“Blood mead” sounds like a feast hall, a ritual and a dare. In nearly every case it points to a single myth: two dwarves kill the wisest man the gods ever made, stir his blood into honey, and whoever drinks the result becomes a poet or a scholar. This article goes back to the texts: Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, the Hávamál and the skaldic kennings. It separates what is written there from what later readers made of it, untangles the confusion with honey mead and modern products, and says plainly that the word “Blóðmjöð” itself does not appear in the passages I checked. There is no recipe here, only sources.
Anyone who types “blood mead” or “Blóðmjöð” into a search engine lands, more often than not, on a story written down in the thirteenth century: the mead of poetry, which Norse tradition makes out of Kvasir’s blood. Around it cluster fantasy novels, role-playing games, drink labels and the occasional claim that Vikings really put blood in their mead. That last claim is backed by no source I have seen for this article. It does not mean blood never played a part in ancient cult; it means there is no readily citable evidence for a drink called blood mead.
The article therefore follows three questions. What do the texts tell us about the mead made from Kvasir’s blood? What is that drink called in the sources, and does the word “blood mead” or its Old Norse counterpart occur in them? And what does any of this have to do with the honey wine you can buy in a shop or ferment in a carboy? Where my source base is thin, the text says so.
The fullest account stands in the Skáldskaparmál (“The Language of Poetry”), the second part of Snorri’s Edda. The Icelander Snorri Sturluson compiled it in the early thirteenth century, usually dated to around 1220. It is a handbook for would-be skalds, the court poets, and explains their imagery. Snorri wrote some two centuries after Iceland’s conversion and retells the old myths as a scholar, not as a believer. That matters for every statement about “real” Viking customs: his stories show what a Christian Icelander around 1220 knew, or believed he knew, about the pagan past.
The second main source is the Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), a gnomic poem of the Poetic Edda. It tells its own version: Odin, speaking in the first person, describes how he won the precious drink from Gunnlöð, a giant’s daughter. In the stanzas I checked (104 to 110 and 140), neither Kvasir nor blood is mentioned. The same goes for other texts. In the Ynglinga saga, which Snorri puts at the head of his Heimskringla, Kvasir appears as a Vanir hostage, the wisest among them. His death and any mead are absent from that account; elsewhere the saga mentions a mead vat in which a king drowns, with no link to Kvasir.
Then there are the skalds themselves. Medieval poets used kennings, poetic circumlocutions, in which poetry appears as “Kvasir’s blood” or “the dwarves’ drink”. Snorri himself cites in the Skáldskaparmál a stanza attributed to the skald Einarr skálaglamm that contains the phrase Kvasis dreyra (“Kvasir’s blood”); a retrieval of heimskringla.no showed this, and I did not read the stanza’s wording myself. The English Wikipedia assigns the stanza to the Vellekla of the tenth century, which I have not checked. If that dating holds, the image would be older than Snorri’s book.
According to Snorri, the story begins with a war. Æsir and Vanir, the two families of gods, had fought for a long time (see the articles on the Vanir war and on Æsir and Vanir). To seal the peace, all the gods stepped up to a vessel and spat into it. From that shared spittle the gods shaped a man and called him Kvasir. He was held to be so wise that he had an answer to every question; that is how the retellings I saw put it, and I did not read the exact wording of this passage in the original.
Snorri calls Kvasir a maðr, a man, not a god. Many summaries skip that detail. Kvasir is a created being, a peace symbol in human form, and his wisdom comes from what the gods of both sides contributed. The name itself has no secure explanation. The English Wikipedia article offers a root kvas- in the sense of “to squeeze, crush”, a link to Slavic kvass, a fermented drink, and the reading of the name as a term for the spittle itself. It names Sturtevant (1952), De Vries (1961) and Simek (2007), among others; I have not read those works and pass the attribution on only as Wikipedia gives it. None of the explanations can be proven.
The dwarves Fjalarr and Galarr (in older German spelling Fialar and Galar) invite Kvasir to their home, call him aside for a private talk and kill him. They let the blood run into two vessels and a kettle. In Simrock’s German translation the kettle is called Odhrörir and the two vessels Són and Boðn (Son and Bodn in Simrock). Then they mix honey into the blood. The wording is clear in both languages: a mead results, and whoever drinks it becomes a poet or a scholar, in Old Norse skáld eða fræðamaðr.
“Þeir blendu hunangi við blóðit, ok varð þar af mjöðr sá, er hverr, er af drekkr, verðr skáld eða fræðamaðr.” – “They blended honey with the blood, and from it came a mead such that whoever drinks of it becomes a poet or a man of learning.”
Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, Old Norse text as shown on heimskringla.no; English rendering my own
This is the only link between blood and mead I found in the sources. It belongs to a tale of gods and dwarves in which blood and honey are the marvel of the story. It is not a production instruction, and the dwarves do not brew in any sense a brewer would recognise: they stir, the mixture becomes a magic draught, and that is all the text says. Time, fermentation, yeast and vessel treatment do not come up.
A note on the names: the assignment is not fully fixed in the tradition. Simrock makes Odhrörir the kettle and Son and Bodn the vessels. In the Hávamál, by contrast, Óðrerir names the drink itself in stanza 107 and the vessel in stanza 141, according to a note in the Bellows edition. For the question of “blood mead” this is a side issue, but it matters when reading sources: anyone who finds “Odrerir” online as the name of “the blood drink” is looking at a simplification.
The dwarves do not keep the drink for long. According to Snorri they also kill the giant Gillingr and his wife; Gilling’s son Suttungr demands compensation and receives the mead, which he stores inside the mountain Hnitbjörg and leaves in the keeping of his daughter Gunnlöð. I give this chain as the summaries available to me have it (Wikipedia and the excerpts on heimskringla.no); I do not know the secondary figures Gillingr and Baugi from a reading of the full text. The pattern of the story is clear: the mead changes hands three times, and each time force or cunning brings about the change.
Odin, god of poetry and wisdom (see Odin), wants the drink. As Bölverkr, “the evildoer”, he enters the service of Suttungr’s brother Baugi, works for a summer and asks a sip of the mead as his wage. Suttungr refuses; Odin bores a hole through the mountain with the drill Rati, reaches Gunnlöð and spends three nights with her. She allows him three draughts of the mead. In the Old Norse excerpt shown on heimskringla.no he drinks everything from Óðrerir with the first, from Boðn with the second and from Són with the third. Simrock’s translation renders the same scene: with the first draught he drank Odhrörir dry, with the second he emptied Bodn, with the third Son.
Then Odin turns into an eagle and flies off, and Suttungr pursues him, also as an eagle. The Æsir have set out vessels in their courtyard, and Odin spits the mead into them. Because the pursuer was so close, part of it falls out behind, and Snorri calls this the “poetaster’s share” (skáldfífla hlutr), which anyone can have. The good mead, Snorri says, Odin gave to the Æsir and to the people who could compose verse.
Here lies the point of the story for the poets themselves: two kinds of poetry come from the drink. The good kind belongs to the god and falls to the gifted, the poor kind lands with anyone who makes verses.
Set Snorri beside the Poetic Edda and the differences stand out. In the Hávamál (stanzas 104 to 110) Odin himself speaks. He was, he says, in Suttungr’s halls. Gunnlöð gave him the mead on a golden seat, and he repaid her badly by leaving her in grief. He would hardly have got out of the giants’ land without her help. The next day the frost giants come to the High One’s hall to ask whether Bölverkr is among the gods or whether Suttungr has killed him. Stanza 110 says Odin broke a ring oath and tricked Suttungr. This summary rests on two retrievals, an overview of the Old Norse edition and the Bellows version on voluspa.org, not on the full wording.
What is missing is the important part. These stanzas contain no Kvasir, no dwarvish murder, no blood and no honey. The drink is called Óðrerir; according to stanza 107 it has come “to the edge of the sanctuary of men” (á alda vés jaðar), and in stanza 140 the speaker says he obtained the precious mead “ausinn Óðreri”, that is, drawn from Óðrerir (wording in each case from a heimskringla.no retrieval). The speaker of the Hávamál is interested in Odin’s journey, in the oath-breaking and the seduction, not in the formula. Whether the Hávamál poet knew the Kvasir story cannot be answered. Scholars generally assume both tales mean the same drink, because name, giants and mountain hideout fit together. It cannot be proven.
The consequence for our keyword: the link of blood and mead is a feature of Snorri’s version and of the poets’ language. Whoever writes that Odin drinks “blood mead” in the Hávamál is inventing something. More on the stanzas in the overview Hávamál sayings.
“Blóðmjöð” is easily conceivable as an Old Norse compound. It is made from blóð (“blood”) and mjǫðr (“mead, honey wine”), modern Icelandic mjöður. Old Norse mjǫðr matches Old High German metu and Old English medu, and so our “mead”; all go back to a common Indo-European root with relatives in Greek and Sanskrit. This is standard linguistic knowledge that I only summarise here and have not rechecked for this article.
That a word can be formed does not mean it is attested. In the passages I have seen, the drink is never called “blood mead”. According to the retrievals, Snorri names it Kvasis blóð (“Kvasir’s blood”), dvergadrekka (“dwarves’ drink”), Suttungamjöðr (“Suttungr’s mead”), Hnitbjargalögr (“liquid of Hnitbjörg”), also fylli (“fill”) and, in the accounts of Odin’s theft, the “find”, the “gift” and the “drink of the Æsir”. A compound of blóð and mjǫðr was not among them. That does not rule out that it stands somewhere; I have not run a full-text search through all of the skaldic corpus. Anyone who presents “Blóðmjöð” as an Old Norse technical term has to name a passage. I know of none.
The English form “blood mead” is thus more probably a modern shorthand that packs the myth into one word, much like “mead of poetry” or “poets’ mead”. “Mead of poetry” is the usual English name in scholarship and retellings. “Skald” is the Old Norse skáld for the court poet, the same word that stands in Snorri’s sentence “becomes a poet or a scholar”.
In skaldic verse the mead is poetry itself. Snorri explains to his readers why poets call their art “Kvasir’s blood”, “dwarves’ drink” or “fill”, and teaches them to use the images. This is a kenning: a poet who says “Kvasir’s blood” means his verses, just as “Odin’s catch” or “Suttungr’s mead” mean the same. For listeners of the time it was a riddle game; those in the know decoded the myths inside.
Seen this way, “blood mead” is a figure of speech: poetry as a liquid one drinks, inspiration as something that fills you. Behind it lies the idea that wisdom is something bodily that can be taken in. No source I know says the skalds had an actual blood drink in mind with these circumlocutions. The phrase “Kvasir’s blood” points to the myth, not to a practice. The English Wikipedia entry on the “Mead of Poetry” shows no blood in its kenning examples; that is a gap in that summary, since Snorri names “Kvasis blóð” explicitly.
Why spittle, blood and honey of all things? Research offers several explanations that do not exclude one another. According to the English Wikipedia article on Kvasir, Simek (2007) sees in the shared spitting a reflex of older customs in which berries were chewed together and spat into a vessel to ferment. He also points to the similarity between Odin’s theft and Indra’s theft of the soma in Indian myth and infers a common Indo-European basis. Several older scholars, among them Afanasyev, Heinzel, Mikkola and Dumézil, are said to have seen Kvasir as the embodiment of fermented drinks. I report this as a line of research, not as a secured result: I have not seen the original works.
The second line of interpretation is literary. The myth ties peace (the spittle), knowledge (the wise man) and violence (the murder) into one chain, and it explains why poetry is at once divine and human. That fits what Snorri wanted to teach his readers: why the language of poetry looks the way it does. How far a cultic background hides behind it cannot be clearly demonstrated. A blood offering for a poet’s drink is described nowhere in the sources I know.
The mead that archaeology and reference works discuss for the Viking Age is honey wine: honey, water, yeast. What is known about it, what finds say and how rare it was in everyday life is covered in Mead among the Vikings. The myth of the mead of poetry has to be kept strictly apart, since it speaks of something supernatural; the word “mead” stands there for a magic draught, much as “nectar” does today. That honey is stirred into blood in a saga implies nothing for the kitchen of a farmstead.
The drinking vessel belongs in the same distinction. What finds show about drinking vessels is in the article Drinking horn. A horn is no proof of blood mead; it is a drinking vessel.
Russian kvass is a lightly fermented refreshment, usually made from bread. A link between the name Kvasir and this word is suspected (the English Wikipedia names Jan de Vries and Adolfo Zavaroni for it; I have not seen those works); it is not certain. Kvass is in no sense “Kvasir’s blood”, and it contains no blood. Whoever reads of a “Viking blood lemonade” is looking at a pun.
Shops sell drinks that borrow their names from the myth. In a search for “blood mead” I came across, in the result lists, a red wine with honey called “Kwasirs Trunk” at a medieval-gear online shop, a homebrew recipe titled “Kvasir’s Blood” in a recipe database, and honey wines with names such as “Odin’s Skull” and “Suttungr”. I did not open those pages and saw only the titles in the results; ingredients, origin and quality are beyond my judgement. For the classification it is enough to say: a name that quotes Kvasir’s blood says nothing about what is in the bottle. Such names are marketing and play with the myth.
Because the sources contain none. Snorri’s text says “blood and honey”, nothing more. Anything added beyond that would be invention dressed as authenticity. There is also a practical side: animal blood behaves differently from honey wine, spoils easily and demands particular care in food processing. That is common knowledge I have not researched here. Anyone who wants to make a “blood mead” drink must decide that on their own responsibility. Neither a method nor evidence for a historical drink can be derived from the texts, and this article does not recommend it.
What is secure: there is a medieval Icelandic narrative about a mead of Kvasir’s blood and honey that makes poets or scholars. It is also secure that this narrative comes from the Skáldskaparmál, a thirteenth-century work, and that the Hávamál tell an independent version without blood. What stays uncertain is how old the blood version is, how it relates to the idea of the dwarves’ drink and whether it goes back to an older cult. It is also unsettled whether “Blóðmjöð” is attested anywhere as a word. For those questions a look into the skaldic poetry itself, for instance the editions of the Skaldic Project, would be needed, which I have not done here.
For further reading: the myth as a narrative is treated in Kvasir and the mead of poetry, the dwarves in Dwarves, the giants in Giants, and the author of the Prose Edda in Snorri Sturluson.
What is blood mead? Usually the mead of poetry is meant, which in Norse tradition arises from the blood of Kvasir and honey. A historical drink called blood mead cannot be shown with the sources checked here.
Does the word Blóðmjöð occur in the sources? Not in the passages I have seen. The sources speak of “Kvasir’s blood”, “dwarves’ drink” and “Suttungr’s mead”. I may have overlooked a passage; the skaldic vocabulary was not searched in full.
What does the mead of poetry do to the person who drinks it? According to Snorri the drinker becomes a poet or a scholar. Whoever gets a share of the spilled remainder is, according to the text, a “poetaster”, a weak poet.
Is honey mead the same as the mead of poetry? No. Honey mead is a real drink; the mead of poetry is a myth with a magic draught in which only the name “mead” is shared.
Is there a recipe for blood mead? The sources yield none, and this article gives none. It only points to the texts.
Kvasir & the mead of poetry · Mead – the drink of gods · Hávamál – Sayings of the High One · Snorri Sturluson · The Edda.
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