Geirröðr and Agnarr: A Drink Between the Fires

“The king ordered him to be tortured to make him confess, and to be set between two fires; and there he sat for eight nights. King Geirröd had a son ten years old, whom he named Agnar, after his brother. Agnar went to Grimnir and gave him a full horn to drink from, saying that the king did wrong in causing him to be tortured, though innocent. Grimnir drank from it.”

2. Eight nights have I sat between fires here, and to me no one food has offered, save only Agnar, the son of Geirröd, who alone shall rule over the land of Goths.

3. Be thou blessed, Agnar! as blessed as the god of men bids thee to be. For one draught thou never shalt get better recompense.

Thorpe’s prose introduction to Grímnismál tells of two sons of King Hraudung, Agnarr and Geirröðr, who are blown out to sea and winter with a cottager. Geirröðr, the younger, is helped home by the cottager, pushes his brother’s boat out to sea and becomes king. Odin and Frigg, sitting in Hliðskjálf, wager over him: Odin says his foster-son is a king, and Frigg says he is so inhospitable that he tortures guests when too many come. She sends her maid Fulla to warn him of a sorcerer, and Geirröðr has the stranger in the blue cloak, who gives the name Grímnir, seized and set between two fires.

The king’s young son Agnarr, named for his uncle, brings the stranger a horn. In stanzas 2 and 3 Grímnir says that the boy alone will rule the land of the Goths. In stanzas 51 to 54 he calls the king drunk, says his friends mislead him and that his life has run out, and names himself Odin. Geirröðr rises with his sword half drawn, stumbles, and is pierced by it. Agnarr is king for a long time after.

This King Geirröðr is a human ruler, a foster-son of Odin in Thorpe’s prose, and is not the giant Geirröðr whom Thor visits, who appears in the entry on Gríðr: The Giantess Who Equipped Thor. The two share a name, and Thorpe’s glossary glosses it as “spear-red”.

The prose turns on hospitality: the king who will not feed a stranger loses everything, and the boy who gives him a drink gains a kingdom. Two men named Agnarr appear in the frame, the elder brother and the king’s son named after him; the Agnarr of stanza 2 is the son.