The Death of Kvasir

At a Glance

Central figures: Kvasir, a being of pure wisdom made from the combined spittle of the Aesir and Vanir gods; the dwarf brothers Fjalar and Galar who killed him; the giant Suttung who took the resulting mead; and Odin, who stole it back.
Setting: The Nine Realms - Asgard, Jotunheim, and the mountains between them - in the time after the war between the Aesir and Vanir ended in truce.
The turn: Fjalar and Galar murder Kvasir, drain his blood into three vats, and brew it with honey into the Mead of Poetry, which then passes to Suttung and is locked inside a mountain in Jotunheim.
The outcome: Odin, disguised as a mortal laborer, tricks his way into the mountain, spends three nights with Suttung’s daughter Gunnlod, drinks all three vats of the mead, and escapes as an eagle back to Asgard.
The legacy: A few drops of the mead fell from Odin’s beak during the chase and landed in Midgard, where they became the source of the gift of poetry among ordinary mortals.

Kvasir was made from spit. The Aesir and Vanir had fought their war, agreed to peace, and sealed it in the old way - each god spitting into a single vessel. From that mingled saliva they shaped a man, and what they put into him was everything they knew. He had no limits on his wisdom. No question he could not answer. He walked the Nine Realms freely, sat with men and gods and dwarves alike, and gave counsel to whoever asked. He did not hoard it. That was, in the end, what killed him.

The dwarves Fjalar and Galar had watched him for a long time. They were craftsmen, and clever, and they could not stand that Kvasir’s wisdom moved through the world like open water when it should, they thought, be kept somewhere it could be used by those who deserved it.

Kvasir’s Blood

They invited him to their hall. Welcomed him with food and flattery, which he accepted, because he trusted freely. Then they killed him. Cut his throat while he sat among them and caught his blood in three great vats - Bodn, Son, and Odrerir. Into the blood they stirred honey, let the mixture ferment and settle, and what they produced was the Mead of Poetry. A sip of it could make any creature speak with flawless beauty and perfect understanding. The wisdom Kvasir had carried in his living body was now locked inside a drink.

They told the Aesir that Kvasir had choked on his own knowledge - that no one had been there to ask him questions and his wisdom had suffocated him from inside. The Aesir believed it, or at least could not prove otherwise.

Gilling’s Son

Fjalar and Galar did not enjoy their prize for long without more blood. They invited a giant named Gilling and his wife to visit, and they drowned Gilling in the sea for sport. When his wife wept, they dropped a millstone on her head. When Suttung, Gilling’s son, found out what they had done, he came for them directly.

Suttung was not small. He hauled the two dwarves out of their hall, carried them down to the shore, and set them on a reef in open water at low tide. The sea was rising. Fjalar and Galar begged. They offered the only thing they had worth offering - the mead. All of it. Suttung looked at the vats and knew their value. He took them and let the dwarves live.

He brought the mead back to Jotunheim and hid it inside a mountain called Hnitbjorg. His daughter Gunnlod he set as guard, deep in the rock where no one would reach her without his knowing.

Baugi’s Farm

Odin knew where the mead was. He also knew that Suttung would not simply hand it over. So Odin became Bolverk - a wandering laborer, mortal in appearance, unremarkable. He came to the farm of Baugi, who was Suttung’s brother, and found it in disorder. The nine thralls who worked the land had killed each other over a whetstone Odin had passed among them, all of them grabbing for it at once, the blades turning on each other in the confusion. Baugi had no workers left before the harvest.

Odin struck his deal plainly. He would do the work of nine men through the season, and at the end Baugi would arrange for him a single sip of Suttung’s mead. Baugi agreed, and Odin worked. When autumn came, Baugi went to his brother and asked. Suttung refused. Not a drop.

Odin produced an auger - a drill for boring through rock - and handed it to Baugi. They went to the mountain together. Baugi drilled, and the bit bit deep, and shavings of stone came away in the cold air. When Odin blew into the hole and the shavings scattered back toward them, he knew the tunnel had not broken through. Baugi had stopped short. Odin made him drill again, deeper, until the shavings flew forward into the dark space beyond, and the way was open.

Odin took the shape of a serpent and went through the hole in the rock.

Gunnlod’s Chamber

Gunnlod was inside, in the deep chamber, with the three vats arranged before her in the dark. Odin came to her not as a serpent but as a man, and he was persuasive in the way that gods who have drunk from Mimir’s well are persuasive - careful and patient and entirely focused on what he wanted. He stayed three nights. He told her whatever she needed to hear. By the third night she had come to trust him, or to love him, and she gave him what he asked: three sips of the mead, one for each night.

He drained Odrerir in the first sip. Bodn in the second. Son in the third. Every drop of the mead was inside him when he transformed again, this time into an eagle, and burst through the stone and into open sky.

The Chase

Suttung heard the breaking rock. He took the shape of an eagle himself and launched after Odin, and the two enormous birds crossed the sky between Jotunheim and Asgard - Odin ahead, Suttung closing behind.

The gods at Asgard’s walls saw Odin coming. They had set vats out at the gates and they stood ready. Odin reached the walls and released the mead from his beak into the waiting vessels, all of it, the full treasure of Kvasir’s blood.

But in the speed of the final approach, a few drops fell. They scattered downward through the cold air and landed in Midgard below. The gods paid them little attention. But those drops, wherever they hit the ground, left something behind - the same gift Kvasir had carried, diminished but real. Men and women who found themselves able to make words that struck others like iron, or like light, were said to have drunk from what Odin spilled. That scattered fragment, the accident of a chase across the sky, became poetry among mortals.