Yggdrasil · Giants and Dwarves

Hymir’s Hall: A Cauldron Worth a Dangerous Visit

The home of the giant Hymir in Hymiskviða, where Thor and Týr go to fetch a cauldron for Ægir’s feast.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Thorpe’s translation

5. There dwells eastward of Elivagar the all-wise Hymir, at heaven’s end. My sire, fierce of mood, a kettle owns, a capacious cauldron, a rast in depth.

7. Thor stalled his goats, splendid of horn, then turned him to the hall that Hymir owned. The son his granddam found to him most loathful; heads she had nine hundred.

34. Then Modi’s father by the brim grasped it, and trod through the dwelling’s floor. Sif’s consort lifted the kettle on his head, while about his heels its rings jingled.

39. In his strength exulting he to the gods’ council came, and had the kettle, which Hymir had possessed, out of which every god shall beer with Oegir drink at every harvest-tide.

  • Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Hymiskviða (Thorpe: The Lay of Hymir), stanzas 5, 7, 34 and 39 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
Myth and literature

What the sources say

Hymiskviða opens with the gods short of kettles for brewing at Ægir’s. Týr says that his father Hymir, east of the Élivágar at heaven’s end, owns a huge cauldron, and he and Thor drive from Ásgarðr to fetch it. Thor leaves his goats outside. Inside they meet Hymir’s many-headed grandmother and a bright, kindly woman, who hides them under kettles; neither is named.

Hymir arrives with a frozen beard and a glance that splits a pillar and a beam, though one kettle survives. After Thor eats two oxen they row out to sea, Thor hooks the world serpent, and Hymir will not call his guest strong until he breaks a cup. Thor shatters it only on Hymir’s head, on the woman’s advice, then carries off the cauldron and kills the many-headed host that follows. The poem gives no town or hall name.

Myth and literature · Context

Names and background

Hymir is a giant, called a Jotun in Thorpe’s translation; the meaning of his name is not settled here. The poem calls Týr his son (stanzas 5 and 11), while Skáldskaparmál counts “son of Odin” among the names that can stand for Týr, so the sources disagree about Týr’s father. In stanza 35 Thorpe’s “Odin’s son” is Thor.

Snorri tells a different story with a giant of almost the same name. In Gylfaginning, Anderson’s translation has Thor rowing out to fish for the serpent with a giant called Hymer, with no cauldron and no Týr. A note in that translation says the Younger Edda writes the name Ymer where the Elder Edda has Hymer. The Élivágar, east of which Hymir is said to live, have their own entry on this site.

Historical evidence

Where the sources attest it

Hymir’s household is described only in Hymiskviða, an Elder Edda poem, in stanzas 5 to 39 of Thorpe’s numbering. Snorri’s Gylfaginning has a separate account of Thor fishing with a giant of the same name, without the cauldron. The poem is the only text cited here that places Hymir east of the Élivágar. No archaeological or pictorial evidence for the hall or the cauldron is cited in this entry.