Geirröðr

Geirröðr caught a falcon that would not leave his window ledge and recognised the eyes: Loki, in Freyja's feather cloak. Three months in a chest without food bought Loki's promise to bring Thor to Geirröðr's courts with neither hammer, belt, nor iron gloves — the only assassination plot in the myths aimed at a disarmed Thor.

The giantess Gríðr's warning and loaned gear turned the trap. Thor survived the river Vimur, swollen by Geirröðr's daughter straddling it upstream ('a river must be dammed at its source,' he observed, throwing a boulder); survived the guest-chair his daughters pushed toward the roof, breaking both their backs with the staff; and when Geirröðr flung a glowing iron ingot with tongs, Thor caught it in the iron gloves and sent it back through a pillar, through the giant, and through the wall behind him. Hospitality myths cut both ways: Geirröðr is what happens when the host is the monster.

Of all the giants who tried to kill Thor, Geirröðr came closest to deserving success, because he alone did the intelligence work: he understood that Thor's divinity was, to a great degree, equipment. Strip away Mjölnir, the belt of strength, and the iron gloves, and what walks into your hall is merely the strongest person alive. Geirröðr engineered exactly that — and still lost, which is the story's point about what "merely" means.

Loki in the chest

The plot begins, as so many do, with Loki amusing himself. Flying in borrowed falcon-feathers, he perched at a window of Geirröðr's hall to peer in, and the giant, seeing something knowing in the bird's eyes, had it caught — the falcon making the fatal mistake of pausing to enjoy the difficulty of the wall-climbing servant sent after it, until its feet stuck fast. Geirröðr looked into the falcon's eyes, judged that this was no bird, and demanded it speak. The falcon said nothing. So the giant locked it in a chest and starved it for three months — a torture of patient, bureaucratic cruelty unusual in the myths — and when he finally lifted the lid, Loki talked. The price of his life was an oath: he would bring Thor to Geirröðr's courts without hammer, without belt of strength, without iron gloves.

How Loki then persuaded Thor to travel unarmed into Jötunheim, Snorri does not record — the sources simply move to the journey, and readers are left to imagine the sales pitch. What saved the god was a stop on the road: the night spent with the giantess Grid, mother of Odin's son Víðarr, who told Thor what he was walking into and lent him her own belt of strength, iron gloves, and the staff Gríðarvölr. The trap was still set; but the quarry now knew, and carried substitutes for everything Loki had promised to strip from him.

The river Vimur and the murderous chair

The first attempt on Thor's life was hydraulic. Fording the great river Vimur, Thor felt it rise impossibly, until it broke over his shoulders. Looking upstream, he saw the cause: Geirröðr's daughter Gjálp standing astride the ravine, swelling the river from her own body. Thor's response gives the myth its most quoted line — "a river must be dammed at its source" — delivered with a well-aimed boulder. Then, nearly swept away, he hauled himself out by a rowan bush growing from the bank, whence the proverb that the rowan is "Thor's salvation." The scene is told with baroque magnificence in Þórsdrápa, the tenth-century skaldic poem by Eilífr Goðrúnarson that is our oldest source for the adventure: the river roaring with hail-fed venom, Þjálfi (in the poem's version, Thor's companion) clinging to the god's belt, the two wading "the fjord of the wand."

At the hall, the second attempt was mechanical. The travelers were shown not to the feast but to a goat-shed for lodging, with a single chair. Thor sat; the chair rose beneath him, driving him toward the rafters to crush him. He jammed Gríðarvölr against the roof-beam and pushed back — and there came, says Snorri, a great crack and a great scream: under the chair had been Geirröðr's daughters, Gjálp and Greip, and both their backs were broken. The murder-furniture of Jötunheim, defeated by leverage.

The game of catch that killed Geirröðr

Only then did the host receive his guest — for "games," he said. Down the length of the hall, fires burned in a row; and as Thor came opposite him, Geirröðr snatched up a glowing lump of iron with tongs and hurled it. Thor caught it out of the air in Gríðr's iron gloves. Geirröðr dove behind an iron pillar. Thor threw the ingot back — through the pillar, through Geirröðr, through the wall behind him, and into the earth outside. The molten missile, the myth is careful to say, was the giant's own; Thor merely returned it, with interest, through every layer of protection the host had prepared. As an image of the whole Æsir–jötnar war it could hardly be improved: the violence you launch at the thunder-god comes back through you.

In the primary sources

The prose narrative is Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda, which tells the falcon, the chest, Gríðr's cave, Vimur, the chair, and the iron-throwing, and then quotes its authority in full: Þórsdrápa, by Eilífr Goðrúnarson, court poet of Jarl Hákon in the late tenth century — eighteen-plus stanzas of the most notoriously difficult verse in the skaldic corpus, in which the journey and the hall-fight glitter through dense kennings (in the poem Thor's companion is Þjálfi, and some details differ from Snorri's prose; the two versions genuinely diverge in the journey's cast and order). In the Poetic Edda, the giant is absent, but confusingly his name is not: the Grímnismál prose frame concerns a human king Geirröðr, tortured and doomed by Odin — an entirely different figure sharing the name. Saxo Grammaticus (Gesta Danorum, Book 8) preserves a third witness: the traveler Thorkillus visits a horrific otherworldly stronghold and sees the aged giant "Geruthus" with his body pierced through, and beside him three women with broken backs — Geirröðr and his daughters, dead in exactly the postures Thor left them in, displayed like a museum of the myth. The same voyage brings Thorkillus to the chained Utgarthilocus, linking Geirröðr's tale to Utgarda-Loki's in Saxo's geography of the dreadful North.