The Dwarves

The dwarves began ignobly: maggots quickening in the flesh of the slain giant Ymir, granted mind and human shape by the gods. They live under stones and in the Dark Fields, and four of them — Norðri, Suðri, Austri, Vestri — were assigned to hold up the sky itself, one at each corner of Ymir's skull. Völuspá pauses its apocalypse to recite a long roll of their names, and medieval readers noticed "Gandálfr" and a dozen others: Tolkien lifted his dwarves (and his wizard's name) from that list wholesale.

Everything irreplaceable in the mythology is their work — Mjölnir, Gungnir, Draupnir, Gleipnir, Brísingamen, Skíðblaðnir, the Mead of Poetry — and almost none of it was paid for honestly, which the dwarves noticed. They are craft embodied and grievance collected: short-changed, sun-shy (daylight turns them to stone, as the dwarf Alvíss learns fatally when Thor stalls him until dawn), and utterly indispensable. The gods win the myths; the dwarves' invoices remain outstanding at Ragnarök.

Born from a corpse

The dwarves' origin is bound up with the very beginning of the world. When Odin, Vili, and Vé killed the primordial giant Ymir and built the cosmos from his body — his flesh the earth, his blood the sea, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky — the dwarves quickened in his flesh the way maggots quicken in any dead thing, and the gods, looking at what had bred there, chose to give them understanding and human shape while letting them keep their nature as creatures of earth and stone. It is one of the mythology's least romantic origin stories: no divine breath, no careful shaping, just decay given intelligence. Four of them earned the most literal job in the cosmos for it — Norðri, Suðri, Austri, and Vestri, named for the four directions, set to hold up the four corners of Ymir's skull, keeping the sky itself from falling.

Where the dwarves live

The sources place the dwarves underground, in a realm called Svartálfaheimr, "home of the black elves," or Niðavellir, "the dark fields" — the two names used at times almost interchangeably by Snorri, reflecting an old blurriness between "dwarves" and "dark elves" the medieval sources never fully resolve. Völuspá, reciting its long dvergatal or "tally of dwarves," names Móðsognir and Durinn as the first and most prominent of their kind, ruling halls built in the earth, and lists dozens more by name in a passage whose sheer length has long puzzled readers — a roll call with no accompanying story, as though the poet wanted the names preserved even without the deeds attached to them. It is this list, more than any other passage in Old Norse literature, that gave modern fantasy its dwarf-names: J.R.R. Tolkien, a professional scholar of these texts, drew Thorin, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, and most of the Company of the Hobbit from Völuspá's roster — and took the name Gandálfr, "wand-elf," from the same list for his wizard.

Sunlight and stone

The dwarves' defining vulnerability is told most fully through the story of Alvíss, "all-wise," a dwarf who arrived in Asgard to claim Thor's daughter Þrúðr as his bride, having somehow secured a promise of her hand. Unwilling to let the marriage happen but bound by the promise, Thor set the dwarf a condition instead of a refusal: Alvíss would win the bride if he could name, correctly, what every world calls the sky, the sea, the sun, and more, in the languages of gods, elves, giants, dwarves, and men. Alvíss, proud of exactly the knowledge dwarves were famous for, answered fluently and at length, never suspecting Thor was only drawing the exchange out. As he finished his last answer, dawn broke, sunlight struck him, and he turned to stone where he stood — the fatal weakness of his kind, exploited by a god with nothing to lose from a long conversation.

Masters of every great forging

No other class of being in the mythology is responsible for so much of what the gods actually use. The dwarves Brokkr and Sindri forged Mjölnir, Draupnir, and Gullinbursti in a single wager against Loki's head; the sons of Ivaldi forged Sif's golden hair, Gungnir, and Skíðblaðnir in one commission; and unnamed dwarves in Svartálfaheimr forged Gleipnir, the impossible ribbon that finally bound Fenrir, out of six things that do not exist. Elsewhere, Andvari hoarded and lost the cursed gold that drives the entire Völsung tragedy, and Fjalar and Galar murdered Kvasir to brew the Mead of Poetry from his blood. Almost nothing that keeps the gods' world running — no weapon, no fetter, no drink of inspiration — was made by a god's own hands.

What unites these stories is how rarely the dwarves are paid fairly for what they make. Loki tricks, threatens, or robs dwarves in nearly every transaction the myths record — Andvari is stripped of his entire hoard by force, and Brokkr, who wins his wager outright, is denied the head he was promised on a technicality and settles for sewing Loki's lips shut instead. A mythology written by and for the gods' descendants nonetheless preserves, again and again, the dwarves getting the short end of every bargain they strike with Asgard: their genius is never in question, their compensation almost always is.

In the primary sources

Völuspá, in the Poetic Edda, gives the dwarves' origin from Ymir's flesh and the long dvergatal naming dozens of them, including Móðsognir and Durinn. Alvíssmál, also in the Poetic Edda, tells the story of the dwarf Alvíss turned to stone by sunlight after answering Thor's questions all night. Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, confirms the maggot origin and describes the four dwarves holding up the sky's corners, while Skáldskaparmál supplies most of the individual forging stories — Mjölnir, Gleipnir, and the rest — scattered across its explanations of skaldic kennings.