Fenrir

Fenrir was raised in Asgard because the gods feared what he would become if left to grow in Jötunheimr — and he grew anyway, so fast that soon only Týr dared feed him. Prophecy said the wolf would be the ruin of the gods, so they resolved to bind him, dressing treachery as sport: twice they chained him with great fetters, Læðing and Drómi, and twice he burst them.

Then the dwarves forged Gleipnir from six impossible things — the sound of a cat's footfall, a woman's beard, a mountain's roots, a bear's sinews, a fish's breath, a bird's spittle — a ribbon soft as silk. Fenrir, suspicious, agreed to be tied only if a god laid a hand in his mouth as pledge. Týr did. The ribbon held, and the wolf took the hand. Bound to a rock, a sword propping his jaws, Fenrir howls until Ragnarök — when he breaks loose, runs with his lower jaw on the earth and his upper against the sky, and swallows Odin whole, before Odin's son Víðarr tears him apart.

The wolf raised among the gods

Snorri Sturluson tells the whole story in Gylfaginning. Loki fathered three children on the giantess Angrboða in Jötunheimr: the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Jörmungandr, and the half-dead daughter Hel. When the gods learned of the brood — and learned from prophecy how much grief would come of it — Odin had all three brought to him. The serpent he hurled into the sea, the daughter he sent down to rule the world of the dead, but the wolf the Æsir kept at home in Asgard, where they could watch him.

Watching turned out to be all they could safely do. Fenrir grew at a pace that frightened even gods, and of all the Æsir only Týr had the courage to walk up to him and give him food. Every prophecy said the same thing: this wolf was fated to harm them. Yet the gods would not kill him — Snorri says they so respected the sanctity of their own holy place that they refused to defile it with the wolf's blood, even knowing what he would become. It is one of the mythology's quietest, most devastating ironies: the gods' scruple preserves the creature that will destroy them.

So they turned to trickery. They brought Fenrir a great fetter called Læðing and challenged him, as if it were a game, to test his strength against it. The wolf judged it no real threat, let them bind him, and shattered it at the first strain. They forged a second fetter, half again as strong, called Drómi, and flattered him: bursting this would make his fame. Fenrir weighed the risk against the glory, allowed the binding — and kicked the chain to fragments that flew far and wide. From this, Snorri says, come the old sayings "to loose oneself from Læðing" and "to dash out of Drómi," for anything achieved by main force.

How was Fenrir bound?

Frightened now, Odin sent Freyr's messenger Skírnir down to the dark-elves' world, and dwarf-smiths made the third fetter: Gleipnir, thin and soft as a silk ribbon, woven from six things that do not exist — which is exactly why no strength can break it. The sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird: the world was emptied of them to make the wolf's chain, and that, Snorri notes drily, is why you will find none of them now.

The gods took Fenrir out to the island of Lyngvi in the lake called Ámsvartnir and produced the ribbon, daring him to snap it. Fenrir looked at Gleipnir and did the maths. A band that thin would win him no fame for breaking; and if it was made with cunning, he wanted no part of it. The gods needled him — was the great wolf afraid of a silk ribbon? — and Fenrir named his terms: he would let them tie him only if one of them laid a hand in his mouth as a pledge of good faith, "that this is done without deceit."

The gods looked at one another, and no one moved — until Týr stretched out his right hand and laid it between the wolf's jaws. They bound him; he strained; the ribbon only hardened. And when Fenrir saw that the gods had no intention of loosing him, he bit. Snorri records that all the gods laughed then — except Týr. He lost his hand, and the Norse afterwards called the wrist the "wolf-joint."

Why did the gods fear Fenrir?

Because they had read the ending. Norse myth is ruled by fate, and the völva's prophecy in Völuspá is explicit: the wolf will swallow the father of the gods. The Æsir's fear of Fenrir is not fear of a large animal; it is the fear of people who know exactly how the story ends and are trying, in full knowledge of its futility, to postpone the final page. Every step they take — raising him at home, refusing to kill him, binding him with tricks — buys time and deepens the debt. Fenrir bound is the doom of the gods with the clock still running.

There is also a moral engine under the story that the poets did not hide. In Lokasenna, when Týr rebukes Loki, Loki answers that Týr can never be "the right hand of justice between two men" since his right hand lies in Fenrir's mouth; and the wolf himself, tricked under cover of a game and a pledge, has an honest grievance. The gods purchased safety with an oath they never meant to keep, and Týr's hand is the price of admitting it. Many readers have seen in this the mythology judging its own gods: the order of the world is founded on a broken pledge, and Ragnarök is, among other things, the invoice arriving.

Where is Fenrir now?

Bound, and howling. The gods thrust a sword into his gaping mouth — hilt on the lower gum, point against the palate — to prop his jaws apart, and secured Gleipnir's chain, Gelgja, through a great stone slab called Gjöll, pinned deeper still with the rock Þviti. The river called Ván, "Hope" or "Expectation," flows from his slavering jaws, which is why the poets call him Vánagandr, "the monster of the river Ván." There he lies, Snorri says, until Ragnarök. In Lokasenna Loki spits the fact at the assembled gods like a threat: the wolf lies bound at the mouth of the river, waiting.

At Ragnarök

When the end comes, the earth itself shakes so violently that all bonds break — and Fenrir runs free at last. Gylfaginning gives him the mythology's most awe-striking description: he advances with his lower jaw against the earth and his upper jaw against the sky, and would gape wider still if there were room; fire burns from his eyes and nostrils. He runs beside his brother the Midgard Serpent to the field of Vígríðr, and there, in the last battle, Odin rides against him first of all, with spear and golden helmet — and the wolf swallows the Allfather whole.

Vengeance follows in one stride. Odin's son Víðarr, the silent god, steps into the wolf's mouth. In Snorri's account he pins the lower jaw with a shoe built up from all the leather scraps men have ever cut from their shoes, seizes the upper jaw, and tears the wolf apart. Völuspá tells it slightly differently — Víðarr drives his sword into the heart of "Hveðrungr's son" — and the two versions stand side by side in the sources, one visceral, one clean, both final. The wolves who chase the sun and moon, Sköll and Hati, complete the family's work in the sky: Hati is named "son of Hróðvitnir," and Hróðvitnir — "famed wolf" — is Fenrir himself. Vafþrúðnismál even says the wolf will seize the sun, blurring father and son; the sources never quite untangle them, and honest readers flag the knot rather than cut it.

In the primary sources

Fenrir's story is stitched together from a handful of texts. In the Poetic Edda, Völuspá prophesies the wolf's breaking loose and Odin's death, with the recurring refrain that "the fetter will break and the wolf run free"; Lokasenna has the bound wolf thrown in the gods' faces during Loki's flyting, and preserves the exchange over Týr's hand; Vafþrúðnismál names Víðarr as the avenger who cleaves the wolf's cold jaws. The fullest connected narrative — the fostering, Læðing and Drómi, Gleipnir's forging, the binding on Lyngvi, and the wolf's part at Ragnarök — is Snorri's, in Gylfaginning of the Prose Edda, with scattered kennings explained in Skáldskaparmál. The tenth-century poem Eiríksmál already assumes the story: Odin explains that he gathers dead kings to Valhalla because the grey wolf is always gazing at the dwellings of the gods.

Legacy

Fenrir has never really been rebound. He stalks through modern fantasy and popular culture wherever a great wolf threatens the end of things — from the Fenris Wolf of Marvel's Thor comics and films to the werewolf Fenrir Greyback in the Harry Potter novels, video games from God of War to Final Fantasy, and the heavy-metal songbook. Astronomers named a moon of Saturn after him. The image the Middle Ages could not forget — the bound wolf, the sword in his jaws, the patient waiting — remains one of mythology's great emblems of catastrophe deferred but never cancelled.