Fjalar and Galar

Fjalar and Galar invited Kvasir — the being born of the gods' truce, who could answer any question — to a quiet word, and killed him. His blood, brewed with honey in the vessels Óðrerir, Boðn, and Són, became the mead that makes poets; their explanation to the gods, that Kvasir had choked on his own wisdom for lack of good questions, is the blackest joke in the corpus.

Murder was apparently a habit: they drowned the giant Gilling for sport and dropped a millstone on his wife's head when her weeping annoyed them. Gilling's son Suttungr marooned them on a skerry below the tide-line, and the brothers bought their lives with the whole hoard of mead. Poetry's chain of custody thus begins: made by murder, surrendered in terror, hidden in a mountain, and stolen by a god. No one's hands are clean, which the poets have always found rather fitting.

Kvasir, and why he was worth killing

To understand what Fjalar and Galar destroyed, the story has to start with what Kvasir was. When the long Æsir-Vanir war finally ended, both sides sealed the truce by spitting into a shared vessel rather than simply parting ways — and from that mingled spit the gods shaped a being, Kvasir, wiser than any of them individually, able to answer any question put to him and travel the world doing exactly that, teaching and settling disputes wherever he went. He was, in effect, wisdom itself given a body and sent walking. Fjalar and Galar, two dwarves, invited him to their home under pretense of wanting to speak with him privately — and killed him there, draining his blood into three containers: the kettle Óðrerir and the vessels Boðn and Són.

The mead, and the lie told about it

Mixed with honey, Kvasir's blood fermented into the Mead of Poetry, a drink so potent that anyone who tasted it became a poet or a scholar on the spot. When the gods eventually asked after their missing creation, the dwarves offered an explanation almost cruel enough to be a confession: Kvasir, they said, had suffocated inside his own intelligence, because no one alive had proven clever enough to draw out everything he knew by asking the right questions. It is the darkest joke Norse mythology tells about itself — wisdom, in this telling, dies not from violence but from a world too dull to deserve it — delivered by the very murderers who had, in fact, just killed him outright.

Gilling and his wife

The brothers' next victims show the same casual cruelty turned toward a giant rather than a god's creation. They invited Gilling, a jötunn, and his wife to their home, and took him out to sea in a boat; whether by design or announced as accident, the brothers ran the boat onto rocks, capsized it, and let Gilling, who could not swim, drown. Returning to break the news, the dwarves then found the widow's grief unbearable to listen to — one account has one brother suggest to the other that her weeping was intolerable — and arranged for a millstone to be dropped on her head as she left the house, killing her as callously as they had killed her husband. Two murders, committed in close succession, for no clearer motive than irritation and opportunity.

Suttungr's revenge, and the ransom

Gilling and his wife had a son, Suttungr, and he did not let the deaths pass unanswered. He seized the two dwarves, rowed or carried them out to a skerry — a bare rock that vanishes beneath the tide at high water — and left them there to explain themselves with the sea rising around their feet, or drown for what they'd done. Facing certain death, Fjalar and Galar offered the one thing valuable enough to buy their lives: the entire hoard of the Mead of Poetry, Kvasir's blood transformed into liquid wisdom, surrendered as blood-price for their victim's father. Suttungr accepted, sparing them, and carried the mead away to his mountain stronghold, Hnitbjörg, where he set his daughter Gunnlöð to guard the three vessels — wisdom, twice stolen already, locked up a second time.

The mead's onward journey

From Hnitbjörg the mead's story becomes Odin's: disguised as a farmhand, he worked his way into Suttungr's confidence, bored through the mountain in serpent-shape, spent three nights with Gunnlöð, and drained the three vessels in three swallows before escaping as an eagle with Suttungr in furious pursuit. What began as one murder in a dwarf's home ends, several thefts and one seduction later, as the origin of skaldic verse itself — every poem composed under the mead's influence was, by the tradition's own reckoning, tasting Kvasir's blood at several removes.

In the primary sources

The entire sequence — Kvasir's creation, his murder, the killing of Gilling and his wife, the ransom to Suttungr, and Odin's eventual theft — is told as one continuous narrative in Skáldskaparmál, in Snorri's Prose Edda, given as the explanation for why poetry is called "Kvasir's blood," "the dwarves' drink," or "Suttungr's mead" in skaldic kennings. No Eddic poem narrates Fjalar and Galar's crimes directly, though Hávamál in the Poetic Edda alludes to Odin's theft of the mead from Suttungr's hall in its own account of the god's wisdom-winning exploits, without mentioning the dwarves who brewed it in the first place.