Odin’s Seduction of Gunnlöð

At a Glance

• Central figures: Odin, the Allfather, who disguises himself to retrieve the mead; Gunnlöð, the giantess daughter of Suttung who guards it; Suttung, the giant who stole the mead from the dwarves Fjalar and Galar.
• Setting: Jötunheim and Asgard, in the time after the war between the Aesir and the Vanir; from Norse mythology as preserved in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.
• The turn: Odin spends three nights with Gunnlöð, wins her trust, and then drains all three vats of the Mead of Poetry before she can stop him.
• The outcome: Odin escapes as an eagle, spits the mead into vats waiting in Asgard, and returns mastery of poetry and wisdom to the gods; a few drops fall to Midgard.
• The legacy: The drops that fell to Midgard are said to be the source of the gift granted to true poets and storytellers in the world of men.

The Mead of Poetry did not begin with Odin. It began with a truce.

When the Aesir and Vanir ended their war, they sealed the peace by spitting into a common vessel. From that spittle they made Kvasir - the wisest being alive. Kvasir wandered the nine worlds, answering any question put to him, sharing knowledge without reservation. He had no equal and no enemies. Then two dwarves, Fjalar and Galar, invited him to their hall, drove a blade into him, and drained his blood into three vessels - two vats called Bodn and Son, and a kettle called Óðrerir. They mixed the blood with honey. Anyone who drank from those vessels would become a master of poetry and wisdom. The dwarves were not poets. They simply wanted what Kvasir had, and they took it.

They did not keep it long. The giant Suttung came for blood - the dwarves had killed his parents - and in place of that blood he took the mead. He carried the three vessels back to his mountain and put his daughter Gunnlöð there to guard them. Odin heard. Odin always hears.

Bölverk and the Nine Dead Men

Odin could not walk into Suttung’s mountain and demand the mead. He could not fight for it. So he went to Suttung’s brother Baugi instead, wearing a different name: Bölverk, which means Worker of Evil.

When he arrived at Baugi’s farm, nine thralls were cutting hay in the heat. Odin produced a whetstone and offered to sharpen their scythes. The stone worked like nothing they had seen. They wanted it. He tossed it into the air between them.

By sunset all nine were dead, each cut down by a neighbor’s blade.

Baugi stood over the bodies with no workers and a harvest not yet in. Odin stepped forward. He said he would do the work of nine men. His wage: one drink of the mead Suttung kept in the mountain. Baugi said the mead was not his to give, but he would try to get Odin what he was owed. He agreed.

The Auger and the Snake

Odin worked the full season. He kept his word on that much. When the fields were done he went with Baugi to Suttung’s mountain and waited while Baugi asked his brother for a single sip of the mead as payment.

Suttung refused. The mead was not for gods or men. It was his.

Odin had expected this. He handed Baugi an auger called Rati and told him to drill into the rock. Baugi worked until the mountain cracked open. When the hole appeared, Odin changed his shape, became a snake, and slithered through before Baugi could react. Baugi thrust Rati into the hole after him, trying to drive him back. Too late. Odin was already through.

Three Nights with Gunnlöð

Inside the mountain it was dark and cold, and Gunnlöð sat beside the three vessels with nothing else to do but guard them. She had been there a long time.

Odin came to her not as a god but as a man - warm, attentive, full of words. He praised her. He sat with her. He spoke of the worlds above, of Asgard and its halls, of things she had never seen. For three nights he stayed. He whispered. He promised. By the end of the third night she trusted him the way a person trusts someone who has paid close attention to them for a very long time.

She agreed to let him drink from the vessels. Three sips, she said.

Odin said nothing about what three sips would mean.

Óðrerir, Bodn, and Son

He took the first sip from Bodn. The vat was empty.

He took the second sip from Son. Empty.

He drained Óðrerir with the third sip and held in his body everything Kvasir had known, everything the dwarves had made, all the mead that Suttung had carried out of vengeance and hidden in stone. Before Gunnlöð could speak, Odin shed his borrowed shape and became an eagle.

He flew for Asgard.

The Race Across the Sky

Suttung saw the eagle clear the mountain. He changed his own shape - eagle as well - and came after it hard across the sky.

The gods in Asgard saw Odin coming. They set out the vats at the walls and waited. When Odin crossed over he opened his beak and spat the mead down into the vessels, every drop he had carried from the mountain. The gods sealed the vats.

But not every drop reached them. In his haste, some of the mead passed the other way - downward, falling toward Midgard. Those drops scattered across the world of men.

Suttung turned back. There was nothing in Asgard for him now.

The mead the drops touched on their way down - that is the inheritance of poets who came after. Not the pure measure that the gods kept, but enough. Enough to make a kenning that bends, a line that catches, a story that stays.