Þrymr

Summary

Þrymr is a giant of Norse myth, "lord of the thursar" in their land of Jötunheimr, who stole Thor's hammer Mjöllnir and would give it back only if Freyja was given to him in marriage. He is known from a single poem of the Poetic Edda, Þrymskviða, preserved in a manuscript of around 1270.

Thor woke in anger and could not find his hammer; he shook his beard and tossed his hair and said to Loki: hear what no one knows on earth or in heaven: the god has been robbed of his hammer. They went to Freyja, who lent Loki her feather cloak, saying she would give it even if it were of gold or silver. Loki flew until he came beyond the Æsir's courts and within the giants' worlds. Þrymr sat on a mound twisting golden collars for his hounds and smoothing the manes of his mares. He said: how fares it with the Æsir? How fares it with the elves? Why have you come alone to Jötunheimr? Loki said: ill with the Æsir, ill with the elves; have you hidden the hammer? Þrymr said: I have hidden it eight leagues under the earth, and no one will fetch it back unless he brings me Freyja as wife.

Loki flew back with the news, and they told Freyja: put on the bridal linen, we two shall drive to Jötunheimr. Freyja grew angry and snorted, the whole hall of the Æsir trembled beneath her, her great necklace, the necklace of the Brísings, burst, and she said: you would know me as the most man-crazed of women if I drove with you. The gods and goddesses met in council, and Heimdall said: let us dress Thor in bridal linen; let him wear the great necklace, let keys jingle at his belt, women's clothes fall about his knees, broad brooches lie on his breast, and let us dress his head. Thor said: the Æsir will call me unmanly if I put on the bridal linen. Loki said: be quiet, Thor; the giants will soon dwell in Asgard unless you get your hammer back. So they dressed him, and Loki went with him as a maidservant. The goats ran, the mountains broke, the earth burned with flame, and Odin's son drove to Jötunheimr.

Þrymr said: stand up, giants, strew the benches; now they bring me Freyja, daughter of Njörðr. Gold-horned cows walk in my yard, all-black oxen for the giant's delight; I have many treasures and many jewels, and only Freyja seemed lacking. In the evening ale was served, and the bride alone ate a whole ox, eight salmon and all the dainties made for the women, and "Sif's husband" drank three casks of mead. Þrymr said: where have you seen a bride eat more? The clever maidservant said: Freyja ate nothing for eight nights, so eager was she for Jötunheimr. Þrymr lifted the veil to kiss her and sprang back the length of the hall: why are Freyja's eyes so terrible? Fire seems to burn from them. The maidservant said: Freyja did not sleep for eight nights, so eager was she. Then the giant's sister came in and asked for the bride-gift, the red rings.

Þrymr said: bring in the hammer to hallow the bride; lay Mjöllnir in the maiden's lap; wed us together by the hand of Vár. Thor's heart laughed in his breast when he knew his hammer. He killed Þrymr first, lord of the thursar, and battered all the giant's kin, and killed the old sister who had asked for the bride-gift: she got a blow instead of shillings and a hammer stroke instead of rings. "So Odin's son got back his hammer." Þrymskviða 30–32.

The idea the story turns on is that the weapon that protects the gods became a pledge for the goddess of fertility, that the gods recovered it by a trick rather than by force, and that the wedding rite itself returned the hammer to its owner: the hammer laid in the bride's lap to hallow her was laid in Thor's lap. Þrymr is rich in everything, cows, oxen and gold, and lacks only Freyja, as the builder asked for her as the price of Asgard's wall and the giant Hrungnir said he would carry her off. The giants ask the gods for the one thing that cannot be bought, and the gods do not give it. Loki runs the trick, as in the stories of the trickster, and the wedding is a false wedding that turns the sacred marriage inside out: the bride is the storm god himself.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a proposal on the method, since neither essay reads it. The final r of Þrymr is the Old Norse nominative ending and drops in the accusative, as the poem says Þrym drap hann fyrstan, "Þrymr he slew first", leaving Þrym-. The letter þ is Arabic th, as Thor's name is read thawr on this wiki, and r is r. So the name is Arabic tharā, from which comes tharwa, wealth; the m answers the w, both belonging to the group of lip sounds that the Juthoor project treats as one. In Lane tharā al-qawmu is "the people became many", tharā al-mālu "the cattle, or other property, became many", tharī is one abundant in property, and tharwa abundance of number and wealth. On this reading Þrymr is "the rich one", abundant in herds and men, which is what the poem makes him: he sits on his mound twisting golden collars for his dogs and counts his gold-horned cows, his black oxen, his treasures and jewels, lacking only Freyja. Old English has a sister word to his name, þrymm, "a host, a multitude".

Linguistic Root

Þrymr and tharwa

Cleasby and Vigfusson give þrymr as a noun, "an alarm, noise, freq. in Lex. poët. of battle", with compounds that serve as names for a warrior, and a second word of the same spelling, an adjective "glorious", whose sister in Old English is þrym. Orel derives the name from Germanic *þrumiz, which gives Old Norse þrymr, "noise, alarm", and Old English þrymm, "host, crowd, multitude", and calls it probably related to Latin turma, a troop of horsemen.

Lane gives tharā al-qawmu, "the people, or company of men, became many, much, or great in number"; tharā al-mālu, "the cattle, or other property, became many"; thariya, "he was, or became, abundant in cattle, or other property"; tharī, "many, numerous", said of a company of men; tharwa, abundance of wealth; tharawnāhum, "we were more than they, or more in cattle"; and tharītu bihi, "I rejoiced in him". Lane, th-r-w. Of the two senses in the Germanic word, the crowd and the noise it makes, the first meets Arabic tharwa, which is abundance of number and of wealth together. Th answers þ without change and r is r; the m answers the w within the lip-sound group, and this is the weak point of the reading: the group joins the two letters, but the m belongs to the root of the Germanic word and the w to the root of th-r-w.

Two other readings

Arabic also has ḍarima: in Lane ḍarimat an-nāru is "the fire became kindled, burned brightly or fiercely", ḍarimat al-ḥarbu "the war became kindled, raged", ḍarima said of a man "he became vehemently hungry", ḍarima fī ṭ-ṭaʿām "he applied himself to the eating of the food vigorously, not pushing away aught thereof", and ḍarima ʿalayhi "his anger became violent". This meets the Norse sense of battle-din, and in the poem it meets the bride whose eyes burn with fire and who eats a whole ox. But ḍ is not a regular partner of þ, and these senses describe the disguised Thor, not Þrymr. Lane, ḍ-r-m. There is also tharama, whose letters are all the letters of the name in order, but in Lane it means to have a front tooth broken, a sense the story does not know.

Key Mythic Narratives

The wedding and the hammer

The commentary of Northern Tales on stanza 30 says that laying the hammer in the bride's lap was likely an actual Old Norse wedding rite, attested in later folk tradition. The poem preserves other details of bridal dress and wedding: the linen and the veil, the keys at the belt as the mark of the mistress of the house, the broad brooches on the breast, the bride-gift asked for by the groom's sister, and the marriage "by the hand of Vár", the goddess who listens to the oaths women and men make between themselves and takes vengeance on those who break them.

The date of the poem

The poem survives only in the Codex Regius of the Eddic poems, and scholars disagree on its date: some have placed it in the thirteenth century under the influence of ballads, others in the tenth. Snorri does not mention Þrymr in Gylfaginning, though he tells how the giants asked for Freyja as the price of Asgard's wall.

Symbolic Reading

The essay Rereading Norse Myths reads Thor's hammer as lightning and a real hammer at once: lightning is the force that breaks the ice, the hammer is the builder's tool, and the hammer thrown and returning is the lightning that strikes and vanishes. It reads Thor's battle with the giants as the human fight against harsh nature. The essay does not read this poem; extended to it, the hammer hidden eight leagues under the earth would be the absent lightning, which returns at a wedding, and in the story the wedding is a pledge for the fertility Freyja stands for.

The poem itself is clearer as a social reading: marriage in it is an exchange between two groups, in which a rich man seeks a wife from another group and pays for her, and his sister asks for the bride-gift. The gods refuse to let Freyja go to the giants, as they refuse in every story, and turn the exchange around by a trick: a man enters as the bride, and the bride-price leaves as a hammer.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Library attributed to Apollodorus, Typhon gets the better of Zeus at close quarters, cuts out the sinews of his hands and feet and hides them in a cave; Hermes and Aegipan steal them back and fit them in again, and Zeus returns to his thunderbolt. In the Akkadian epic the bird Anzu steals the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil while he bathes, and Ninurta recovers it by battle. In all three stories the storm god or the lord of the gods is robbed of what his power rests on, it is hidden with an enemy from outside the gods' world, and it is recovered. The recovery differs: by stealth among the Greeks, by war in Mesopotamia, and by disguise in bridal dress in the North, which makes Loki in this story the counterpart of Hermes, the trickster who arranges the recovery.

The poem stands where the storm god whose weapon is stolen meets the trickster who recovers it and the sacred marriage turned against its host.