Norse Mythology(23)

The gods came the next morning. “Kvasir,” they said. “He was last seen with you.”

“Yes,” said the dwarfs. “He came back with us, but when he realized that we are only dwarfs, and foolish and lacking in wisdom, he choked on his own knowledge. If only we had been able to ask him questions.”

“He died, you say?”

“Yes,” said Fjalar and Galar, and they gave the gods Kvasir’s bloodless body to take back to Asgard, for a god’s funeral and perhaps (because gods are not as others, and death is not always permanent for them) for a god’s eventual return.

Thus it was that the dwarfs had the mead of wisdom and poetry, and any person who wished to taste it needed to beg it from the dwarfs. But Galar and Fjalar gave the mead only to those they liked, and they liked nobody but themselves.

Still, there were those to whom they had obligations. The giant Gilling, for example, and his wife: the dwarfs invited them to come and visit their fortress, and one winter’s day they came.

“Let us go rowing in our boat,” the dwarfs told Gilling.

The giant’s weight made the boat ride low in the water, and the dwarfs rowed the boat onto the rocks just under the surface. Always before their boat had floated serenely above the rocks. Not this time. The boat crashed onto the rocks and overturned, throwing the giant into the sea.

“Swim back to the boat,” the brothers called to Gilling.

“I cannot swim,” he said, and that was the last thing he said, for a wave filled his open mouth with salt water, and his head hit the rocks, and in a moment he was lost to view.

Fjalar and Galar righted their boat and went home.

Gilling’s wife was waiting for them.

“Where is my husband?” she asked.

“Him?” said Galar. “Oh, he’s dead.”

“Drowned,” added Fjalar helpfully.

At this the giant’s wife wailed and sobbed as if each cry were being ripped from her soul. She called to her dead husband and swore she would love him always, and she cried and moaned and wept.

“Hush!” said Galar. “Your weeping and wailing hurts my ears. It’s very loud. I expect that’s because you’re a giant.”

But the giant’s wife simply wept the louder.

“Here,” said Fjalar. “Would it help if we showed you the place where your husband died?”

She sniffed, and nodded, and cried and wailed and keened for her husband, who would never come back to her.

“Stand just over there and we will point it out to you,” said Fjalar, showing her exactly where she should stand, that she should go through the great door and stand beneath the wall of the fortress. And he nodded to his brother, who scurried off up the steps to the wall above.

As Gilling’s wife walked through the door, Galar dropped a huge stone on her head, and she fell, her skull half crushed.

“Good job,” said Fjalar. “I was getting very tired of those dreadful noises.”

They pushed the woman’s lifeless body off the rocks and into the sea. The fingers of the gray waves dragged her body away from them, and Gilling’s wife and Gilling were reunited in death.

The dwarfs shrugged, and believed themselves to be extremely clever in their fortress by the sea.

They drank the mead of poetry each night, and declaimed great and beautiful verses to each other, made mighty sagas about the death of Gilling and Gilling’s wife, which they declaimed from the rooftop of their fortress, and eventually each night they slept, insensible, and woke where they had sat down or fallen the night before.

One day they woke as usual, but they did not wake in their fortress.

They woke on the floor of their boat, and a giant whom they did not recognize was rowing it into the waves. The sky was dark with storm clouds and the sea was black. The waves were high and rough, and the salt water splashed over the side of the dwarfs’ boat, soaking them.

“Who are you?” asked the dwarfs.

“I am Suttung,” said the giant. “I heard you were bragging to the wind and the waves and the world about having killed my father and mother.”

“Ah,” said Galar. “Does that explain why you have tied us up?”

“It does,” said Suttung.

“Perhaps you are taking us to a glorious place,” said Fjalar hopefully, “where you will untie us, and there we will feast and drink and laugh and become the best of friends.”

“I do not believe so,” said Suttung.

It was low tide. There were rocks jutting out above the water. They were the same rocks upon which at high tide the dwarfs’ boat had overturned, on which Gilling had drowned. Suttung picked up each of the dwarfs, took him from the bottom of the boat, and placed him on the rocks.

“These rocks will be covered by the sea at high tide,” said Fjalar. “Our hands are tied behind our backs. We cannot swim. If you leave us here, we will undoubtedly drown.”

“That is certainly the intention,” said Suttung. He smiled then, for the first time. “And as you drown I shall sit in this, your boat, and I shall watch the sea take you both. Then I shall return home to Jotunheim, and I will tell my brother, Baugi, and my daughter, Gunnlod, how you died, and we will be satisfied that my mother and my father were appropriately avenged.”

The sea began to rise. It covered the dwarfs’ feet, and then it came up to their navels. Soon enough the dwarfs’ beards were floating in the foam and there was panic in their eyes.