Eight legs, a one-eyed rider and a road that leads all the way down into the realm of the dead: Sleipnir is no ordinary horse. He is Odin's most trusted mount, the best of all steeds – and, of all beings, a child of Loki. How did the Allfather come by this strange grey stallion? The answer is one of the oddest and most charming tales in Norse tradition.
When the skalds speak of Odin, he rarely sits still. The raven-god, lord of the high seat Hliðskjálf, bearer of the spear Gungnir and the golden ring Draupnir, is above all a traveller. He roams the nine worlds, gathers knowledge, visits the dead and returns home before his ravens Huginn and Muninn have finished their round. One creature makes this possible: Sleipnir, his grey stallion with eight legs.
The Poetic Edda leaves no doubt about it. In the Grímnismál, Odin's great naming-lay, the best of every kind of thing is listed – the best tree, the best river, the best ship. And when it comes to the horse, only one name is spoken.
“Sleipnir is the best of steeds." Grímnismál 44, transl. H. A. Bellows (public domain)
No boasting, no hedging. Sleipnir carries Odin over sea and air, over the roots of the world and down into the darkness from which no one else returns. A horse that walks such roads needs more than four legs – and an origin every bit as unusual as its gait.
Snorri Sturluson tells the birth story in the Gylfaginning, and it begins innocently enough with a building site. In the early days of the gods, when Asgard still lay open and vulnerable, a craftsman appears with an offer that sounds too good to be true: in a single winter he will raise a wall around the gods' stronghold, so high and strong that no giant or mountain troll could ever breach it.
The price for this marvel, however, is steep. The builder demands the goddess Freyja as his wife – and, while he is at it, the sun and the moon from the sky as well. The Æsir are appalled, yet the prospect of an impregnable fortress is tempting. What to do with an offer one can neither accept nor refuse?
Here Loki steps forward, as he so often does when a cunning solution is called for. His suggestion: strike the bargain, but set a merciless deadline. Give the man only one winter, and if a single stone is missing on the first day of summer, the payment is forfeit. That way the gods will be handed a half-finished wall and never have to pay a thing. Convinced that a lone builder could never manage it, the Æsir agree.
Loki allows the craftsman one concession: that his stallion Svaðilfari may help with the work. A draught horse, the Æsir think, what harm can that do? It is precisely this seemingly harmless clause that nearly breaks their necks.
For Svaðilfari is no ordinary steed. Night after night the stallion drags in boulders so vast that the gods watch in astonishment as the wall rises. The builder lays stone by day, the horse carries half the labour alone by night. With alarming speed the first day of summer draws near, and the wall stands almost complete – only a few stones are missing around the gate.
Now the truth dawns on the Æsir: the stranger is no man but a mountain giant in disguise, and they are about to lose Freyja, the sun and the moon to an enemy. Anger quickly turns on the one who advised the deal. Loki, the gods grimly decide, shall clean up the mess he made – on pain of death.
Loki solves the problem in his own inimitable way. As Svaðilfari is sent out at dusk to fetch more stone, a beautiful mare springs from the woods and whinnies enticingly at the stallion. Svaðilfari, suddenly with no interest whatsoever in masonry, tears loose and gives chase, the builder bellowing behind him. All night the pursuit rages through the forest, and by morning there is no more thought of building.
The deadline passes, the wall remains unfinished, and the cheated giant flies into a giant's rage. No disguise helps him now: Thor steps forth and strikes him down with the hammer Mjölnir – a crude but effective end to the contract negotiations. The mare in the woods, as one might guess, was none other than Loki himself. Some time later he gives birth to a foal: grey, with eight legs, the swiftest and best steed the worlds have ever seen. Loki gives it to Odin. So the most shape-shifting of all the gods becomes the mother of Odin's mount – and Sleipnir becomes perhaps Loki's most likeable child, far removed from his darker siblings Fenrir, Hel and the Midgard Serpent.
What Sleipnir is truly capable of shows itself when things grow darkest. After Baldr's death, a messenger must ride down into the realm of the dead to demand the beloved god back from Hel. It is Hermóðr, a son of Odin, who takes on this journey – and Odin gives him Sleipnir for it. For nine nights Hermóðr rides through ever deeper, ever darker valleys until he reaches the river Gjöll and its golden bridge. In the end Sleipnir leaps clear over the gate of the dead, so effortlessly that no other horse could match him.
Odin himself takes this road too. In the Baldrs draumar the Allfather rides Sleipnir down into Niflhel to wake a dead seeress and draw from her the fate of his son. Sleipnir is thus far more than a swift steed: he is the creature that can cross the border between the living and the dead and carry his rider home again. A mount for a god to whom no threshold shall stay closed.
Sleipnir is firmly anchored in the oldest sources. The Grímnismál explicitly names him the best of steeds, Snorri's Gylfaginning tells of the wall-building and the birth as well as Hermóðr's ride to Hel, and in the Baldrs draumar Odin himself rides him down to Niflhel. The eight-legged horse is attested visually too: the picture stone of Tjängvide (also called Ardre VIII) on Gotland, from the 8th to 9th century, shows a rider on a steed with eight legs, convincingly interpreted as Sleipnir by scholars such as Rudolf Simek and John Lindow. The eight legs are therefore no modern fantasy but an old motif, witnessed in both word and stone.
What the eight legs mean, however, remains open. A popular reading takes them simply as an image of otherworldly speed – twice as many legs, twice as fast. Another, equally appealing theory sees in them a shamanic journey, or even the funeral bier traditionally borne by four carriers, which in motion resembles an eight-legged creature. Both make for good storytelling, but neither is proven; the sources themselves offer no explanation. Only one thing is sure: Loki as the „mother" is not a later embellishment but already stands so in the Eddic tradition. With the modern eight-legged kitsch of some decorative merchandise, by contrast, the original image has little in common.
Odin · Hugin & Munin – Odin's ravens · Sacred horses · Loki · Valhalla.