Hymiskviða

Hymiskviða, "The Lay of Hymir," is one of the mythological poems of the Poetic Edda, and it is a strange, layered piece of work: a comic quest for cooking equipment that happens to contain, buried at its exact center, the single most famous image in the entire mythology — Thor hauling the Midgard Serpent up out of the sea on a hook baited with an ox's head. The poem wraps that scene in a much less famous frame story, and understanding Hymiskviða means understanding both halves and how oddly they fit together.

What is Hymiskviða about?

The poem opens with the gods wanting a feast, and turning to Ægir, a sea-giant with the means to host one properly. Ægir sets what he clearly believes is an impossible condition: he will brew for everyone, but only if someone brings him a cauldron large enough to do it in. Týr solves the problem by remembering that his own kinsman, the giant Hymir, owns a cauldron a mile deep — and the poem becomes a quest narrative, Thor and Týr traveling into Hymir's household to obtain it.

What follows plays out almost like a folktale sequence of trials inside a giant's home: a many-headed grandmother of Týr's who turns out to be helpful rather than hostile, a gold-decked concubine who offers the travelers useful warnings, a crisis at dinner when Thor eats his way through an alarming share of Hymir's ox supply, a contest of glares in which Thor's stare cracks a stone pillar, and finally a drinking-cup that will not break no matter how hard Thor throws it — until Hymir's own concubine advises throwing it at the giant's skull instead, which works. Having proven himself sufficiently terrifying a guest, Thor is allowed to leave with the cauldron, which he carries off worn as a hat, its handles ringing against his heels the whole way home.

The fishing of the World Serpent

Embedded almost exactly in the middle of this household comedy is the poem's other, far more famous episode: Hymir insists that any guest earn his keep, and takes Thor out fishing. Thor tears the head off Hymir's best ox for bait, rows them out past the point any sane fisherman would stop, and drops the line. What comes up is Jörmungandr, described as "the girdler of earth," gaping at the hook below the waves — and the poem gives the confrontation in a tight two stanzas, Thor's fist driving straight through the hull of the boat as he hauls, god and serpent face to face in what the wider mythological tradition calls the most terrifying sight anyone has ever seen. Hymir, in terror of what Thor is about to do to the world by killing the serpent early, cuts the line, and the moment passes without the apocalypse arriving ahead of schedule.

It is a strange structural choice — burying mythology's biggest scene inside what is otherwise a comic quest for kitchenware — and it is very likely deliberate. Hymiskviða reads throughout like a poet showing off: it is the densest of all the mythological poems in kennings, calling its gods and giants by riddling epithets ("mountain-breaker," "friend of men") at a rate no other Eddic poem matches, and scholars have long suspected a single late, highly skilled author compiled and polished several existing Thor-adventures into one virtuoso frame rather than simply recording an older oral original whole.

Why does the poem dwell on Týr's family?

One detail the poem raises and never quite discusses is Týr's own position in all of this. Hymir is, by the poem's own account, Týr's kinsman — which means the god of law and oaths is leading Thor directly into the household of the same race of giants the gods spend the rest of the mythology fighting and robbing. The poem states this connection plainly and then moves on without comment, a small, quiet piece of family shame folded into an otherwise boisterous adventure story, and it is easy to read past it on a first pass through the poem.

How does Hymiskviða relate to Snorri's version?

Snorri Sturluson retells the fishing trip in Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, and his version is both shorter in scope and different in emphasis: Snorri strips away almost all of the cauldron-quest frame and gives a clean, self-contained account of Thor's visit to Hymir purely for the fishing expedition, adding vivid details of his own — Thor's feet driving through the floor of the boat to the sea-bed itself, and, in Snorri's telling, Thor throwing Hymir overboard after the giant cuts the line, a beat the poem does not include. Snorri clearly knew Hymiskviða or a closely related tradition, since the core sequence of ox-head bait, the serpent's rise, and the cut line all match, but he was writing a prose handbook of mythology rather than transmitting a poem, and he kept the scene that mattered to his purposes — the confrontation with the serpent — while discarding the giant's-cauldron plot that gives the Eddic poem its shape. The scene's popularity independent of either text is confirmed by the Thor's fishing trip motif's wide presence in Norse-era picture stones, which depict the fishing expedition on its own, suggesting it circulated as a favorite image regardless of which telling audiences knew.

In the primary sources

Hymiskviða survives in the two main manuscript witnesses to the mythological Poetic Edda: the Codex Regius, the core manuscript that preserves most of the surviving Eddic poems, and AM 748 I a 4to, a separate medieval Icelandic manuscript that overlaps with Codex Regius for several of the mythological poems and occasionally preserves independent readings. Snorri's parallel and more widely read account sits in Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, where the fishing scene is quoted essentially without the surrounding cauldron-quest material found in the poem itself.