Hymir

When the gods wanted Ægir to brew ale for them all, he stalled: no cauldron big enough. Týr knew where one was — his own kinsman Hymir owned a kettle a mile deep. Thor and Týr went to fetch it, and the visit is a masterpiece of hostile hospitality: Hymir's glare split a stone pillar, he grudged every ox Thor ate (two, at one sitting), and set escalating tests — smash his cup (only Hymir's own skull was hard enough, on his wife's whispered advice), then carry the cauldron, which Thor wore away on his head like a monstrous helmet.

In between comes the myth's centrepiece: Thor rowing them far past the safe grounds, baiting a hook with an ox-head, and pulling the Midgard Serpent itself to the gunwale. Hymir, grey with terror, cut the line as the hammer swung. Snorri says Thor knocked him overboard for it; the poem lets him live to be killed in the lava-wave of pursuing giants. Either way: never cut another god's fishing line.

Hymir is the mythology's great reluctant host — a giant who never attacks the gods, never steals from them, never plots against them, and still ends up dead because two of them came to dinner. His farm at the edge of heaven, out east among the icy cliffs, is the setting for two of Norse myth's most vivid set pieces: the fetching of the cauldron and the fishing for the serpent.

Why did the gods need Hymir's cauldron?

Hymiskviða opens with the gods, flush from a feast and reading twigs of divination, deciding that the sea-giant Ægir shall brew their ale from now on. Ægir, resenting Thor's peremptory tone, names an impossible condition: a cauldron vast enough to brew for all the gods at once. The assembly is stumped until Tyr — in this poem, remarkably, called Hymir's kinsman; the poem's language suggests the giant is his father, flatly contradicting Snorri, who makes Tyr a son of Odin — reveals that east of the Élivágar rivers, at heaven's end, "my father" Hymir keeps a kettle a mile (a rast) deep. "Do you think we can get it?" asks Thor. "Yes — by cunning," says Tyr.

The reception at Hymir's hall is a comic catalogue of dangers. Tyr's grandmother appears first — a monster with nine hundred heads — and then his gold-decked, white-browed mother, kindly to the guests, who hides the two gods under the kettles at the hall's end because her husband is "often grudging toward guests, and given to anger." When Hymir comes home late from the hunt, icicles rattling in his frozen beard, and learns Thor is under his roof, his mere glance shatters the roof-beam pillar, and eight kettles crash down — only the mile-deep one survives. Dinner does not improve his mood: three oxen are boiled, and Thor eats two of them alone. Tomorrow, mutters Hymir, we hunt for our supper — or rather, we fish.

The fishing trip: Thor hooks the Midgard Serpent

Told twice — in Hymiskviða and, in Snorri's finest prose, in Gylfaginning — this is among the most famous scenes in Norse myth, carved on stones from Altuna in Sweden to Gosforth in England, centuries before either text was written. Asked to find his own bait, Thor tears the head off the biggest ox in Hymir's herd (a beast the poem names Himinhrjóðr, "heaven-bellower"). Out in the boat, he rows so hard the giant grows alarmed; they pass Hymir's usual flatfish-and-whale grounds, and still Thor rows, while Hymir warns of what waits in the deeper water. Hymir hauls up two whales on his hooks. Thor pays out a line with the ox-head on it — and Jörmungandr, the serpent that rings Midgard, takes the bait, the hook setting in the roof of its mouth.

What follows is the mythology at maximum wattage: the serpent jerks so hard that both Thor's fists slam against the gunwale; the god grows wrathful, takes on his divine strength, and pushes so hard his feet go through the bottom of the boat, bracing against the sea-floor itself as he hauls the serpent up. Snorri says no one has seen a more terrifying sight than Thor's eyes locked on the serpent's, the serpent glaring back and blowing venom. And Hymir, gray-faced in the bilge with the sea washing in, does the most human thing in the Eddas: as Thor raises the hammer, he lunges with his bait-knife and cuts the line. The serpent sinks back into the sea. Thor hurls Mjölnir after it — Snorri passes on the opinion that the blow struck its head off against the sea-bed, but adds that he believes the truth to be otherwise: the serpent lives, and waits. In Gylfaginning Thor punches Hymir overboard on the spot and wades ashore; the poem, needing him for the cauldron-tests, lets him row home glum and alive. The two sources genuinely conflict, and the poem's version is the fuller one.

The cup, the cauldron, and the pursuit

Back on land, Hymiskviða resumes the trials. Hymir will surrender the cauldron only if Thor can smash his goblet — which bounces intact off stone pillars until Hymir's wife whispers the secret: throw it at his head, which is harder than any cup. Thor does; the goblet shatters on the giant's skull, and Hymir mourns his cup with the poem's saddest line — "Never again shall I say: ale, you are brewed." One test remains: carry the cauldron out unaided. Tyr twice cannot budge it. Thor grips it by the rim, his feet breaking through the hall floor, and swings the mile-deep kettle up over his head, its rings clanking at his heels — wearing it away like a colossal helmet. They have not gone far when Thor looks back and sees the pursuit: Hymir leading a many-headed host of giants out of the rock-caves of the east. He sets down the cauldron, raises Mjölnir, and kills them all — Hymir included. So the gods got their brewing-kettle, and every winter feast in Ægir's hall is drunk, the poem notes, from Hymir's cauldron.

In the primary sources

Hymiskviða in the Poetic Edda is the main text: cauldron-quest, fishing trip, cup and kettle tests, and the giant-host's destruction, told in dense, kenning-rich verse (it also works in, along the way, the lament of Thor's lamed goat — the poem is a magpie's nest of Thor-lore). Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda tells the fishing expedition as a freestanding story, with differences: Thor arrives disguised as a young lad, there is no cauldron plot, and Hymir goes overboard. Skáldskaparmál quotes older skaldic verses on the fishing myth — fragments of Bragi Boddason and Úlfr Uggason — showing the story was already ancient in the 9th century, as the picture-stones confirm. Tyr's kinship to Hymir appears only in Hymiskviða and remains an unresolved wrinkle in the god's genealogy.