Tyr is the god who knew what order costs – and was willing to pay it with his own hand. Once perhaps the highest sky-god of the Germanic peoples, he is the very image of courage, law and sacrificed self-interest.
Tyr (Old Norse Týr) is the one-handed god of war and law among the Æsir. His name goes back to the Proto-Germanic sky-god *Tiwaz – and that is ancient: it survives in the weekday Tuesday („Tyr’s day") and in the rune Tiwaz ᛏ, shaped like an upward-pointing arrow.
When the Romans described the Germanic peoples, they equated Tyr with their war-god Mars (Mars Thingsus) – a hint that Tyr once held far greater importance, before Odin and Thor moved to the fore. Tyr is also a god of the Thing, the legal assembly: for the Germanic peoples, war and law were two sides of the same order.
The most famous story: the wolf Fenrir, Loki’s son, grew so threatening that the gods wished to bind him. Twice he tore their chains apart. Only the magic fetter Gleipnir, thin as silk and yet unbreakable, could hold him. But Fenrir smelled the trick and demanded a pledge: one of the gods should lay a hand in his jaws as a sign of good faith.
Only one was willing: Tyr. He laid his right hand between Fenrir’s teeth. When the wolf found himself still bound, he bit down. Tyr lost the hand – but the world gained time. No other god had the courage; Tyr knew from the first what it would cost him, and did it anyway.
“Be silent, Tyr! for between two men / never couldst thou make peace; / of thy right hand let me speak, / which Fenrir tore from thee.”— Lokasenna 38, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
Tyr’s sacrifice is the heart of his meaning: order has a price, and true courage shows itself not in striking but in deliberate loss. In Old Norse a man was called „Tyr-brave" when he surpassed others in boldness.
At Ragnarök Tyr fights the hell-hound Garmr – and the two kill each other. A one-handed god who holds his post to the very end: an ending could hardly suit Tyr better.
Fenrir · Odin · Ragnarök · The Norse pantheon.
Lokasenna, Völuspá, Hymiskviða (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning. Tacitus, Germania. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001); Georges Dumézil on the function of the law-god.