who destroys the moon.
The Iron Wood was outside the walls of Asgard, outside the meadow of Midgard, a dark place, a devilish place, inhabited by things that were part-beast and part-human, or even part-god, or part-demon. The old one in the poem is Angurboda, Angrboða, bringer of anguish, a giant with a fierce face, a pelt of wolf-hair, clawed hands and feet, and sharp teeth. Loki played with her, rippling like flame over and in her body, pleasuring her against her will, clutching and clasping and escaping, invading and ungraspable. They spoke to each other in snarls and hissings. Sigyn would not have known this ferocious Loki or recognised his triumphant howl as his seed went in. Did he foresee the shapes of his children? One was a wolf-cub, armed already with an array of sharp teeth and a dark throat behind them. One was a supple snake, with a crown of fleshy feelers and teeth sharp as her brother’s, though fine as needles. She was dull gold with blood-red flickering over her scales as she stretched and coiled.
The third was a woman, or a giantess, or a goddess. She was a strange colour, or colours. Her form was uncompromising, straight-spined, with long legs, strong, capable hands, firm feet. Her face was, there was no other way of putting it, severe. She had carved cheeks and a wide, unsmiling mouth, inside which were strong sharp teeth, wolfish teeth, teeth for ripping. Her nose was fine and her brows were dusky, like smoke, like the lower world’s kenning for ‘forest’, seaweed of the hills. Her eye-sockets went back and back. Inside their caverns were unblinking dark, dark eyes, like pools of tar, or wells where no light was reflected. But the colour. Half of her was black, and half of her was blue. Half of her, those who saw her also reported, was living flesh, and half was dead. Sometimes the line between the black and the blue split her cleanly, running from the crown of her black head, down the long nose, the chin, the breastbone, the sex, to the space between the feet. But sometimes the black and the blue floated on and in each other. They were beautiful, like the last blue of the sky meeting the dark of the coming night. They were hideous, the colour of bruises on battered or moribund flesh. She slept naked, coiled and curled with her terrible kin, scales, fur, snout, fangs, lids over glaring eyes. They emitted a raucous hissing and purring. They delighted Loki. He fed them and watched them grow. Who knew what they might do? They grew, and grew.
Odin sat on his throne, Hlidskialf, holding his spear, Gungnir, surveying Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim and Ironwood. Two black ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), told him what they had seen during their flight. He turned his fierce face towards Ironwood.
Loki was, in the beginning, in the days when the Gap was flooded by Ymir’s pouring blood, the foster brother of Odin. They had sworn blood-brotherhood, and ridden in the same boat over the blood. Now Odin imposed order, and Loki smiled at disorder. The gods knew that the three monsters were dangerous and would be more dangerous. Odin sent out a force to fetch them, Hermodur the bright, and the god of the hunt, Tyr. They crossed the bright bridge, Bifröst, which joins Asgard to other worlds, crossed the river Ifing and came to where Loki was, in the dark land of the Hrimthurses. They seized the three and carried them back to the steps of Hlidskialf. The wolf yawned. The snake coiled herself into a knot. Hel stood rigid, blue-black, staring.
Odin acted. He threw two of the three out into space. The small snake gleamed dully in the air, and fell, and flew, and fell, and came down on the surface of the bright-black ocean that surrounded Midgard. She stretched, and swam for a time, rising and falling on the waves. Then she sank, or plunged, and was out of sight. The gods applauded.
Odin took Hel and flung her towards Niflheim, the dark land of mists and cold. She remained rigid, like an arrow from a bow, a sharp-nosed missile, on and on, down and down, nine days falling through sunlight, moonlight and starlight, past the racing chariots of the Sun and the Moon, past the tips of firs and past their roots, into and through the lightless bogs and swamps of Niflheim, across the cold torrent of Giöll and into Helheim, where she was to rule over those human dead who were not fortunate enough to die in battle, a land of shadows. The bridge over Giöll was gold, and the perimeter fence of Hel was iron, high and impassable. Inside the dark hall a throne waited for the bruised, livid being, the goddess, the monstrous child, and a crown lay on a black cushion, made of white gold, and moonstones, pearls like congealed tears and crystals, like frost. When she took up the crown, and the wand which lay beside it, the dead began to flood into her hall like whispering bats, innumerable, insubstantial. She welcomed them, unsmiling. They wheeled about her, whistling weakly, and she had dishes brought, with the ghosts of fruits and flesh, and beakers, inside which were the ghosts of mead and wine, with ghostly bubbles at the rim.
And the wolf? Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind. Humans heard the howling in the dark, an urgent music, a gleeful reciprocal chorus; the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head. There, too, are the bristling coat, the snout, the teeth, the blood. Firelight, and the light of the full moon, are reflected in inhuman eyes, glittering in the dark, specks of brightness in deep shadows. Humans respect wolves, the closeness and warmth of the pack, the ingenuity of the chase, the calling and growling, messages from the throat. Odin in Asgard had two tamed cubs at his feet, to which he threw the meat he did not eat. Wolves are free and monstrous: wolves are the forebears of dogs, which are creatures of the hearth and hunt, who have replaced the pack leader with a human one. Humans and gods made their own packs to hunt down and kill the wolf packs. Maybe cubs were taken from a lair when the parents had been slaughtered, and fed on milk and meat, and brought in from the wild. Maybe a solitary cub sat on its haunches at the edge of a clearing and howled, and was taken in by a woman, and fed and tamed. They point their snouts at the moon, and howl.
The god, Tyr, was a hunter and a fighter. He wore a wolfskin as a cloak; the great dead head lolled above his bearded face, hairy, blind and snarling. When Odin hesitated over how to dispose of the Fenris-cub, Tyr said he would take it, and feed it, and tame it perhaps, so it could hunt with him. Fenris growled in his throat and laid back his ears. The thin child in wartime wondered why omniscient Odin did not simply destroy the wolf and the snake, who were clearly venomous and appalling, and full of animosity towards the Ases. But he clearly could not do this – he was constrained by some other power, which gave shape to the story that held him. The story decided that the destroyers must survive. All the gods could do was inhibit the monsters, disable them. Tyr believed he knew the wolf, because he knew the wild. He took him to the woods of Midgard, fed him, and ran with him through the trees. They played together: when the beast was bigger, they would hunt together.
The wolf grew. Like his father he was inordinate. His voice deepened and opened out – he had a gamut of growls, chuckling barks, full-throated howls which could be heard, louder and louder, in faraway Asgard. Tyr heard it as the music of the wild. He was the only one. The playful cub became a lolloping youngling the size of a boar, and growing every day. He killed for pleasure, which Tyr put down to juvenile playfulness. He left bleeding hares in the snow, and gutted fawns in the forest. He grew to the size of an ass, a colt, and then a young bull. Midgard resounded to his racket, and his silences were ominous, because when he was silent, he was stalking, and no one – no god – knew what he would take it into his head to stalk next. Tyr brought him flanks of pork, and dead geese, to placate him, to have his confidence. Fenris swallowed, and howled, and killed.
The gods decided to tie up the wolf. The words men used to describe the gods were the words they used for fetters or bonds, things which held the world together, within bounds, preventing the breakout of chaos and disorder. Odin ruled with a spear, wrought from a branch torn from Yggdrasil, a spear carved with the runes of justice, a spear which had brought war into the world, to solve disputes, a spear which finished off warriors and was their way into Valhalla and eternal roast pork, honey and chess-play. The gods controlled. The wolf was the raging son of the incomprehensible and unpredictable Loki, who mocked their solemnities and said they would come to no good end. But something in their sense of the order of things led them to decide merely to restrict and torture the great beast, not to try to slay him. To do this they needed guile, they needed to trick him into co-operating, they needed him to submit.