Suttungr

Suttungr came by the mead lawfully, by Norse standards: the dwarves Fjalar and Galar had drowned his father Gilling and dropped a millstone on his mother, so Suttungr marooned them on a tidal skerry and accepted the Mead of Poetry as the price of their lives. He hid it in three vats inside the mountain Hnitbjörg and set his daughter Gunnlöð to guard it — wisdom as a locked asset, earning no interest.

Odin came as a farmhand, bored through the mountain as a snake, spent three nights with Gunnlöð, drained all three vats in three swallows, and left as an eagle. Suttungr took eagle-shape and nearly caught him — close enough that the gods lit fires at Asgard's wall — and 'Suttungr's mead' became the skalds' standard name for poetry itself: every poem toasts the giant who lost it.

To understand Suttungr's claim, you have to start further back, with the strangest brewing recipe in mythology — because the mead he guarded was made from a murdered god.

Where did the Mead of Poetry come from?

Skáldskaparmál tells it as the answer to the question "whence came the art of poetry?" At the truce that ended the war between the Æsir and the Vanir, both sides spat into a vat, and from the mingled spittle the gods made a man: Kvasir, so wise that no one could ask him a question he could not answer. Kvasir traveled the world teaching wisdom until two dwarves, Fjalar and Galar, invited him aside and killed him, draining his blood into two vats and a kettle — Són, Boðn, and Óðrerir. Mixed with honey, the blood fermented into the mead that makes whoever drinks it a poet or a scholar. The dwarves told the gods Kvasir had drowned in his own wisdom, no one being learned enough to empty him with questions.

The dwarves' luck ran out through further murders. They took the giant Gilling out rowing and capsized him; he drowned. His grieving wife wept until Galar, annoyed by the noise, dropped a millstone on her head from a doorway. When their son Suttungr learned of it, he seized both dwarves and set them on a skerry that the tide would cover. From that rock, with the water rising, Fjalar and Galar offered him the precious mead as compensation for his father — and Suttungr accepted. Snorri is explicit that this was a settlement, föðurgjöld, a father's blood-price. In a culture governed by compensation-law, Suttungr's title to the mead was as good as title gets: he did not steal poetry; he was awarded it in damages. He carried it home, hid it in the mountain Hnitbjörg ("clashing rocks"), and set his daughter Gunnlöd to watch it. Poets afterward called the mead "Kvasir's blood," "the dwarves' ransom," "Suttungr's mead," and "the liquid of Óðrerir."

How Odin stole the mead

What Suttungr locked up, Odin — hungry for every form of wisdom — set out to take, and the heist in Skáldskaparmál is the god's character in miniature: patient, shape-shifting, oath-breaking, and total. Calling himself Bölverkr, "worker of evil" (the alias is at least honest), he came to the hayfields of Suttungr's brother Baugi, where nine thralls were mowing. He offered to whet their scythes; the whetstone worked so well that all nine bid for it, and Odin threw it into the air — and in scrambling for it, the thralls cut each other's throats with their scythes. Odin then presented himself to the suddenly shorthanded Baugi and offered to do the work of nine men for one wage: a single drink of Suttungr's mead. Baugi had no say over the mead but agreed to help win it.

All winter Bölverkr did nine men's work. At settling time Suttungr flatly refused a drop. So Odin produced an auger named Rati and had Baugi bore into Hnitbjörg. Baugi cheated — he declared the hole finished when it wasn't, and Odin, blowing into it, got rock-dust back in his face. He noted his ally's treachery, made him bore again, blew and saw the chips fly inward, and slipped into the hole in serpent's form as Baugi stabbed after him with the auger. Inside the mountain, in Gunnlöð's chamber, he changed strategy entirely: three nights he lay with her, and she granted him three drinks of the mead. In three swallows he emptied all three vessels — the technicality that swallowed an ocean — took eagle-shape, and burst out of the mountain for home.

Suttungr saw the eagle go, took his own eagle-form, and flew in pursuit — and he was fast. So close was the chase that the Æsir, seeing the pair from Asgard, rushed their vats into the courtyard, and Odin barely cleared the wall, spewing the mead into the containers with Suttungr at his tail-feathers. Some of it, Snorri adds with relish, went out backward — the "poetaster's share," free to anyone, which explains bad verse. Of Suttungr after the chase the sources say nothing: he simply drops out of the story, a giant who lost the only thing that made him matter. His daughter's grief, and Odin's flicker of remorse about it, are recorded in Hávamál — but that is Gunnlöd's story.

Was Suttungr the villain of the story?

By the mythology's own laws, hardly. He obtained the mead as lawful compensation for two murdered parents; his crimes are hoarding and inhospitality — he shares the mead with no one, teaches nothing, makes nothing. Odin, meanwhile, engineers the deaths of nine laborers, works under a false name, breaks a ring-oath (Hávamál asks bluntly, "who shall trust him?"), seduces and abandons the guard, and robs the vault. The myth does not moralize; it simply shows what the Norse thought poetry was worth, and what kind of god acquires wisdom. Suttungr's real failure is the one the source text winks at: wisdom locked in a mountain earns nothing. The mead only became poetry when it was spilled into the world — even the backward-spilled share.

In the primary sources

Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda carries the whole narrative — Kvasir, the dwarves, Gilling's drowning, the skerry-settlement, Bölverkr's winter of labor, Rati, Gunnlöð, and the eagle-chase — as Snorri's foundation-story for the art his handbook teaches. In the Poetic Edda, Hávamál (stanzas 104–110) gives Odin's own first-person account: the visit to the old giant, the silver-tongued eloquence in Suttungr's halls, Gunnlöð on her golden seat, the auger Rati gnawing the rock, the ring-oath broken, and the frost-giants coming to Odin's hall afterward to ask after "Bölverkr" — whether he was among the gods, or whether Suttungr had slaughtered him. Hávamál's allusive stanzas and Snorri's smooth narrative differ in small details, which suggests Snorri was stitching together more than one older telling. The mead itself echoes everywhere skaldic verse is discussed: to compose was to pour "Suttungr's mead."