The Catch and the Stone Giant
Thor could not forget. Útgarða-Loki had revealed that the cat was Jörmungandr, that Thor had lifted the Midgard Serpent, almost. It was that word that gnawed at him. Almost. Thor did not have almost in his vocabulary, and he decided to do the whole thing over, but this time for real, without sorcery and bloody illusions.
He sought out the giant Hymir, known as the best fisherman in all the worlds and moreover the only one who owned a boat big enough to row out where it was deep, truly deep, where Jörmungandr lay coiling at the bottom of the ocean. Hymir was not pleased by the visit. Thor turned up uninvited, as was his habit, and sat down at Hymir's table and ate enough for ten men at supper. Two of Hymir's three oxen vanished into Thor's stomach that evening. Hymir sat counting his shrinking provisions with every bite and said nothing, but his eyes said quite a lot.
When Thor explained that he intended to fish the next morning Hymir snorted. What was the thunder god planning to use as bait? Thor walked out to Hymir's field where the great black oxen grazed, grabbed the largest bull Himinbrjótr by the horns, twisted off its head with his bare hands in a single motion, and the blood sprayed from the neck stump in a pulsing jet. Hymir opened his mouth, closed it, and said nothing.
They rowed out at dawn. Hymir wanted to stop at his usual fishing spot, but Thor told him to row on. Hymir wanted to stop again, farther out, at the deep reef where the big flatfish lay. Thor said: keep going. Hymir pulled in the oars and said they were now above Jörmungandr and no sane man lingered here, and that if Thor pulled up the serpent they would both die. Thor took the oars from his hands and rowed on.
He cast the hook with the ox-head as bait. The line sank. It went quiet. The sea was flat and still, and Hymir sat trembling in the bow with his hands between his knees.
Something bit. The line cut into the water with a force that dragged the whole boat forward, and Thor nearly lost his grip. He braced. His whole body tensed, his feet pushed through the bottom of the boat and down to the seabed, and he stood there with his feet in the sand beneath the ocean and pulled. The sea boiled. Waves crashed over the gunwale. And up from the deep came a head so vast it filled the horizon.
Jörmungandr. The Midgard Serpent. The eyes were yellow as amber and each one as large as a shield, and the venom dripped from its jaws in streams that hissed when they hit the water's surface. The stench of venom made the air burn in your lungs and the tears stream. They stared at each other, the god and the serpent, and in that gaze lay all of Ragnarök compressed into a single moment. Everything that was to come, everything that was fated, everything was pressed together in the space between Thor's last remaining scream and the serpent's gaping mouth.
Thor reached for Mjolnir. In that instant Hymir took his knife. Hymir, who had pissed and shat himself from sheer terror and sat in his own muck with snot and tears in his beard, took the knife with shaking hands and cut the line. The serpent sank. The head vanished beneath the surface with a sucking pull that dragged half the sea with it, and the last thing Thor saw was the yellow eyes, staring upward through the water, before the darkness swallowed them.
Thor turned on Hymir and struck him with his bare fist, and that was enough. The giant flew overboard, hit the water, and vanished beneath the surface. Then the thunder god sat alone in the boat, on a sea that was slowly settling back to calm, and his hands shook with fury and with something else that he would never admit was fear. He had had the serpent. He had had it on the hook. And someone else had cut away his chance.
Thor rowed home, went ashore, and walked toward Hymir's hall. Hymir had survived, as giants do, and sat by his fire, wet and furious. There was a goblet in Hymir's hall that no one had been able to break, the strongest vessel in all the worlds, and the story of how Thor finally shattered it against Hymir's own skull, the hardest thing in the room, and won a brewing kettle so large it had to be carried on his shoulders like a house, that story belongs to another evening.
He came home to Asgard with a piece of whetstone in his skull, but that is the next story. The giant Hrungnir had challenged Odin to a horse race. Gullfaxi against Sleipnir, the giant's stallion against the god's eight-legged, and Sleipnir won of course, because nothing beat Sleipnir, but Hrungnir had built up such speed he hurled himself through Asgard's gates before the gods could shut them, and suddenly a giant sat at their table drinking their mead.
Hrungnir got drunk. And Hrungnir drunk was a different thing from Hrungnir sober. He boasted he would lift Valhöll and carry it to Jötunheim. He said he would kill every god except Freyja and Sif, whom he intended to keep for himself. He drank from Thor's own cups, and the gods sat listening, and none of them dared speak up, because Hrungnir was the strongest giant alive and his body was stone, hard as the mountain he came from.
The gods called for Thor, as they always did when things needed solving with violence. They met at Grjótúnagarðar, the ground that lay between the gods' land and the giants'. Hrungnir had a head of stone and a heart of stone, three-pointed and sharp, and a shield of stone, and he carried a whetstone the size of a millwheel. The giants had built a helper for him out of clay, Mökkurkálfi, who was nine leagues high and three leagues wide, and he had a mare's heart, because they could not find anything better, and when Mökkurkálfi saw Thor coming he pissed himself.
Þjálfi ran ahead and shouted to Hrungnir: "You have positioned yourself wrong! Thor is coming from below, underground! He is digging his way!" Hrungnir, who was stupid enough to listen, placed his stone shield under his feet instead of in front of him. The instant he looked down Thor threw Mjolnir.
The hammer and the whetstone met in the air with a crack that was heard in all nine worlds. Mjolnir crushed Hrungnir's skull. The stone skull split like a pot and the giant fell like a mountain. The whetstone went through Thor's forehead and stuck, half the stone protruding from his skull like a horn, and Thor fell with the giant on top of him. One of Hrungnir's legs landed across Thor's neck, and Thor could not get free.
None of the gods could lift the leg. Not Odin, not Tyr, not Freyr, not Heimdallr, none of them. They pulled and strained and could not budge it. Then Thor's son Magni came along, three nights old, three bloody nights old, walked up to the dead giant, took the leg, and lifted it as though it were a stick. "Shame I did not come sooner," he said, and his voice was steady as stone. "I would have killed the giant with my fists." Thor lay there, proud and furious and with a piece of whetstone in his skull that could never be removed. It is said you should not throw whetstones near Thor even today, because the one inside him shifts about.
It was not the only time Thor had to swallow his pride. On another occasion, alone and heading home from the east after killing trolls as he did, he came to a sound too deep to wade. On the far side stood a man with a skiff, old and crooked, with a beard like a bundle of twigs. 'Ferryman!' Thor shouted. 'Take me across!' The man, who called himself Hárbard, leaned on his oar and regarded him with a single eye. 'Who are you, standing there smelling of goat?' he said.
'I am Thor,' said Thor, who was not accustomed to people asking. 'Odin's son. The strongest of all the gods. Take me across.' Hárbard did not move. 'Odin's son, is that so,' he said. 'Your mother is dead, I hear. And you look like a vagrant. Your clothes hang like a beggar's. Have you even got a home to go to?'
Thor, who could have thrown Mjolnir across the sound and killed the man without shifting his weight, stood there and turned red. 'I have killed giants,' he said. 'Hrungnir. Þjazi. Whole families of trolls in the east.' Hárbard yawned. 'While you were killing trolls,' he said, 'I was fucking their wives. Five sisters on the isle of Allgrœn. Wild women, soft thighs. What do you have to show for yourself, Thor? Blood and sweat?'
Thor listed his feats. Hárbard listed his women. Thor told of crushing the skulls of mountain giants. Hárbard told of fucking their daughters afterward. It went back and forth like a fight without fists, and Thor was losing, because Thor had a weapon and Hárbard had words, and words were not Thor's strongest suit.
'You are strong,' Hárbard conceded at last. 'Strong as an ox and just as stupid. But courage? That you lack. You hid inside a glove in Jötunheim, Thor. You lay trembling in the dark like a terrified child. Odin gets the fallen noblemen. You get the thralls. You with your hammer and your goatskin. A whole day you spent killing trolls while real men were fucking their women.' Thor gripped Mjolnir and his eyes burned. 'Say that again, you...' But Hárbard had already turned his back and was rowing away, and his laughter echoed across the water like crows cawing.
Thor had to walk around. It took him a full day, and he cursed the entire way, and they say the weather was unusually foul that day across all of Midgard. He never learned that the ferryman was his own father. Odin, standing on the far shore, mocking him, testing him, and above all: entertaining himself royally at his eldest son's expense.
Thor went home with giant-blood on his clothes and stone in his forehead, and the gods feasted as they always feasted, loudly and long, and they drank for Thor and for Magni and for the dead Hrungnir, because you can respect an enemy you have killed. But during the feast a shadow circled above Asgard, a bird with wings as wide as sails, and that shadow was about to descend.