38 giant master builder
Giant Master Builder The giant who tricked the gods into hiring him to build a new wall around Asgard that was intended to protect the gods from the giants. Snorri Sturluson tells the story in
Gylfaginning.
The old wall had been destroyed in the war with the Vanir. This unnamed giant took the form of an ordinary builder and traveled to Asgard, his great stallion Svadilfari pulling a wagon. He told the gods he could complete the job for them in three seasons if they paid him by giving him the Sun and Moon and the fertility goddess, Freya. Mischief-maker Loki persuaded the gods to accept the offer under the condition that the builder complete the task in less than half a year. The giant accepted the new terms.
Once the builder started working, the gods discovered that he was a giant, aided by a giant stallion. They grew dismayed and fearful that they might indeed lose their goddess and the Sun and Moon in a very bad arrangement. Three days before the wall was completed, Loki, the shape-shifter, turned himself into a mare and lured the stallion away from the construction site, thereby spoiling the giant’ s plan.
Giants Giants play a central role in Norse mythology, mainly as the enemy of the gods but also as the race from which the gods most likely were offspring. The different roles that giants play in the surviving stories are so confusing that some experts suggest that in Norse religious beliefs, the giants were gods themselves or perhaps the gods were giants.
The proto-giant Ymir was the first being in the cosmos, according to 13th-century writer Snorri Sturluson’ s version of the Norse creation myth. Details from Snorri’ s Prose Edda tell how Ymir evolved from the heat and cold in the beginning times, and from the parts of his body were born the Hrimthurssar( rime-giants). At the same time that Ymir came into being, the first cow, Audhumla, formed out of the chaos. She licked at a salt block and uncovered Buri, whose son Bor mated with Bestla, one of the first giantesses. From these latter two, one a giant, came the first gods: Odin, Vili, and Ve. When these brothers killed Ymir, his blood caused a flood that killed all of the rime-giants but Bergilmir, and his wife, who survived to become the ancestors of all the giants.
This shared ancestry of gods and giants has caused much curiosity among modern scholars, though no answers to the puzzle exist in surviving records. Most commonly, the giants are interpreted as representing the wild forces of nature that threatened people living in northern climates more so than those in southern lands. The giants lived in mountains and often hurled huge boulders at one another. They loved darkness and often confronted the gods at night.
giantess A female giant in Norse mythology. Defeating a giantess brings extra power and stature to the gods of the myths. Giantesses are often the love interests of the Aesir. Thor frequently does battle with giantesses, worthy foes of even this mightiest of the gods. Loki assumes the shape of the giantess Thokk to deceive the Aesir when they seek his help in restoring Balder to life. Frey falls in love with and woos the giantess Gerda.
Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, has nine giantess mothers, which are the source of the strength he requires to sit by the gates of Hel( 2) and protect the land of the Aesir. According to the poem Hyndluljoth, these women sat at the edge of the world and gave their son the ice of the sea for his blood. They are Gialp, Greip, Eistla, Eyrgjafa, Ulfrum, Angeyja, Imth, Atla, and Jarnsaxa.
The names of giantesses occur frequently in the works in the Poetic Edda as kennings, or metaphors, as mothers of the gods, and for locations and objects in nature.
Gilling A giant killed along with his wife by the dwarfs Fjalar and Galar. After Fjalar and Galar kill the wise man Kvasir( 1) and use his blood to make the mead of poetry, the two dwarfs invite Gilling and his wife to visit. They ambush the pair, drowning Gilling and crushing his wife’ s head with a millstone.
Gilling and his wife were the parents of Suttung, who sought revenge for their death by threatening the dwarfs and taking the mead in exchange for their lives.
The story of the mead is told by Snorri Sturluson in Skaldsaparmal.( See also“ The Mead of Poetry” under Odin.)
Gimle A mountain, or a great hall, where the next generation of Norse gods will dwell after the destruction of the pantheon at the time of Ragnarok.
In the Voluspa, the first poem in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda, Gimle is described as a mountain on which stands a hall roofed in gold where the righteous will dwell in the new world that rises out of the destruction of the old world.