Skaði

Summary

Skaði is the daughter of the giant Þjazi in the Scandinavian myths, who joined the gods by marrying Njörðr. She lives in Þrymheimr, her father's home in the mountains, goes about much on skis and hunts beasts with the bow, and Snorri calls her "the ski-goddess". Grímnismál calls her "the pure bride of the gods".

Her story begins with her father's death. Þjazi carried off Iðunn, the wife of Bragi, with the apples by which the gods keep their youth, and the gods grew grey and old. Loki, who had brought her out to Þjazi, was seized and threatened with death; he borrowed the falcon skin of Freyja, flew to the land of the giants and carried Iðunn back in his claws in the shape of a nut. Þjazi flew after him as an eagle; when the falcon was inside the walls of Asgard the gods set fire to piles of wood shavings, the eagle's feathers caught fire, and they killed Þjazi. Skaði put on helmet and mail-coat, took all her weapons and came to Asgard to avenge her father. The gods offered her a settlement and compensation: she would choose a husband from among them, seeing nothing of them but their feet. She saw a pair of feet fairer than all others and said: "This one I choose; there can be little ugliness in Baldr." They were Njörðr's. She also made it a term that the gods should make her laugh, so Loki tied a cord to the beard of a goat and the other end to his own genitals, each pulled and both shrieked, and then Loki dropped into her lap and she laughed. Odin threw Þjazi's eyes into the sky, where they became two stars.

Then the marriage did not last. She wanted to live on her father's mountain and Njörðr by the sea, so they agreed on nine nights in each place. When Njörðr came back from the mountain he said the howling of wolves was ugly after the song of swans; she said the seabird woke her every morning, and she went back to her mountain. The idea the story turns on is that the vengeance paid off with compensation was not extinguished. The gods gave her a husband, a laugh and two stars; the husband stayed a stranger to her mountain, and her vengeance waited for its time. When Loki was bound after Baldr's killing, Skaði took a venomous snake and fastened it above him so that its venom dripped onto his face, and Loki was the one who had told her in Lokasenna: I was first and foremost at your father's killing.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The final i of Skaði is the nominative ending of a weak masculine noun, the genitive being Skaða, which leaves skað-: s, k, ð. The essay has saqaṭa, whose letters s, q and ṭ answer the three letters in order. Lane gives saqīṭ as hoar-frost, that is, dew that falls and congeals on the ground, and as snow and hail. On this reading Skaði is the saqīṭ, the snow and ice that fall on the mountains, which is what the story makes her: the ski-goddess who lives on her father's mountain and cannot bear the shore.

Linguistic Root

Skaði and saqīṭ

Cleasby–Vigfusson call Skaði the giantess or goddess, daughter of Þjazi and wife of Njörðr, and note that her name is declined as a masculine. The common noun skaði is in their entry scathe, harm and damage, and also death or destruction. Orel gives the Germanic source as *skaþōn, with Gothic skaþis, harm and injustice, and reports that Holthausen took the first part of the name Scadinavia from this word.

Lane, under s-q-ṭ: saqīṭ is "hoar-frost, or rime; i.e. dew that falls and congeals upon the ground", also called ḍarīb; saqīṭ is snow, and hail, called saqīṭ al-saḥāb, the hail of the clouds. From the same root, saqaṭ is a mistake or fault.

The comparison keeps all three letters in order. S is s, and Arabic q meets k and j in the European languages at k, c and g, as the Juthoor sound laws record. Ṭ becomes t in the European languages; Germanic then turns old t into th by a regular law, as Latin tres is English three; and Norse turns th between vowels into ð: Gothic skaþis has þ, Norse skaði has ð. One thing remains: this path from ṭ to ð runs through three stages, and we have no witness of the middle stage in this word itself.

Other readings in the essay

The essay puts ṣaqaʿa, frost and winter, first, then saqaṭa, the falling of snow, then sakata, the silence of the mountains, then shaqqa, cutting a path through snow. Lane gives ṣaqīʿ as the hoar-frost that blasts the plants, falling from the sky by night like snow, and ṣaqaʿahu as "he struck him upon his head", so the root joins cold and striking, close to the sense of harm in the Norse word. But its final ʿ drops, leaving nothing to answer the ð. Sakata also keeps three matching letters, but silence plays no part in Skaði's stories. Shaqqa has two q's and no ð.

The essay says the name of Scandinavia may come from Skaði's name, and Holthausen, as Orel reports, said something close when he derived the first part of Scadinavia from the same word for harm.

Key Mythic Narratives

Who killed Þjazi

In Hárbarðsljóð Thor boasts that he killed Þjazi and threw his eyes into the sky, where they are a sign that all people see. In Snorri the gods kill him at the wall, and it is Odin who makes his eyes into two stars as compensation to Skaði. Loki, for his part, claims in Lokasenna that he was first at the killing.

Skaði's prophecy

In Lokasenna Skaði tells Loki that he will not play long with his tail free, for the gods will bind him to a sword's edge with his own son's guts. Loki boasts that he was first at her father's killing, and she answers: from my sanctuaries and fields only cold counsel will ever come to you.

After Njörðr

Ynglinga saga says that Skaði would not live with Njörðr and afterwards married Odin, bearing him many sons, among them Sæmingr, to whom Earl Hákon traced his descent.

Symbolic Reading

The Semitic-reading essay reads Skaði as the goddess of winter, mountains and the hunt, dwelling in the snowy mountains and hunting with the bow, and takes her name from frost. The Norse rereading essay reads the giants as the ice mountains and storms the northern peoples faced. On these readings Skaði is the winter mountain brought into the household by a settlement, which cannot bear the shore and goes back to its place. In the story itself the two places stand in their sounds: the wolf's howl on the mountain, the swans' song and the seabird's screaming on the shore.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Artemis is a huntress with the bow in the mountains and the wild and stays unmarried; Skaði is a huntress with the bow who marries by settlement and then goes back to her mountain. The figure closest to her in Norse myth is Ullr, whom Snorri describes with the same skis and bow. Her marriage to Njörðr is one of the marriages of the Vanir with the giants: Njörðr and Þjazi's daughter, Freyr and Gerðr, daughter of the giant Gymir. At Loki's rock she stands opposite his wife Sigyn: Skaði hangs the snake above him, and Sigyn holds the bowl under its venom.