Hrungnir

Summary

Hrungnir is a giant of stone in the myths of the Scandinavian north: his head was of stone, his heart of hard stone with three horns, his shield of stone, and his weapon a whetstone. Thor fought him in a duel and killed him, the most famous of his duels, and he boasts of it in Hárbarðsljóð: "you found no harder man since Hrungnir died, that proud giant whose head was of stone; yet I made him fall".

The story begins with a horse race. Odin rode Sleipnir into the land of the giants and met Hrungnir, who asked: who is this with the golden helmet who rides over air and sea? He has a wonderful horse. Odin wagered his head that there was no horse as good in all the giants' land; Hrungnir said his own horse, Gullfaxi, "Gold-mane", had a far longer stride, and in his anger leapt on it and galloped after Odin. Odin rode so hard that he stayed a hill ahead, and Hrungnir was in such a giant's fury that he did not notice until he was inside the walls of Asgard. The gods invited him to drink and brought him the bowls Thor drinks from, and he drained them all; when he was drunk he said he would carry Valhalla off to the land of the giants, sink Asgard and kill all the gods except Freyja and Sif, whom he would take home with him, and that he would drink up all the gods' ale; and only Freyja dared to pour for him.

When the gods tired of his talk they called on Thor, who came into the hall with his hammer raised in anger and asked: who let a cunning giant drink here, who gave Hrungnir safe-conduct in Valhalla, and why does Freyja pour for him as at a feast of the gods? Hrungnir said that Odin had invited him and that he was under Odin's protection; there was no glory for Thor in killing an unarmed man, and it would be braver to fight him at the border, at Grjótúnagarðar; he had been foolish to leave his shield and whetstone at home, and if Thor killed him unarmed he was a coward. So they agreed to a duel. The giants made a man of clay called Mökkurkálfi, nine leagues tall and three broad under the arms, and could find no heart big enough for him until they took a mare's, which did not hold steady when Thor came. Hrungnir stood waiting with his shield before him and the whetstone on his shoulder, and Mökkurkálfi beside him, so frightened that he wet himself when he saw Thor.

Thor's servant Þjálfi ran ahead to the giant and said: you stand carelessly with your shield in front of you; Thor has seen you, and he is coming at you from under the earth. So Hrungnir put the shield under his feet and stood on it, holding the whetstone in both hands. Then he saw lightning and heard great thunder, and saw Thor in his divine fury. Thor threw the hammer from far off and Hrungnir threw the whetstone; they met in the air and the whetstone broke: one half fell to the earth, and from it come all the whetstone rocks, and the other half lodged in Thor's head, so that he fell. The hammer struck Hrungnir's head and smashed his skull into small pieces, and he fell across Thor with his leg on Thor's neck. Þjálfi struck Mökkurkálfi, who fell without glory. Neither Þjálfi nor all the gods together could lift the leg off Thor's neck, until Magni, Thor's son by the giantess Járnsaxa, came, three nights old, and threw it off, and Thor gave him Hrungnir's horse.

The idea the story turns on is stone meeting the hammer. The giant is made of what the hammer splits, head, heart, shield and weapon, and the duel leaves its mark on both fighters and on the world: the hammer smashes the stone head, a stone stays in Thor's head for ever, the earth takes its whetstone rocks from the broken half of the weapon, and the dead giant's weight lies on Thor's neck until a son three nights old lifts it. Hrungnir was not an aggressor from the start: he entered Asgard in a race, Odin invited him to drink, and once drunk he talked, and the talk led to the duel.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay mentions him. Hrungnir ends in the suffix -nir, as Sleipnir does, and its r drops in the genitive, Hrungnis, as in "Hrungnir's bane", one of the hammer's names. That leaves Hrung-: h, r, n, then g. H, r and n are the letters of Arabic qarn in their order: q becomes Latin c, and old k becomes h in Germanic by Grimm's law, just as qarn is Latin cornu and Germanic horn; r is r, and n is n. Lane gives qirn as "one who opposes, or contends with, another .. in fight; an opponent; a competitor; an adversary; an antagonist: or one's equal, or match, in courage", qarn as "the part of the head of a human being which in an animal is the place whence the horn grows", the side of the head, "the edge of the cranium", and aqran, horned. On this reading Hrungnir is the qirn, the adversary who fights a duel, which is what the story makes him: he asked for the duel, and it was Thor's most famous one. Both blows fell on the qarn, the head: the hammer smashed his stone head, and the piece of whetstone lodged in Thor's. And his heart was of hard stone "with three horns", as Snorri says, using the Norse word horn itself.

Linguistic Root

Hrungnir and qirn

Cleasby–Vigfusson say the name is "prob. akin to A. S. hrung, Germ. runge", a pole or staff, and note that a shield is called "the pedestal of the giant Hrungnir" because he stood on it. Orel says the Germanic word for horn is "closely related to Lat cornū", and to Sanskrit śṛṅga-, and belongs to an Indo-European root meaning "head, horn".

Lane, under q-r-n: qarana, he connected a thing with a thing; qāranahu, he became his companion; qarīn, a comrade; aqrana li-sh-shayʾ, he was able and strong to do the thing; aqran, horned; qirn, "one who opposes, or contends with, another, in science, or in fight; an opponent; a competitor; an adversary; an antagonist: or one's equal, or match, in courage"; qarn, one's equal in age, a generation of men, "the part of the head of a human being which in an animal is the place whence the horn grows", the side of the head, the edge of the cranium, and the highest part of a desert.

The project's own table of sound changes shows the path with this very word: Semitic qarn, Latin cornu, Germanic horn, q becoming Latin c and c becoming Germanic h by Grimm's law. The three letters of Hrung- stand in the order of qarn. Two things remain: the g after the n, which qarn does not supply, and the vowel, which in the Norse name follows the r and in Arabic precedes it.

Key Mythic Narratives

In Haustlöng

The oldest witness to the duel is Haustlöng, "Autumn-long", composed around 900 by Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, poet of King Harald Fairhair, describing pictures on a shield. The poet says that the moon's road thundered under Thor as he drove to meet Hrungnir, that the sanctuaries of the hawks burned, the earth was beaten with hail, the rocks shook and split and high heaven burned. The shield flew under the feet of the guardian of the rocks, because the gods willed it, and the giant fell before the sharp hammer. The whetstone whizzed into Thor's skull and stood there until a woman sang her spell over him.

Gróa and the whetstone

Thor went home with the whetstone in his head, and the seeress Gróa, wife of Aurvandill, chanted her spells over him until it loosened. To gladden her Thor told her that he had carried her husband in a basket on his back out of the land of the giants, that one of his toes had stuck out of the basket and frozen, so that he broke it off and threw it into the sky, where it became a star, and that her husband would soon be home. She was so glad that she forgot her spells, and the whetstone stayed in Thor's head. That is why one must not throw a whetstone across the floor, for then the whetstone stirs in Thor's head.

Hrungnir's bane

The giant's name passed into the hammer's. In Lokasenna Thor tells Loki: with my right hand I will strike you with Hrungnir's bane so that every bone in you breaks, and then: Hrungnir's bane shall send you to Hel. His heart became a carved sign: Snorri says it was of hard stone, spiked with three horns, in the shape in which the carved sign called "Hrungnir's heart" was later made. Cleasby–Vigfusson note that a coward is said to have "a heart of clay", or "a mare's heart", referring to Mökkurkálfi.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse rereading essay reads the giants Thor fights as ice mountains, snowstorms and avalanches, the hammer as lightning that breaks the ice and a building tool in the smith's hand, and the giant's defeat as the northerners' success in building despite the cold. Hrungnir is the giant closest to that picture: he is all stone, Thor comes at him with lightning and thunder, and the story makes their duel the origin of something people use every day, the whetstone rocks on which tools are sharpened, and of a household custom, not to throw a whetstone on the floor.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Apollodorus Zeus fights Typhon, who at Mount Haemus heaves whole mountains, and they recoil on him through the force of the thunderbolt. Hrungnir throws his whetstone at Thor, and the hammer breaks it in the air. In both the giant throws stone, the thunder-weapon turns it back, and part of the stone falls to earth. At Ugarit Kothar makes Baal two clubs, and the second flies from his hand and strikes the head of Yamm, as the hammer flew to Hrungnir's head. These belong to divine combat with sea and serpent, and to the storm god who comes with lightning and thunder.

The giants make Mökkurkálfi of clay to stand against Thor, as Aruru made Enkidu of clay as a match for Gilgamesh. The difference is that Enkidu became Gilgamesh's companion, while the North's man of clay could not carry his heart and fell at the first blow.