Gleipnir

Summary

Gleipnir is the fetter with which the wolf Fenrir was bound in the myths of the Scandinavian north, and which held him until the end of time. The dwarves made it under the earth from six things that do not exist; it was thin and soft as a silk ribbon, and the wolf would not let it be put on him until Týr placed his hand in his mouth.

Its story is the story of the third fetter. The gods reared the wolf, Loki's son, among themselves, and only Týr dared to feed him. When they saw how much he grew each day, and all the prophecies said he would be their ruin, they made a strong fetter called Læðingr and told him to try his strength on it, and he broke it at the first push. Then they made a second fetter, twice as strong, called Drómi; the wolf shook himself, dashed it against the ground and the pieces flew far off. The gods feared they would never bind him, so Odin sent Skírnir, Freyr's messenger, down to the land of the black elves under the earth, to certain dwarves, who made the fetter Gleipnir from six things: the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. That, Snorri says, is why a woman has no beard, why a cat makes no sound when it runs, and why there are no roots under a mountain.

The gods took the wolf to the islet Lyngvi in the lake Ámsvartnir, showed him the ribbon, and passed it from hand to hand pulling on it, and it did not break; they told him it was stronger than it looked. The wolf said: I shall win no fame by tearing so thin a ribbon, and if it was made with craft and cunning, it shall not go on my feet. They said: one who broke the great iron fetters will tear this quickly, and if you cannot, the gods need not fear you, and we will set you free. The wolf said: if you bind me so that I cannot free myself, you will be slow to help me; but let one of you put his hand in my mouth as a pledge that this is done without deceit. The gods looked at one another, and none would put out his hand until Týr laid his right hand in the wolf's mouth. When the wolf pushed, the ribbon hardened, and the harder he struggled the tighter it held. All the gods laughed except Týr, who lost his hand. Then they drew the chain that ran from the fetter through a great slab, sank it deep in the earth, drove another great stone still deeper as an anchoring peg, and wedged a sword in his mouth with the hilt against the lower jaw and the point against the upper, so that his slaver runs as a river; and there he lies until Ragnarök. Gylfaginning 34.

The idea the story turns on is that craft does what iron cannot. The first two fetters were tried by force and broken by force; the third was made of things that weigh nothing and do not exist, so there was nothing in it to break. But the craft needed a lie, and the lie needed a pledge, and Týr's hand was the price of the fetter. The gods did not kill the wolf because they would not stain their sanctuaries with his blood, though they knew he would kill Odin, so the fetter delayed the end without preventing it. Völuspá says in its refrain: "the fetter will burst, and the wolf run free".

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the essays do not name the fetter. Gleipnir ends in the suffix -nir, which makes a word into a name for the one who does the act, as in Sleipnir and Draupnir; that leaves gleip-: g, l, and a b that has become p. These are the letters of Arabic kalb in their order: Arabic k is answered by g in the European languages, l is l, and b becomes p as it did in Sleipnir. Besides the familiar animal, Lane gives kalb as "anything with which a thing is made firm, or fast, or is bound", "so called because it holds fast a thing like a dog"; kalb is also "a strap, or thong, cut from an untanned skin", and the mukallab is "a man bound with" such a thong, and "a captive having the feet shackled". On this reading Gleipnir is "the kalb", the band that holds fast and does not let go, which is what the story makes it: a smooth, soft ribbon bound on the wolf's feet that holds tighter the more he struggles. The dog is of the wolf's own kind, and from the same root kaliba ʿalā is "he was eager for, or desired with avidity, a thing", and kaliba "he ate voraciously, without becoming satiated", which is the wolf who grew every day.

Linguistic Root

Gleipnir and kalb

Cleasby–Vigfusson explain the name as "the Lissom", close to Snorri's statement that the fetter was smooth and soft as a silk ribbon. Orel lists the Norse verb gleipa, "to mock", with an Old High German participle meaning "oblique, crooked", without mentioning the fetter. That sense meets the story too: a thin ribbon that seems to mock the wolf's strength, and gods who laugh when it tightens on him.

Lane, under k-l-b: kalb, the dog; kalb, "anything with which a thing is made firm, or fast, or is bound .. so called because it holds fast a thing like a dog"; kalb, a strap or thong cut from an untanned skin, and mukallab, a man bound with it; mukallab also "a captive, having the feet shackled, or bound", said by some to be mukabbal transposed; kalb and kulba, a thong put between the two edges of a skin when it is sewn; kallāb and kallūb, a hooked iron. From the verb: kaliba ʿalā shayʾ, "he was eager for, or desired with avidity, a thing"; takālaba, people were eager for a thing "as though they were dogs"; kaliba, "he ate voraciously, without becoming satiated".

The comparison follows the Juthoor sound laws: k belongs to the group that becomes k, c or g, l is among the steadiest consonants, and b belongs to the lip group that becomes b or p. It is the same correspondence by which the Sleipnir page reads sleip- as salib. The reading takes the name from what the fetter does; the Norse dictionary takes it from how it feels.

Key Mythic Narratives

The saying and the messenger

Snorri says that the first two fetters became a proverb: of anyone who strives hard at something, people say that he "frees himself from Læðingr" or "dashes out of Drómi". The messenger who went down to the dwarves, Skírnir, is the same one who later went to woo Gerðr for Freyr and took his sword as payment.

The fetter in the poems

In Lokasenna Loki taunts Týr with the hand Fenrir tore off, and Týr answers: I lack a hand, and you lack the wolf; nor does the wolf fare well, waiting in bonds for Ragnarök. Then Freyr says to Loki: I see a wolf lying before the river-mouth until the powers are riven, and next to him you shall be bound unless you are silent. The refrain of Völuspá comes back four times: the hound Garmr howls before Gnipahellir, the fetter will burst and the wolf run free. The word for the wolf in that line is freki, the name of one of Odin's two wolves; see Geri and Freki. Lokasenna 39 and 41; Völuspá 44, 49, 53 and 57.

The fetter bursts

At Ragnarök Fenrir breaks loose and opens his jaws until the lower one touches the earth and the upper one the sky; he swallows Odin, and Odin's son Víðarr kills him.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse rereading essay reads Fenrir as hunger and famine that grows until it cannot be bound for ever, and reads the binding of Loki's children as the community's attempt to put off disaster: the bond is always temporary, and nature breaks free in the end. On this reading Gleipnir pictures what the community has against hunger: it cannot master it by force, so it holds it by cunning for a time and pays the price with its own body. The text itself has something to match: the six things the fetter was made from cannot be seen or held, and Snorri makes the fetter the reason they are missing from the world, so the fetter is made of absence itself.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Odyssey Hephaestus forges bonds as fine as spiders' webs, which not even the gods could see, which could not be broken or loosed, and Ares and Aphrodite are caught in them, and the gods break into unquenchable laughter. Gleipnir is just as fine, thin as silk, made by makers who do not fight, and the gods laughed when it tightened, all but the one who paid for it.

Zahhak is bound in Mount Damavand rather than killed, until he breaks loose at the end of time, as Fenrir is bound with Gleipnir and his father Loki with his son's entrails; in both the bond puts the danger off until the end, as in Ragnarök. The cunning with which the fetter was made, and the pledge it required, put the gods of this story in the place of the trickster, and make the wolf the one who asks for a guarantee against deceit.