A woman puts on mail and walks into the fortress of the people who killed her father, alone, to fight all of them. What she gets instead is a negotiation — and the settlement she accepts is so strange, and so funny, that it has overshadowed everything else about her ever since. It should not. This is a legal proceeding, conducted under duress, and both parties know it.
Why she came armed
Her father was Þjazi, a giant who lived in a hall in the mountains, and he had died in the gods' own courtyard.
The short version of how: he had got hold of Iðunn and her apples by leaning on Loki, the gods had begun to grey and stiffen without them, and Loki — given the usual choice between fixing it and being killed — borrowed Freyja's falcon skin, went to the mountain hall, turned Iðunn into something small enough to carry, and flew. Þjazi came after him in eagle shape. The gods had shavings heaped along the wall of the stronghold and lit them as the falcon came in low; the eagle, flying too fast to stop, went through the flames, and they finished him on the ground.
That was a killing, and killings in Norse law create obligations. Skaði came to collect.
She arrived in helmet and mail with her weapons, intending to take vengeance in person. Vengeance and compensation are the two available routes and the injured party chooses. The gods offered her the second, and she was willing to hear the terms.
Two clauses, both of them jokes
The settlement had two clauses, and both of them are jokes played on a grieving woman by the people who owed her.
First: a husband. She could take any one of the gods as her man. She would choose him by his feet, and she would see nothing of him but his feet.
They lined up behind a screen. She looked along the row, picked out the finest pair of feet she had ever seen, and said she would have that one — reasoning aloud that there could hardly be anything ugly about Baldr.
It was Njörðr, of Nóatún, the sea-god, an entirely respectable choice and not remotely the one she was making. Feet that beautiful, on reflection, are exactly what you would expect on a man who spends his life on wet decks.
Second: laughter. She required that they make her laugh, which she said flatly she did not think anyone could do, given what she was there about.
Loki solved it. He took a cord, tied one end round the beard of a nanny-goat and the other end round his own testicles, and the two of them hauled each other back and forth, both shrieking. Then he let go and dropped into Skaði's lap, and she laughed, and the settlement was complete.
Odin added something to the terms that nobody had asked for. He took Þjazi's eyes, threw them up into the sky, and made two stars of them, so that her father would be visible from anywhere in the world for as long as there was a sky. It is the one gesture in the whole transaction with any grace in it.
The marriage nobody could have made work
They were to live nine nights in her country and then nine nights in his, alternating.
Her hall, Þrymheim, sits in the mountains — Grímnismál names it as the sixth of the divine dwellings, the place where Þjazi lived and where his daughter lives now. Nóatún is at the water's edge, in the traffic of harbours.
The verses they exchange are among the most quietly awful lines in Norse poetry, because they are not arguing. Each simply describes the other's home. He cannot bear the howling of wolves after the singing of swans. She cannot sleep for the racket of seabirds at the edge of the water, every morning, waking her.
They separated. She went back up into the mountains and lived the life the sources actually attach to her: hunting on skis with a bow, running down game in the snow. Her standing epithets are the ski-deity and the snowshoe-goddess, and they are much older and more specific than her marriage.
After the settlement
Skaði does not disappear from the corpus, and the two later appearances are worth knowing.
In Lokasenna, when Loki is insulting every god in Ægir's hall in turn, he tells Skaði — with no attempt at softening it — that he was foremost among those who put her father to death. Her reply is a curse rather than a comeback: from her sanctuaries and her lands, she says, cold counsel will always come to him. The prose passage appended to that poem then makes good on it. When the gods finally bind Loki, it is Skaði who fixes the venom-dripping serpent over his face, and Sigyn who sits beside him catching what falls.
The Ynglinga saga, meanwhile, has her leave Njörðr and marry Odin, bearing him many sons, one of whom — Sæmingr — is presented as the ancestor of the rulers of Norway. That is euhemerised dynastic bookkeeping written for a thirteenth-century audience with a king to flatter, not mythology, and it should be labelled as such.
The sources, and how much each carries
The full narrative — the armed arrival, the feet, the goat, the star-making, the nine-and-nine arrangement, the exchange about wolves and swans — is Snorri Sturluson's, spread across Gylfaginning and the Skáldskaparmál material on Þjazi. Nothing else tells it whole.
But the underlying events are attested independently, which is unusual and useful:
- Haustlöng, a skaldic poem by Þjóðólfr of Hvinir composed perhaps around 900, describes Þjazi's seizure of Iðunn and his death by fire in the gods' stronghold. It is three centuries older than Snorri and it means the feud is real tradition, not his invention.
- Grímnismál places Skaði in Þrymheim as her father's successor.
- Lokasenna assumes the killing, the grievance and the marriage without narrating any of them.
So: the death, the daughter, the mountain hall and the grudge are old. The comedy of the settlement rests on Snorri alone. A common error in popular retellings is to give the marriage as three nights in the mountains and nine by the sea; the text says nine and nine.
The argument about who she originally was
Two long-running questions, neither settled.
Her name and Scandinavia. The place-name element in Skáney and Scandinavia has been connected to her name since the nineteenth century — either she is named for the land or the land for her. The common noun skaði means harm or damage, which pulls in a different direction. Neither derivation can be proved and the toponymic argument in particular is circular in the usual way.
Whether she was originally male. Her name is grammatically masculine in form, and the functions attached to her — hunting, skiing, mountains, the bow — are elsewhere male functions in the Norse system. This has led to a genuine scholarly suggestion, associated with Georges Dumézil among others, that behind her lies an earlier male figure whose gender shifted. The evidence is a name-form and a set of activities, which is thin, and there is no text on either side. It belongs in the "possible, unproven" column.
A third observation is safer than either: she is one of very few figures in Norse myth who is a giant by birth and lives among the gods by right of a settlement rather than by marriage alone, and she keeps her own house, her own weapons, and her own grudge.
Points readers stumble over
Is the settlement fair? By Icelandic legal instinct, a settlement is fair if both parties accept it and it ends the feud, which this one does. What the terms disclose is the gods' attitude: they treat a woman's claim as an occasion for a party game. The story is funny and the joke is not on her — it is on them, and Loki has to injure himself to close it.
Why choose a husband at all? Compensation in Norse law could take the form of an alliance. Marrying the claimant into the offending household converts an enemy into a relative and makes further vengeance a family matter. The clause is legally orthodox; the blindfold is not.
Did she know it was not Baldr? The text gives her the reasoning out loud, so no. The joke depends on her guessing wrong, and it is a fair guess — the gods offered a lottery and she played it.
Does the goat scene mean anything beyond the obvious? Loki's willingness to injure and degrade himself to discharge a debt is a recurring pattern, and the sexual humiliation is of a piece with the accusations he attracts elsewhere. It also does something narratively precise: laughter ends mourning, and Norse settlement procedure needed a visible sign that the grievance was closed.
Why does she help bind him later, if he paid her price? Because the settlement covered her father's death, not everything he ever did. Lokasenna is a fresh offence, publicly given, and she answers it in kind.
Read on at Skaði herself, Njörðr, Iðunn and her apples, the giants as a kindred, and the insult-contest that follows it all at Loki's flyting. Wider context at the Norse hub and the Norse family tree.