. Time to be on our way. Are you three headed to Utgard? They will look after you well there. I guarantee you a mighty feast, horns of ale, and afterward wrestling and racing and contests of strength. They like their fun in Utgard. That’s due east—just head that way, where the sky is lightening. Me, I’ll be off to the north.” He gave them a gap-toothed grin, which would have seemed foolish and vacant if his eyes had not been so very blue and so very sharp.