In the Earlier Versions, Thor Kills the Serpent

The giant cuts the line. That is how most people know the story of Thor's fishing trip: the Midgard Serpent on the hook, Thor's hammer raised, and a frightened jötunn named Hymir ending it. The Prose Edda tells it that way, and it was written down around 1220. Earlier Scandinavian poets told it another way. In their version, Thor kills the serpent.

Both endings can't be right. And the serpent still has a part to play at the end of the world. This post follows the story in order, then looks at where the sources split.

The Serpent Odin Threw Away

Jörmungandr is the middle child of Loki and the giantess Angrboða. His siblings are the wolf Fenrir and Hel, who rules the dead. According to the Prose Edda, Odin takes all three of them out of Asgard. He throws the serpent into the great ocean that surrounds Midgard, the earth.

Getting rid of it doesn't work. In the sea the serpent keeps growing until it circles the whole earth and bites its own tail. The name fits. The prefix jörmun- means something huge, vast or beyond human scale. Gandr can mean snake, but it can also mean staff, river or binding. So the name can be read as world serpent, world river or world bond. The monster Odin threw away has become the thing that holds the world together.

The sources for it are the Prose Edda, the Eddic poems Hymiskviða and Völuspá, the skaldic poems Húsdrápa and Ragnarsdrápa, and kennings scattered through other skaldic verse. In Þórsdrápa, Loki is called faðir lögseims, "father of the sea-thread." Thor has a long feud with this sea-thread, and the fishing trip is one episode of it.

A Kettle for a Party

The Eddic poem Hymiskviða, the Lay of Hymir, doesn't start at sea. It starts with a drinking problem. The Æsir consult their augury twigs and decide that Ægir, who owns a lot of kettles for brewing beer, should host them often. Ægir agrees, reluctantly. Hosting the gods is a lot of work, so he sets a condition he hopes they can't meet: they have to bring him a kettle big enough to brew for all of them at once.

None of the gods owns one. But Týr remembers that his father, the giant Hymir, has exactly that kettle. So the gods set off to borrow a pot, and one of the most popular scenes in Norse art begins as an errand for a party.

The poem was written down in the late 13th century, and its seams show. It is stitched together from fragments of several myths. Its scenes follow each other in a very rough logical order, it alludes to stories known from no other source, and it has unusually many kennings for an Eddic poem.

The Ox Head

At Hymir's hall, Thor eats so much that Hymir and his guests have no choice but to go fishing. Then comes a quarrel over bait. Hymir won't give Thor any, so Thor strikes the head off Hymir's largest ox and uses that.

A Swedish picture stone may show this very scene. The Ardre VIII stone seems to show several stages: a man entering a house where an ox is standing, two men leaving with one carrying something on his shoulder, and two men fishing with a spear. The image is dated to the 8th to 10th century. If it really shows this myth, the story kept its shape for centuries before the Prose Edda recorded it.

Past the Whales

The two of them row to the spot where Hymir usually sits and catches flatfish. There Hymir pulls up two whales. Thor demands to go further out, and Hymir protests. They go anyway.

Thor gets ready a strong line and a large hook, baits it with the ox head and drops it into the deep. Jörmungandr bites. Thor hauls the serpent out of the water, and god and monster face each other while the serpent blows poison. Hymir goes pale with fear.

This was one of the most popular scenes in Norse art. On the Altuna Runestone in Sweden, Thor pulls so hard that his foot goes through the bottom of the boat. Other stones believed to show the myth are the Hørdum stone in Denmark and a slab at Gosforth in Cumbria, carved by the same sculptor as the Gosforth Cross.

Two Endings

In the Prose Edda, the giant acts first. As Thor grabs his hammer, Hymir cuts the line. The serpent sinks under the waves and goes back to circling the earth. Hymiskviða ends the scene in a similar way. Many of the picture stones agree and show the giant cutting the line.

The earlier Scandinavian versions in skaldic poetry don't agree. In them, Thor catches the serpent and kills it with a blow to the head.

Look at the Altuna stone again. Thor is alone in the boat. There is no giant in the picture. The likeliest reading is that the carver knew the ending where Thor wins.

So the record holds two stories. In one, the world serpent dies in a fishing boat. In the other, it lives. The stones themselves split: some show the cut line and one shows Thor alone.

The Serpent at Ragnarök

Snorri's Gylfaginning, drawing on Völuspá, describes the end of the world. One sign of Ragnarök is a violent upheaval of the sea, because Jörmungandr lets go of its tail. The sea floods. The serpent crawls onto land and sprays poison through the air and water, alongside Fenrir. They join the sons of Muspell against the gods on the plain of Vigrid.

There Thor and the serpent meet for the last time. Thor kills it, walks nine paces and falls dead from its venom. The Gosforth Cross has been read as showing this battle.

The sources never say why the two fishing endings differ. One way to read it: a serpent killed at sea can't rise at Ragnarök. On that reading, Hymir's cut does more than spoil a catch. It saves the serpent for the end of the world, and it puts Thor's victory nine paces from his own death.

What the Cut Line Means

Preben Meulengracht Sørensen read the episode as a youthful indiscretion of Thor's, told to stress the order and balance of the cosmos, where Jörmungandr has a vital role. John Lindow connected the bitten tail to the binding of Fenrir. Both are bound monsters, enemies of the gods held in place until they break free at Ragnarök.

Their readings leave room for one more, which is mine and not theirs: Hymir may not be a coward. He may be the only one in the boat who understands what Thor has on the hook.

The comparisons go further afield. Thor's fight has been set beside the Hindu god Indra slaying the dragon Vritra, and beside a Balto-Slavic motif of a storm god fighting a serpent. Georges Dumézil compared Hymiskviða to the Indian churning of the ocean. None of these comparisons settles which Norse ending came first. The skaldic verse is the earlier record, and there Thor wins.

The Kettle Comes Home

Hymiskviða still has an errand to finish. Back on land, Hymir taunts Thor: he can hardly be called strong if he can't break Hymir's chalice. The chalice is magic and breaks only when thrown against Hymir's own head. Thor learns the trick and does it. Hymir, annoyed, lets them take the kettle. Hordes of jötnar are slain, and the gods drink happily at Ægir's ever after, or at least until Lokasenna.

The gods get their beer. The serpent goes back to holding the world together. Which ending you think is the real one depends on whether you read the stone at Altuna or the book from 1220.

Sources