Kvasir and the Peace Pledge

“the Æsir and Vanir having met to put an end to the war which had long been carried on between them, a treaty of peace was agreed to and ratified by each party spitting into a jar. As a lasting sign of the amity which was thenceforward to subsist between the contending parties, the gods formed out of this spittle a being to whom they gave the name of Kvasir”

“On the other side, the Vanaland people sent the wisest man in their community, who was called Kvase.”

In Skáldskaparmál, as Bragi tells Ægir, the Æsir and Vanir seal their peace by spitting into a jar. The gods make Kvasir out of it and give him such wisdom that no question can stump him. He travels the world teaching, until the dwarfs Fjalar and Galar kill him and mix his blood with honey. That drink, the mead of poetry, is the one Suttungr later guards.

Ynglinga saga gives Kvasir a different origin. There he is the wisest of the Vanaland people and goes to the Æsir as a hostage in the exchange, so no vessel is mentioned. The two accounts are not reconciled in the sources.

Kvasir is a being in both tellings. He is not a place, a well or a spring in either.

The 1906 edition’s glossary says the word kvasir seems to have been used for a drinking bout, and suggests that Kvasir, like the name Óðr, may be a personification of poetry. That is a nineteenth-century reading and the sources do not say it.

The shared pledge and the stolen mead are separate stories joined in Skáldskaparmál. The mead’s later keeping is told in Hnitbjörg. The war that the pledge ended is told in The Æsir–Vanir War.