Thor’s Fishing Trip and the Giant Cauldron

The gods wanted a feast, and their divinations led them to Ægir. Thor demanded that he prepare a great supply of ale. Ægir found a way to turn the demand back upon his guests: he would brew for them if they first brought him a cauldron large enough. The gods searched, but none of their vessels would serve. Then Týr remembered the enormous kettle belonging to Hymir, whom this poem calls his father, far to the east beyond Élivágar.

Could they obtain it? Thor asked. With cunning, Týr thought they could. They travelled together, leaving Thor’s goats with Egill before continuing to Hymir’s hall. There Týr encountered a grandmother whom he thoroughly disliked, a monstrous figure said to possess nine hundred heads. His mother was different: bright-browed, adorned with gold, she welcomed her son and offered him a drink. She also understood the danger his companion brought into the house.

Hymir was hostile to guests, especially to a visitor famous for killing giants. Týr’s mother hid both newcomers beneath the hanging cauldrons before her husband returned. Late in the day he came home from hunting, his beard stiff with icicles. She greeted him and announced their son’s long-awaited arrival. With Týr had come the enemy of giants, the friend of humankind, known as Véurr. A welcoming announcement had become a careful introduction to an unwelcome surprise.

She pointed toward the place where they waited behind a beam. Hymir’s glance shattered the support. The beam broke, the vessels crashed down, and all but one were destroyed. Only the great, hard-forged kettle remained whole. The guests stepped into view. The object they had come to obtain had already survived a demonstration of the householder’s destructive power.

Three oxen were slaughtered for supper. Thor ate two of them by himself, an appetite that gave Hymir another grievance. If they were going to eat together the next evening, the giant declared, they would have to live on whatever they could catch. Thor offered to row out to sea, provided Hymir supplied the bait. The giant sent him to the herd, perhaps expecting the task to give his troublesome guest some difficulty.

Thor found a black ox and tore off its head. The enormous bait did not please Hymir, who judged that the visitor was even worse when active than when sitting at his table. Nevertheless, they launched the boat. Thor urged him farther out; Hymir had little desire to go as far as his companion wished. Ordinary fishing grounds were giving way to waters associated with something much more dangerous than hunger.

Hymir caught two whales on one hook. Thor sat in the stern and prepared his own line, fastening the ox’s head to it. Beneath them lay the serpent that encircled the earth, the enemy of the gods. The bait drew its attention. Its jaws opened, and the hook joined Thor to the creature he was fated to face at the world’s end. For this encounter the poem briefly leaves the scale of a household quarrel behind.

Thor hauled the venomous serpent up beside the boat and struck its head with his hammer. Monsters roared, the rocks resounded, and the ancient earth shook. Then the creature sank into the sea. The surviving verse is compressed and has textual difficulties, but it does not say that Hymir cut Thor’s fishing line. That familiar action belongs to another telling. Here the blow and the serpent’s disappearance are the essential sequence, followed by the giant’s unhappy silence as they row home.

On shore, Hymir proposed dividing the remaining work. Would Thor secure the boat or carry the catch back to the house? The god answered with an excess of strength rather than a choice. He lifted the boat, water and equipment included, and carried it home with the whales. Everything that should have been a test of practical cooperation became another reason for Hymir to resent his guest’s power.

Still the giant would not acknowledge that Thor had proved himself. A man might row strongly, he said, without being truly strong. Thor should try breaking a particular drinking vessel. He hurled it against stone supports hard enough to damage the building, but the cup survived. The contest had found something brute force, applied in the obvious way, could not overcome.

Týr’s mother quietly supplied the answer. Thor should strike the vessel against Hymir’s head, which was harder than any cup. Thor rose on one knee and struck with all his strength. The giant’s skull remained sound; the treasured vessel broke. Hymir lamented it as he looked at the pieces. His hospitality had cost him two oxen, a fishing companion’s peace of mind, damaged furnishings, and now an irreplaceable drinking cup.

The cauldron could finally be theirs, he said, if they could carry it out. Týr attempted to lift it twice and twice failed. Thor grasped the rim, pulled it up, and settled the enormous vessel over his head. Its handles clattered around his heels. The object that had survived Hymir’s first furious glance was now leaving his house on the shoulders of the intruder he had tried to humble.

They had not gone far when Thor looked back. Hymir was pursuing them with a crowd of many-headed giants emerging from their eastern strongholds. Thor put the cauldron down, turned with Mjöllnir in his hand, and killed the attackers. Negotiation, hospitality, and tests of strength had ended in the kind of battle for which he was already known. The kettle remained to be carried home.

The closing stanzas turn abruptly to a damaged leg of one of Thor’s goats, blame Loki, and allude to compensation involving a man’s two children. The poem assumes its audience knows that adventure and does not narrate it fully here. We need not supply the missing meal, broken bone, and household scene from another work as though this poem had told them. Its own final destination is clear: Thor arrived among the gods with Hymir’s kettle, and Ægir could now brew their ale.

The desired feast frames an expedition that nearly reaches the scale of cosmic battle. Between the gods’ thirst and their eventual drinking stand a giant’s volatile household, a helpful woman, a shattered cup, and the brief rising of the world-serpent from the deep. Thor wins the vessel through strength, but the decisive advice comes from the woman who protected the visitors at the beginning. Týr’s promised cunning has its place beside the hammer.