Thor and Utgard-Loki

The funniest and at the same time most profound Thor story is a string of defeats – that are none at all. On his journey to Utgard the strongest of the gods loses one contest after another. Only at the end does it become clear: his opponents were Age, the Sea, Fire and Thought itself. It is a tale about the limits of raw strength – and about how much greatness there can be in losing.

Thor sets out with Loki into the land of the giants. The journey leads deep into Jötunheim, to the stronghold of Utgard – the name means „that which lies outside the fence“, outside all order – and to its lord Utgard-Loki. He is not to be confused with the Loki of the Æsir: a different figure, a giant king, master of deception.

Why two human children come along

On the first evening Thor turns in with a peasant family and slaughters his two goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, for the meal. The rule is strict: the bones must be laid unbroken upon the skins, so that in the morning Thor can bless the goats back to life with his hammer. But the farmer's son Thjálfi splits a thigh-bone for the marrow – and next morning one goat limps. As atonement, Thjálfi and his sister Röskva must go with Thor as servants. That is how Thjálfi and Röskva enter the gods' following – and why the small company is four strong when it steps into Jötunheim.

The night in the glove

In a forest the travellers find a strange hall: a broad chamber with a smaller side room, in which they spend an uneasy night amid rumbling and quaking. In the morning the riddle is solved – the „hall“ is the glove of an enormous giant, and the side room is its thumb. The giant, Skrymir („the braggart“), joins them and offers to carry all the provisions in his bag.

In the evening, though, Thor cannot get the bag open: Skrymir has bound it shut with wire. Enraged, Thor strikes the sleeping giant three times on the head with Mjöllnir – blows that should have shattered any skull. But Skrymir only stirs, asking whether a leaf, an acorn or a bit of bird-droppings has fallen on him. In truth Thor has struck three deep valleys into a mountain: Skrymir had secretly slid the mountain between himself and the hammer. Even before Utgard, the god's strength runs into an invisible wall.

Utgard: five contests, five defeats

In the giant king's hall Utgard-Loki mocks the small guests and sets them contests. And one after another the greatest of them fail:

Loki boasts that no one can eat faster than he – and competes against Logi. Both fall upon the trough from opposite ends and meet in the middle; but Logi has devoured the meat, the bones and the wooden trough as well. Thjálfi, swift as few, races against the boy Hugi – and is left behind three times, ever further. Thor is offered a drinking-horn to empty; however mightily he draws, and though he tries three times, the level barely sinks. Then he is to lift the household cat from the floor – and for all his straining he raises only a single paw. And when the god demands to wrestle, Utgard-Loki gives him only an old woman, the nurse Elli – and she forces the thunder-god down onto one knee.

The great revelation

The next morning Utgard-Loki escorts his guests out of the stronghold – and only there, in the open, does he confess the truth. It had all been sjónhverfing, a deception of the senses, for he had feared Thor's strength more than he let show.

Logi was wild fire, which devours everything, even the wood. Hugi was thought – nothing runs faster. The horn's tip was joined to the open sea: Thor had drunk the world-ocean so low that ever since there are the tides. The cat was the Midgard Serpent itself, which encircles all the world – and Thor had all but heaved it out of the sea; the whole company had gone pale with terror. And Elli („age“) was old age, which in the end wrestles everyone down.

„And that seemed to me no less a wonder, when you drank from the horn and it went down so slowly … for I would never have believed it possible.“
— Utgard-Loki, after Snorri's Gylfaginning (sense after Brodeur 1916 / Simrock 1851, public domain)

When Thor raises his hammer to answer this mockery with a blow, Utgard-Loki and his whole stronghold have vanished: only an empty plain remains. The greatest defeats of the god were his greatest deeds – he simply could not see them for what they were.

What the story really says

Snorri tells the Utgard journey with visible delight, yet its core is deadly serious. Georges Dumézil read the five contests as an encounter with the great cosmic powers: fire, thought, the sea, the world-serpent and age. Against them even a god cannot win – and that is precisely the point. Thor does not fail out of weakness; he comes so close to fire, ocean and serpent that his opponents themselves grow afraid. The tale binds two Thor themes together: his enmity with the Midgard Serpent (which he raises here, and which will kill him at Ragnarök) and the truth that not even the strongest can wrestle down old age.

Read more with us

Thor (Donar) · Thjálfi & Röskva · The Midgard Serpent · The Giants · Loki.

Sources & literature

Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (Gylfaginning: Thor's journey to Utgard, Skrymir, the contests), c. 1220. German public-domain translation: Karl Simrock, Die Edda (1851). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).

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