Sól and Máni

Summary

Sól and Máni are a sister and her brother in Norse myth who drive the sun and the moon across the sky, and their names are simply the Old Norse words for sun and moon: Sól, the sun, and Máni, the moon.

In Gylfaginning King Gylfi asks how the course of the sun and moon is steered, and Hár answers: a man called Mundilfari had two children so fair that he called his son Máni and his daughter Sól, and married her to a man named Glenr. The gods were angered by this arrogance, took the siblings and set them in the sky. They made Sól drive the two horses that draw the sun's chariot, which the gods had made to light the worlds from an ember that flew out of Muspelheim. The horses are Árvakr and Alsviðr, "Early-waker" and "All-swift", and under their shoulders the gods set two bellows to cool them; some lore calls this ísarnkol, "iron-cool". Máni steers the moon's course and rules its waxing and waning. He took two children from the earth, Bil and Hjúki, as they walked from the well Byrgir carrying a pail on a pole across their shoulders, and they follow him, as can be seen from the earth.

Gylfi then says the sun moves fast, as if afraid. Hár answers that it is no wonder: the one who seeks her is close, and she has no way out but to run. They are two wolves. The one behind her is Sköll; she fears him, and he will take her. The one running ahead of her is Hati Hróðvitnisson, who wants the moon, and so it shall be. They come from an old giantess who lives east of Midgard in the Iron Wood and bears giants in the shape of wolves; the mightiest of her brood is Mánagarmr, "Moon-hound", who fills himself with the lives of the dying, swallows the moon and spatters the sky with blood, so that the sun loses its light. Gylfaginning 12; Völuspá 40–41. In Grímnismál the disguised Odin says: Árvakr and Alsviðr draw the sun up, weary, and under their shoulders the gods hid iron-coolness; before the sun stands a shield called Svalinn, and if it fell away mountains and sea would burn; the wolf Sköll follows the shining god to the sheltering wood, and Hati runs before the bright bride of heaven.

At the end of time the wolf catches the sun and swallows her, the other wolf takes the moon, and the stars fall from the sky, in Ragnarök. Yet the sun does not go without an heir. Odin asks the giant Vafþrúðnir where a sun will come from onto the smooth sky when Fenrir has swallowed this one, and he answers: the sun bears one daughter before Fenrir takes her, and the daughter will ride her mother's roads when the gods die.

The idea the story turns on is that in the North the sun and moon are workers whom the gods set to a task, as punishment for their father's pride, and the task is to count time for people. Vafþrúðnir says Mundilfari is father of the moon and of the sun, and that they must turn across the sky every day "for men to reckon years". Völuspá says that at the first making the sun did not know where her halls were, nor the moon what his might was, until the gods sat in council and named night, new moon, morning, midday, afternoon and evening "to reckon by years". So the sun and moon run because they are hunted, the order of time lasts as long as the running lasts, and when the wolves catch them the world ends and the daughter takes up the road again.

We read the names in the Arabic tongue like this. The project's Norse Semitic-reading essay reads Máni from m-n-y and Sól from ṣ-w-l or s-l-l, and glosses both as light. The final -i of Máni is the Norse weak masculine ending, which leaves m and n, the letters of Arabic manā. In Lane manā means qaddara, "he measured out, determined"; maniyya is the decreed term, and munya a counted span of days. That is the moon's work in the story: he counts the years, and in Alvíssmál the elves call him ártali, "year-counter". The Qur'an says: "He made the sun a radiance and the moon a light, and determined (qaddarahu) stations for it, so that you might know the number of years and the reckoning": the radiance and light by which the essay glossed the names stand at the start of the verse, and qaddara, the sense of manā, at its end. Sól goes back to Germanic *sōwel-, with s, w and l, the letters of ṣ-w-l in order; but Lane's ṣāla is "he leaped, sprang upon, assaulted", which is what the wolf Sköll does to the sun. The sense the story gives the sun itself is closer to ṣaliya: ṣilāʾ is fire and the heat of fire, iṣṭalā is to warm oneself, and of the chameleon it is said iṣṭalā when "he repaired to the sun". On this reading Sól is the heat that would burn mountains and sea but for the shield Svalinn, and whose horses must be cooled with bellows; it is a reading proposed on the method.

Linguistic Root

Máni and manā

Cleasby and Vigfusson say that máni is scarcely used in prose and is the poets' word, the common word for the moon being tungl, and that German replaced the old word with Mond, which properly meant a moon-period, a month. Orel makes Germanic *mēnōn a secondary form built on *mēnōþ-, "month". So in the Germanic dictionary too the moon is the keeper of the month by which time is counted.

The letters of Arabic manā are those of the Norse word with no substitution: m for m, n for n, and the final -i of the Norse word an inflection. Lane gives manā as qaddara, "he determined, measured out"; umniyya originally as "a thing that a man meditates (yuqaddiruhu) in his mind"; maniyya as the decreed term, and death "because it is decreed"; the munya of a she-camel as the period at the end of which one knows whether she is pregnant, and the munya of a mare as twenty days. BDB sets Hebrew mānâ, "count, number, reckon, assign", beside Akkadian manû, Arabic and Aramaic; from it comes the word written on the wall in the book of Daniel: "mənē: God has numbered your kingdom and finished it". And in the Qur'an the sun and the moon go "by reckoning". The sense the two tongues share here is counting and measuring out, which is what the poem makes Máni.

Sól and ṣaliya

Cleasby and Vigfusson call sól the Scandinavian word for the sun and say that sunna is used only by poets. In Alvíssmál Thor asks the dwarf the sun's names in the worlds, and he answers: sól among men, sunna among the gods; the dwarves call it "Dvalinn's plaything", the giants "ever-glow", the elves "fair wheel", the sons of the Æsir "all-bright". Orel says the two words are halves of one ancient noun: an l-stem *sōwel-, from which comes sól, and an n-stem *sun-, from which come sunna and English sun; in the other languages the l-stem prevailed, giving Latin sōl, Greek hēlios and Sanskrit svar.

The essay reads the name from ṣ-w-l, whose letters s, w and l are those of *sōwel- in order, ṣ meeting s in the sibilant group of the Juthoor laws. But Lane's ṣāla is "he leaped, sprang upon him; made an assault upon him; overpowered him", and ṣawla a spring or assault: that is what the wolf Sköll, who "shall take her", does to the sun. The essay also reads the name from s-l-l, and Lane's salla is to draw a thing out of another gently, as a sword from its scabbard; neither entry gives light.

On the method we read it from ṣaliya. In Lane ṣalā al-laḥm is to roast meat; ṣaliya al-nār, to suffer the heat of fire; ṣilāʾ is fuel, fire and the heat of fire, and one says "it is better than ṣilāʾ in winter"; iṣṭalā is to warm oneself at the fire, and of the chameleon it means "he repaired to the sun". The two poems make Sól a heat: her horses are cooled with bellows or iron-cool, and before her stands a shield named Svalinn, "the cooling one", without which mountains and sea would burn; and in the cold North the sun is better than fire in winter. The weak point is that ṣ-l-y keeps s and l and makes the w a long vowel, whereas the w of *sōwel- is an old consonant still visible in Gothic sauil. It is the same question that is open on the Helios page, since his name belongs to the same family.

Key Mythic Narratives

The father's name

Cleasby and Vigfusson say that Mundilfari is "a name evidently referring to the rotation of the heavens", and the translator's notes on the voluspa.org edition record Dronke's view that the rest of Völuspá 5, found only in Snorri's Edda, replaced older lines about a cosmic mill turning the heavens. The sun's husband Glenr is known in the dictionary only as "the husband of the Sun" in Gylfaginning.

Day and Night

Day and night have their own drivers in the North. Odin asks Vafþrúðnir the name of the horse that draws the day over mankind, and he answers: Skinfaxi, "Shining-mane", whose mane always gleams; and the horse of night: Hrímfaxi, "Frost-mane", who lets fall the foam of his bit every morning, and from it comes the dew in the valleys. Day's father is Dellingr, and Night was born of Nörr.

To the wood and to the sea

Among the Norse ways of speaking of sunset, Cleasby and Vigfusson give "the sun runs to the wood" in wooded inland country and "the sun goes into the sea" on the western coast. The sheltering wood to which the wolf Sköll follows the sun in Grímnismál is the place where it sets.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Norse myths reads Sól chased by the wolf as the sun's motion and the polar night, Máni chased as the moon's phases and eclipses, the wolves Sköll and Hati as solar and lunar eclipses, and the swallowing of the sun at the end as the long polar dark.

Cleasby and Vigfusson give a second natural reading of the wolves: for them Sköll and Hati are names of the mock sun, the bright patches that sometimes appear on either side of the sun in cold air, one seeming to run behind it and one before it, like a wolf. Either way the wolf is a picture of something seen in the sky around the sun or upon it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Sól's two-horse chariot is one of the forms of the sun's journey: Helios drives his chariot from the east down to Ocean, and when his son Phaethon drives the horses for one day the earth burns, as mountains and sea would burn if the shield Svalinn fell. In India seven mares draw the chariot of Sūrya, and in the Rigveda Svarbhānu pierces the sun with darkness so that people do not know where they stand, until the seer Atri finds it again: he does to the sun what the wolf Sköll does.

In China too a woman drives the sun, Xihe, and a man runs after the sun until he overtakes it, Kuafu, and dies of thirst before he reaches water. In Egypt the serpent Apophis blocks the sun's boat every night to stop it and is overcome, whereas in the North the wolf catches the sun at the end of time.

The sun is female and the moon male in the North as in Japan, where Amaterasu came from her father's left eye and her brother Tsukuyomi from the right, and she was given heaven and he the night. The Qur'an says: "It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day; each floats in an orbit", the reverse of Ragnarök, when the wolves overtake sun and moon.

The sun is of no use in the great winter that comes before the end, Fimbulwinter; then it is swallowed in Ragnarök, and its daughter rides its roads in the new world.