Skaði

When the gods killed her father, the eagle-giant Þjazi, Skaði put on her war-gear and came to Asgard alone to demand redress — and the gods, impressed, settled rather than fought. Her compensation had three parts: a husband, chosen by looking only at feet (she picked the beautiful feet of the sea-god Njörðr, hoping for Baldr); laughter, which only Loki could wring from her by tying his testicles to a goat's beard; and her father's eyes set in the sky as stars.

The marriage with Njörðr failed — mountain and sea could not share a home — and Skaði returned to her father's hall Þrymheimr, where she skis, hunts with the bow, and rules the high snows. It was Skaði who, after Loki's binding, fixed the venom-dripping serpent above his face. Several sources make her, with Odin, ancestor of the Ynglings, and "Scandinavia" itself may carry her name.

The giantess who out-negotiated the gods

Skaði's story begins with a death she did not cause. Her father Þjazi had abducted Iðunn, keeper of the apples of youth, and when Loki stole her back to Asgard the gods kindled a fire at the wall that burned the pursuing eagle out of the sky. Þjazi died inside their fortress, at their hands, and by every law of the North his kin were owed either vengeance or payment.

What makes the myth remarkable is that his kin was one woman, and she came anyway. Snorri tells in Skáldskaparmál how Skaði took helmet, mail-coat, and "all weapons of war" and travelled alone to Asgard — a single jötunn woman at the gates of the gods who had just killed her father. The Æsir did not laugh her away. They offered atonement: marriage into the divine family itself, and — her own strange condition — that they must make her laugh, which she believed impossible in her grief.

The husband-choice became a famous scene. The gods lined up behind a curtain with only their feet showing; Skaði chose the fairest pair, certain they must belong to Baldr, and they belonged instead to Njörðr of Nóatún, god of the sea — a good god, a wealthy god, and entirely the wrong one. Laughter came by a lower road: Loki tied a cord between a nanny-goat's beard and his own testicles, and the shrieking tug-of-war ended with him tumbling into Skaði's lap. She laughed. Then, Snorri adds, Odin took Þjazi's eyes and threw them into the sky as two stars — grief transformed into something permanent and bright. (In Hárbarðsljóð, Thor claims this deed for himself; the sources genuinely disagree.)

Why did Skaði and Njörðr separate?

Because neither could live in the other's world — one of the mythology's wry tragedies of incompatibility. The couple agreed to alternate: nine nights in Skaði's mountain hall Þrymheimr, then nine (some manuscripts say three) at Njörðr's harbour Nóatún. Each found the other's home unbearable: Njörðr could not sleep in the mountains for the howling of wolves, Skaði could not sleep by the sea for the screeching gulls. Gylfaginning preserves fragments of the verses they traded — a divorce conducted in poetry.

So they parted, and Skaði went home. In Grímnismál, Odin lists Þrymheimr among the great dwellings: Þjazi lived there once, "and now Skaði, the shining bride of gods, dwells in her father's old halls." She is not diminished by the failed marriage; she keeps her seat among the goddesses, and in skaldic verse she is öndurdís — the "snow-shoe goddess" — patron of the skis and the bow.

Skaði's revenge on Loki

Skaði's grudge against Loki never fully healed, and the sources let it show. In Lokasenna she trades some of the poem's coldest lines with him: she promises that from her sanctuaries "cold counsel" will always come to him, and Loki retorts that he was "first and foremost" among Þjazi's killers — then claims, as he does of nearly every goddess present, that she once took him to her bed. Skaði gets no rebuttal; the poem moves on, leaving the insult hanging.

She got the last word in deed rather than verse. When the gods finally bound Loki in the cave with the entrails of his own son, it was Skaði who took a venomous serpent and fastened it above his upturned face, so that the poison would drip on him until Ragnarök. His wife Sigyn catches it in a bowl; when she turns to empty it, his convulsions shake the earth. The woman the gods once had to make laugh designed the pantheon's most patient punishment.

Is Skaði a goddess or a giant?

Both, and the sources are comfortable with the contradiction. By birth she is a jötunn, daughter of Þjazi. By settlement and marriage she is counted among the Ásynjur — Snorri lists her with the goddesses, and poets invoke her as a dís. She belongs to a small class of figures (her father-in-law's family among them — Jörð, Odin's own mother Bestla) who show how porous the border between Æsir and jötnar really was. Heimskringla's Ynglinga saga goes further: after leaving Njörðr, it says, Skaði married Odin himself and bore him many sons, among them Sæmingr, ancestor of the jarls of Hlaðir — making the giantess of the snows a grandmother of Norwegian rulers.

In the primary sources

Skaði appears in the Prose Edda (Gylfaginning for the marriage and the binding of Loki; Skáldskaparmál for the Þjazi settlement, drawing on the ninth-century poem Haustlöng), in the Poetic Edda (Lokasenna, with her hall named in Grímnismál and a mention in Hyndluljóð), and in Heimskringla's Ynglinga saga, where she is ancestress of the Hlaðir jarls — the skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir traces that line from her in Háleygjatal. Place-names such as Skedevi and Skädharg in Sweden suggest she received actual cult.

Legacy

Skaði's name may be the oldest thing about her: many scholars have connected it with Scandinavia itself (Old Norse Skáney, Latin Scadinavia), though the etymology remains debated. Scattered place-names in eastern Sweden and Norway point to genuine worship. Today she has been embraced, alongside Ullr, as a patron figure of winter sport, and a moon of Saturn bears her name.