Play it straight. That is the only way this one works, and it is how the poem does it: nobody in Þrymskviða winks at the audience, nobody makes a joke, and the funniest twenty-nine stanzas in Old Norse are delivered entirely deadpan by characters who are having the worst week of their lives.
Missing
Thor woke up and felt for the hammer and it was not there. The poem's first image is the strongest god in the world shaking with rage in bed, groping in the straw, and then going straight to Loki — not because Loki is trustworthy but because this is the sort of problem Loki solves.
They went to Freyja and borrowed her feather cloak, and Loki flew out of Asgard with the feathers roaring.
He found Þrym, lord of giants, sitting on a burial mound doing exactly what a wealthy man does on a quiet afternoon: plaiting gold collars for his hounds and combing out his horses' manes. Yes, he said, he had taken it. It was buried eight leagues under the earth, and nobody was getting it back — unless they brought him Freyja as his wife.
The proposal, and the refusal
Loki flew home and delivered the terms. Freyja's answer shook the halls of the gods, and the necklace Brísingamen burst off her neck with the force of her snorting. She would be, she said, the most man-mad woman alive if she went to Jötunheim with him.
So the gods held an assembly, and every one of them argued, and it was Heimdall — the watchman, who in this poem is credited with foresight like the Vanir — who proposed the solution. Put the linen headdress on Thor. Hang Brísingamen on him. Let keys jingle at his belt, put a woman's dress down to his knees, and set gems on his chest and a neat cap on his head.
Thor's objection is the pivot of the whole poem, and it is not vanity. He says the gods will call him argr — a word that meant unmanly, penetrable, contemptible, and was one of a very short list of insults that Icelandic law entitled a man to kill over. This is not embarrassment about a frock. It is a legal and social annihilation.
Loki's counter is one sentence: be quiet, because if you do not go, the giants will be living in Asgard. And so Thor was dressed, and Loki said he would come along as the bridesmaid, and the two of them drove out with the goats tearing up the mountainside and fire going before them.
The wedding feast
Þrym gave the order to strew the benches: Freyja was coming, and he ran through his own inventory of wealth — gold-horned cattle, black oxen, treasure, jewels — and concluded that the only thing he still lacked was her.
They sat down to eat. And the bride ate an entire ox, eight whole salmon, every one of the delicacies set aside for the women, and drank three casks of mead.
Þrym, staring, said aloud that he had never seen a bride take bigger bites, or a woman drink more mead. The bridesmaid, quick as anything, explained that Freyja had eaten nothing for eight nights, so violent was her longing for Jötunheim.
He bent down under the veil to kiss her and jumped the length of the hall. Why, he asked, are Freyja's eyes so terrible? Fire seems to be burning out of them.
Eight nights, said the bridesmaid, without sleep. So violent was her longing.
Laid in the bride's lap
Then Þrym's sister — an unlucky old woman who has three lines and no name — came up and asked the bride for a gift, the red-gold rings off her hands, in exchange for her friendship.
And Þrym gave the order that made the whole scheme work: fetch Mjölnir, put it across the girl's knees, and let the two of them be consecrated together under the name of Vár, who witnesses what a man and a woman promise each other.
The poem says Thor's heart laughed in his breast when he saw it. He killed Þrym first, then the whole line of giants, and the old sister who had asked for rings got a hammer-blow instead of coins, and shillings' worth of hammer instead of gold.
Why it is not in the Prose Edda, and how old it is
Þrymskviða survives in exactly one place: the Codex Regius manuscript of the Poetic Edda, written down in Iceland around 1270. Snorri Sturluson, who tells almost every other Thor story we have, never mentions this one. That silence is genuinely odd and has fed the argument about the poem's date.
For a long time it was assumed to be one of the oldest eddic poems — simple metre, folktale shape, a god behaving in a way no Christian author would invent. Since the mid-twentieth century a serious body of opinion has argued the opposite: that its language and phrasing borrow from other eddic poems rather than the reverse, that its comic control is literary rather than traditional, and that it may be a thirteenth-century composition — with a few scholars going as far as suggesting Snorri's own circle, or Snorri himself, which would explain why he does not quote it.
There is no consensus. What can be said is that a poem this confident about the comedy of a god in a dress is doing something deliberate, and that the deliberateness cuts both ways as evidence.
The hammer in the lap was a real gesture
The detail that undoes Þrym is not invented for the plot. Hallowing with Mjölnir appears elsewhere in the sources — Thor consecrates a funeral pyre with it, and he uses it to sanctify goat-bones back into living goats — and there is harder evidence outside the literature.
Several Danish and Swedish runestones of the Viking Age carry the formula asking Thor to hallow these runes, and some of them have a hammer carved beside the inscription. Hammer-shaped pendants turn up in graves across Scandinavia and the Danelaw in large numbers, in some places rising sharply in frequency exactly when cross pendants start appearing — which looks like a marked religious choice rather than an inherited habit. At least one surviving smith's mould was cut to turn out both emblems in a single casting, hammer and cross together — which reads either as a tradesman covering his market or as a genuinely Viking-Age attitude to belief, and is probably both at once.
So the poem's climax turns on a recognisable ritual: the object that sanctifies is placed on the bride, and the god who owns it is sitting in the dress.
What the comedy is about
Norse society was organised around a set of extremely rigid ideas about male honour, and the poem drives directly at them. The most masculine figure in the pantheon is put in women's clothing, given a woman's household keys, made to sit silent at his own wedding, and defended by a companion whose specialty is lying — and he only recovers his identity by killing everybody in the room.
Read one way, that is reassuring: the disguise is temporary, the violence restores the order, and everyone can laugh because nothing was ever really at risk. Read another, the poem is enjoying the discomfort a great deal more than it needs to, and it is Loki, permanently ambiguous about gender in this mythology, who is entirely at ease throughout and does all the thinking.
It is also a story about giants and gods trading in women, and about a goddess who says no and is not made to go. Freyja's refusal is total, and the assembly accepts it. That is not nothing.
It survived as a folk song
Unusually for eddic material, this story kept being sung after the manuscripts stopped being read. Icelandic rímur retold it in the late Middle Ages, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian ballads recorded from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century tell the same plot with the names worn down — Thor becomes Tord or Torkar of Havsgård, the hammer becomes a gold hammer, the giant becomes a troll — while keeping the theft, the disguise and the recovery.
That is roughly eight hundred years of continuous transmission in the mouths of people who had no idea they were singing about a god, and it is much stronger evidence for how popular the story was than any manuscript could be.
Where it turns up now
Comics and film have consistently avoided it, for obvious commercial reasons, though Marvel published a version in the 1980s and Thor has picked up the disguise plot occasionally since. Neil Gaiman retold it faithfully and let it be funny. In Scandinavia it remains a children's-book staple: the giant, the veil, the salmon and the trick are a good story at any age, and the argr problem quietly disappears from the retellings for readers under ten.
The hammer itself has had the largest afterlife of any object in the poem — as a pendant, a tattoo, a band logo, and since the 1970s a recognised religious symbol in several countries, with its own long and contested history as an emblem.
Details worth separating
Does Thor speak much in the poem? Barely. He has the objection about being called unmanly, and then he is silent for the entire wedding while Loki talks for him. The joke is built on the fact that he cannot open his mouth without ending the deception — the god of thunder rendered mute by a costume.
Who is Vár? A goddess named as the witness of oaths and agreements between men and women, invoked in the hallowing formula. She appears in a handful of lists and almost nowhere else, and this poem is her most substantial appearance in the surviving corpus.
Why can't the gods simply take the hammer by force? Because Thor is the gods' entire military capability, and without the hammer he cannot be sent. The poem's premise is that Asgard's defence is a single object, which is also the anxiety underlying the wall-building bargain and much else in the tradition.
Is Þrym known from anywhere else? Effectively no. He exists for this poem. Later Icelandic writers used the name for a giant occasionally, but there is no independent tradition about him — a giant king invented to be the butt of one joke, and remembered for a thousand years because of it.
More: the Norse tradition, Loki's own reckoning with the gods, and the other time Thor was made a fool of.