Þrymr

Þrymr, 'lord of the þursar,' sat plaiting gold collars for his hounds when Loki came asking after Thor's stolen hammer. He admitted it cheerfully: buried eight leagues deep, and the price is Freyja as his bride. He had prepared for the wedding of his dreams — gold-horned cattle, jewels, everything, he boasts, but Freyja.

What arrived was Thor, veiled and bridal, with Loki as bridesmaid. Þrymr wondered at a bride who ate an ox and eight salmon and whose eyes burned like fire — Loki explained she had not eaten or slept for eight nights of longing — and, satisfied, called for the hammer to hallow the bride. It was laid in 'her' lap, and Þrymskviða ends in one of literature's great massacres-at-a-wedding.

Þrymr owes his immortality to a single poem — but what a poem. Þrymskviða, "The Lay of Thrym," is by common consent the funniest thing in the Poetic Edda: tight, fast, gleefully repetitive in the old ballad manner, and built around the best sight-gag in medieval literature. It deserves a scene-by-scene telling.

The theft of Mjölnir

The poem opens on catastrophe compressed into one line: "Wroth was Ving-Thor when he awoke and missed his hammer." Thor's beard bristles, his hair stands on end, his hands grope the empty air. Mjölnir — the weapon that alone keeps the giants out of Asgard and Midgard — is simply gone. The first thing Thor does is tell Loki, and the poem notes the seriousness: this is a thing "known to none, that the hammer was stolen." Loki borrows Freyja's feather-cloak and flies whirring into Jötunheim, where he finds Þrymr, lord of the giants, sitting on a mound at his ease, twisting gold collars for his hounds and trimming the manes of his horses — a portrait of a giant so secure he has taken up handicrafts. Yes, he has the hammer, he says pleasantly; it lies hidden eight leagues under the earth, and no man gets it back "unless he brings me Freyja as wife."

How Þrymr stole it, the poem never says — the theft happens before line one, offstage, and no source fills the gap. He is simply the giant who managed the unmanageable, which is why his name (probably "din" or "uproar") sits so ironically on a hound-fancier plaiting gold on a barrow.

Freyja's refusal and Heimdall's plan

Loki flies home, and Thor relays the ransom to Freyja with breathtaking tactlessness: bind on your bridal linen, we two are driving to Jötunheim. Freyja's reaction is the poem's thunderclap — she snorts with rage so hard that the halls of the Æsir shake and the great necklace Brísingamen bursts from her neck. "Man-mad you may call me," she says, "if I drive with you to giant-land." The gods convene in emergency assembly, and it is Heimdall, "whitest of the Æsir," who — seeing ahead as the Vanir do, the poem says — proposes the solution: dress Thor in the bridal linen. Give him Brísingamen, keys jingling at his belt, a woman's skirts, broad stones on his breast, and a neat headdress. Thor objects that the gods will call him argr — unmanly, the deadliest insult in the Norse vocabulary — and Loki cuts him off with the poem's most quoted rebuke: be silent, Thor; the giants will settle in Asgard at once if you do not fetch your hammer. So the mightiest of gods is laced into a wedding dress, and Loki, volunteering with suspicious enthusiasm, puts on a maid's clothes to ride along as bridesmaid. The goats are harnessed, the mountains crack, and the earth burns as they drive.

A wedding in Jötunheim

Þrymr's excitement is written with real comic tenderness: strew the benches, he orders — Freyja is coming! His yards fill with gold-horned cattle and jet-black oxen; I have treasures on treasures, he inventories, "and Freyja alone did I lack." The evening feast, though, tests his faith. The veiled bride eats an entire ox, eight salmon, all the dainties set aside for the women, and washes it down with three casks of mead. Þrymr has never seen a bride bite more broadly. The "very shrewd serving-maid" is ready: Freyja has not eaten for eight nights, so wild was her longing for Jötunheim. He stoops under the veil to steal a kiss and leaps back the length of the hall — why are Freyja's eyes so terrible? They seem to burn with fire. Again the maid: she has not slept for eight nights, so wild was her longing. (The poem lets us hear how much Loki is enjoying himself.) The giant's luckless sister then sidles up to beg a bridal gift of rings from the bride's fingers — a request that will be honored, in a manner of speaking.

Then Þrymr, in the hurry of a man who wants the formalities finished, calls for the instrument of his own execution: "Bring in the hammer to hallow the bride; lay Mjölnir in the maiden's lap; wed us together by the hand of Vár." It is the poem's one priceless glimpse of Norse wedding ritual — the hammer laid in the bride's lap to consecrate the marriage — and its perfect trap. Thor's heart laughs in his breast when he feels the shaft. The hard-souled one stood up. Þrymr, lord of the þursar, is felled first, and then the whole wedding-party of giants, one by one; the sister who asked for gold rings receives, in the poem's last joke, a hammer-blow instead. "And so Odin's son got his hammer back."

Is the story of Thrym a late parody?

Þrymskviða survives only in the Codex Regius, and nothing else in the old sources mentions Þrymr's theft — Snorri, who retells nearly every good Thor story, skips this one entirely. That silence, plus the poem's ballad-like repetitions and its cheerful mockery of Thor, has convinced many scholars that Þrymskviða is a late composition, possibly 12th- or 13th-century, written when poets could tease the old gods safely — though others defend an earlier date, and the argument is not settled. What is certain is its afterlife: the story became one of the most popular in Scandinavia, retold in late-medieval ballads (the Danish "Tord af Havsgaard") and in rímur, and today it anchors Thor-in-a-dress scenes from Marvel comics to children's retellings. A giant named Thrym also appears as a frost-giant king in God of War Ragnarök, borrowing little but the name. One further namesake deserves mention: Grímnismál lists Þrymheimr, "Thrym-home," as the mountain hall of the giant Thjazi — same name-element, different giant, and no stated connection.

In the primary sources

Everything we know about Þrymr as a character comes from Þrymskviða in the Poetic Edda — theft, ransom, cross-dressed wedding, massacre. He appears in name-lists of giants (the þulur appended to the Prose Edda), and the poem itself calls him þursa dróttinn, lord of the þursar, three times, like a refrain. Snorri's silence about the story remains one of the small mysteries of the Prose Edda. The tale's persistence in later Scandinavian ballads shows it never needed his help.