Thor’s Encounter with the Giant Skrymir

At a Glance

• Central figures: Thor, god of thunder; Loki; Thjálfi, Thor’s human servant; and Skrymir, a giant who is later revealed to be an illusion created by the giant king Útgarða-Loki.
• Setting: Jötunheim, the land of the frost giants, on the road leading to Útgarðr, the hall of the giant king. From Norse mythology, preserved in the prose tradition.
• The turn: Thor strikes the sleeping Skrymir three times with Mjölnir at full force, and each time the giant barely stirs - because Skrymir is not truly there at all.
• The outcome: Thor arrives at Útgarðr shaken and uncertain, and only afterward learns that every apparent humiliation - the food bag, the three hammer blows - was conjured through magic.
• The legacy: The three hammer strikes that Thor believed were wasted on a sleeping giant had in fact shattered a distant mountain into three valleys, which remained as permanent marks on the land.

Thor had been moving through Jötunheim for two days when night came down hard and they needed shelter. He had with him Loki and the young man Thjálfi, and the three of them found what appeared to be a cave in the darkness - wide-mouthed, deep enough, good enough for the night. They went inside and slept. Then the ground shook. Then it shook again. A sound like a mountain grinding against another mountain filled the air, rhythmic and enormous. When morning came and they stepped outside, they found they had been sleeping in the thumb of a giant’s glove.

The giant was already awake. He sat up out of the earth and looked down at them with no particular malice, just the mild curiosity of a man who finds ants near his boot. His name was Skrymir.

The Glove and the Road Ahead

Skrymir was large even by the measure of Jötunheim. He filled the valley. He bent down and picked up his glove and looked at the three of them and seemed to find the situation worth a slow grin.

Thor gave his name. Skrymir gave his. The giant said he knew the way to Útgarðr and offered to walk with them, and Thor, who had come to Jötunheim looking for exactly this kind of encounter, agreed. Skrymir bundled all their supplies into his own great leather sack and slung it over one shoulder and set off ahead of them.

By midday they had covered more ground than Thor and his companions would have managed in three. By late afternoon they were deep into country Thor did not recognize. When Skrymir finally stopped and sat down against a cliff face, he told them to eat from the sack while he slept, and within moments the snoring had started again, shaking loose small rocks from the cliff.

Thor went for the sack. The knot would not move. He pulled with both hands. He braced his feet and hauled back. The knot sat there, unchanged, indifferent. He tried for a long time. The knot did not give.

Three Blows of Mjölnir

Thor stood over the sleeping giant with Mjölnir in his hand and a hunger that had curdled into rage. He swung the hammer down onto Skrymir’s forehead with every ounce of force he had.

Skrymir’s eyes opened.

“A leaf,” he said, and rubbed his forehead, and closed his eyes again.

Thor stood still for a moment. Then he gripped Mjölnir with both hands and struck again - harder, lower, with his weight fully behind the blow.

Skrymir shifted in his sleep.

“An acorn,” he muttered. “Must have dropped.”

The snoring resumed.

Thor waited until the giant had been still long enough. He raised Mjölnir above his head and brought it down with the force that splits ice floes and drives ships under the sea. The impact threw a shockwave through the ground.

Skrymir sat up and looked around at the dark trees.

“Something woke me,” he said, puzzled. “Pebbles, maybe.” He scratched his head, lay back down, and slept.

Thor did not sleep. He stood in the dark with the hammer hanging at his side and said nothing, and Loki and Thjálfi said nothing either.

The Parting at the Crossroads

Morning came grey and cold. Skrymir rose, stretched until the sky seemed to flex, and untied the food sack without effort, as if the knot had never been anything at all. He gave them their provisions and told them Útgarðr was a half-day’s walk to the east.

“Though I will say this,” he added, looking at Thor with something that might have been pity, “the giants in that hall are large. Larger than me. If I were you, I would think carefully about whether a man your size wants to walk through those doors.”

Then he turned north and was gone into the mist between the peaks.

Thor watched him go. He ate. He said nothing. Then he walked east with Loki and Thjálfi, toward Útgarðr.

What the Giant King Revealed

Útgarðr stood on a plain of packed ice and was tall enough that Thor had to tilt his head back to see the top of the gate. Inside, Útgarða-Loki sat at a table the length of a longship and received them without standing.

What happened inside that hall is its own story. Thor was made to wrestle an old woman who was old age itself, and lost. Thjálfi raced a shadow that was thought itself, and lost. Loki ate against fire, and lost. None of the contests were what they seemed.

When it was over and the visitors were being shown out, Útgarða-Loki walked with them to the gate. There he stopped and told them the truth.

Skrymir had not been a giant at all. He had been Útgarða-Loki himself, walking in an illusion of flesh and mountain-bone. The food sack had been tied with iron-sorcery so that no hands, divine or otherwise, could open it. And the three hammer blows - those three blows that had slid off him like water - had not been wasted. Each had struck a different ridge of the mountain behind the illusion, and where Mjölnir landed, the rock split. Three valleys now gaped in that mountain where none had been before.

Thor reached for his hammer. Útgarða-Loki was already gone - the gate was closed, the hall was gone, nothing stood on the plain of ice but wind and the three of them standing in it.

The mountain with its three new valleys was a half-day behind them. The hammer had done what it always did. It had just never touched what Thor thought it was touching.

He turned and walked back toward Asgard. The thunder that rolled that evening, Thjálfi said afterward, lasted until dawn.