Sköll and Hati

Why do the sun and moon hurry? Because they are prey. Sköll ('Mockery') runs behind the sun's chariot, Hati Hróðvitnisson ('Hate, son of the famed wolf') ahead of the moon, and every eclipse is teeth closing. In old Scandinavia people made noise at eclipses to scare the wolf off — solar rescue as public duty.

The wolves are of the Ironwood line, bred by the old giantess of Járnviðr, and Hati's patronymic makes him Fenrir's son. At Ragnarök the chase ends: sun and moon are swallowed, and the sky goes dark for the last battle. But the sun, Vafþrúðnismál promises, has already borne a daughter as fair as herself, who will walk her mother's road in the new sky — the chase ends; the light continues.

The hunt across the sky

The Norse sky is not serene; it is a pursuit in progress. Sól, the sun, drives her chariot behind the horses Árvakr ("Early-Waker") and Alsviðr ("All-Swift"), and her brother Máni steers the moon's course before her. When Gylfaginning's questioner asks why the sun travels so fast, "as if she were afraid," the answer is blunt: she is afraid, and she has reason — "he who seeks her is close behind, and she has no escape but to run." That pursuer is Sköll. Ahead of the moon runs Hati Hróðvitnisson, who wants to catch Máni — and, Snorri adds, so it will go in the end.

Grímnismál, in the Poetic Edda, sets the same scene in verse: Sköll is the wolf that follows "the shining god" to the sheltering woods of the horizon, and Hati, Hróðvitnir's son, runs before "heaven's bright bride." The image explains the most basic facts of the sky — why the lights never stop, never rest, never vary their road — by the simplest of motives. The sun is punctual because she is hunted. Day and night are the rhythm of a chase that has been failing, and will keep failing, until the one day it doesn't.

The wolves also explained the sky's emergencies. An eclipse, in this cosmology, is not an omen but an attack in progress: the wolf has caught up, and the bite has begun. Later Scandinavian folk tradition preserved both the idea — the "sun-wolf" (solvarg) survived in Swedish dialect for atmospheric mock suns — and the response: raising noise during an eclipse to frighten the wolf into letting go. The sun was rescued by clamour, every time; the system worked until Ragnarök.

The brood of Ironwood

The wolves' pedigree runs through the darkest nursery in the mythology. Völuspá tells that "the old one" — an unnamed giantess — sat in Járnviðr, the Ironwood east of Midgard, and there bred the kin of Fenrir; from that brood, one "in troll's shape" shall become the snatcher of the heavenly body. Snorri expands: in the Ironwood dwell troll-women, and the old giantess bears many giant sons, all in wolf shapes — from whom these sky-wolves come. Hati's patronymic seals the family connection, for Hróðvitnir, "the famed wolf," is a byname of Fenrir himself: the moon's hunter is the son of the beast that will swallow Odin. The whole family, in other words, has the same appetite and the same target list — the wolf-children of Loki's line and the Ironwood aim, between them, at the sun, the moon, and the father of the gods.

Which wolf swallows the sun?

Here the sources tangle, and it is worth being honest about the knot. Snorri names Sköll as the sun's pursuer — yet in the same breath describes a third and mightiest Ironwood wolf, Mánagarmr ("Moon-Hound"), who fills himself with the flesh of the dead, will swallow the moon, and will spatter the sky and heavens with blood, whereupon the sun loses her shine. Meanwhile Vafþrúðnismál says plainly that Fenrir will destroy the sun. Three candidates, then, for two heavenly bodies: Sköll and Hati in Grímnismál and parts of Gylfaginning; Mánagarmr in Snorri's Ironwood passage; Fenrir in Vafþrúðnismál. Scholars generally suspect these are overlapping versions of one underlying idea — the devouring wolf-darkness at the end of the world — that the tradition attached to different names in different tellings, with Sköll and Hati perhaps doublets or offspring of Fenrir, and Mánagarmr perhaps another name for Hati. The texts never harmonise it, and neither should a careful retelling. What every version agrees on is the outcome: at the end, the wolves catch.

At Ragnarök

The catch is the curtain-rise of Ragnarök. Gylfaginning opens its account of the end with the Fimbulwinter, and then: the wolf swallows the sun, "and mankind will think it has suffered a great disaster"; the other wolf takes the moon, "and he too will do great harm"; the stars vanish from the sky. Darkness is the precondition of everything that follows — the trembling earth, the breaking bonds, the last battle on Vígríðr. The wolves do not fight in that battle; their work is the lighting. They turn off the sky.

And yet the tradition refuses to let the darkness be final. In Vafþrúðnismál, Odin asks the wise giant where a sun will come from in the smooth heaven once Fenrir has destroyed this one, and the answer is one of the mythology's quietest consolations: Álfröðull — "elf-beam," the sun — will bear a daughter before the wolf takes her, and that maiden will ride her mother's road when the gods are dead. The chase ends in teeth; the light has already arranged its succession. It is very Norse: fate is not escaped, but it is outlasted.

In the primary sources

The core texts are three. Grímnismál (stanza 39) names Sköll and Hati and their stations behind the sun and before the moon. Vafþrúðnismál (stanzas 46–47) gives the wolf's destruction of the sun and the sun's daughter. Völuspá (stanza 40) supplies the Ironwood giantess and the brood of Fenrir's kin, with the "moon's snatcher" among them. Snorri's Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, weaves these into prose — the frightened sun, the pursuing wolves, Mánagarmr, and the swallowing at Ragnarök — quoting the Eddic stanzas as he goes. Neither wolf has any further story: no binding, no dialogue, no individual fate after the catch. They exist to run, and then to stop running.

Legacy

Sköll and Hati have loped steadily into modern culture: they appear as bosses and companions in video games (God of War gives them a memorable joint hunt), in Marvel's Thor comics, in fantasy novels, and in the names of real wolves, sled dogs, and metal bands across the Nordic world. Astronomers put them in the actual sky — Skoll and Hati are moons of Saturn, in the Norse group of its irregular satellites, circling their planet as tirelessly as their namesakes circle ours. The old image needed no updating: everyone still understands a sky where the light runs because something is chasing it.