There was a real poet called Bragi. Bragi Boddason inn gamli — Bragi the Old — worked in Norway and Sweden in the first half of the ninth century, and his Ragnarsdrápa, a poem describing scenes painted on a shield given to him by a ruler, is the oldest skaldic verse that survives in any quantity. Snorri quotes him constantly and treats him as the beginning of the tradition.
There is also a god called Bragi, described in Gylfaginning as renowned for wisdom and above all for eloquence and command of language, most skilled in poetry, from whom poetry is called brag.
Whether the god is a real deity who happens to share the name with a famous poet, or a deified poet, or a poet named after an existing god, is genuinely unresolved — and the last of those is at least as likely as the second.
The linguistic problem underneath
Old Norse has a common noun bragr meaning poetry, and also meaning "the best" or "the foremost" of something — bragr kvenna, the best of women. The god's name may simply be that noun personified.
But there is a competing derivation. Some scholars connect the name to Old English brego, "chief" or "ruler," and to a wider Germanic root for a prince. On that reading Bragi is "the lord," and the poetry association is secondary.
And there is a third possibility that keeps the argument alive: that a ninth-century skald acquired a byname meaning "poetry" or "the foremost," was remembered as the founder of the art, and was gradually promoted into the pantheon by later poets who needed a patron for their profession. Nothing in the sources rules it out. There is no Bragi place-name, no cult evidence and no personal-name usage.
Where he appears
His literary presence is real but narrow, and he is almost always doing the same thing: speaking well, in a hall, on behalf of the household.
- Grímnismál names him best of skalds among the Æsir, in a stanza pairing superlatives — best god, best horse, best ship, best hound.
- Lokasenna opens with Bragi. When Loki arrives at Ægir's feast uninvited and demands a seat, Bragi is the one who says he will never get one from the gods. Loki calls him bench-ornament — bekkskrautuðr — and the wariest of fighting, and Bragi offers a horse, a sword and a ring by way of compensation to avoid a quarrel, then threatens to twist his head off, then is restrained by his wife Iðunn. Odin eventually intervenes. It is not a heroic showing, and the poem clearly finds a poet's courage a comic subject.
- Eiríksmál, composed around 954 for the dead Eiríkr Blóðøx, has Odin wake in Valhalla and send Bragi to the door to see who is arriving. Bragi speaks the greeting. A tenth-century memorial poem gives him the role of the hall's spokesman, which is the strongest early evidence that he was thought of as a god rather than as a remembered author.
- Sigrdrífumál says runes were cut on Bragi's tongue — one of a list of surfaces on which runes were carved, including Sleipnir's teeth, a bear's paw and a wolf's claws.
The cup you swore on
The strongest link between Bragi and actual practice is a drinking ritual. Ynglinga saga and several sagas describe the bragarfull — variously spelled bragafull — a cup drunk at funeral feasts and formal gatherings before the heir took his father's seat, and at which men made public vows.
The trouble is that the name is ambiguous in exactly the same way the god's is. Bragarfull can be read as "the cup of Bragi," or as "the best cup," or as "the cup of the vow." Medieval scribes were already uncertain, and the manuscripts vary between forms. It is either a rite named after the god of eloquence, or a rite whose name accidentally resembles his — and the choice determines whether Bragi had any cultic existence at all.
His household
He is called a son of Odin in Skáldskaparmál, though he is absent from several lists of Odin's sons, and his mother is Gunnlöð in one late genealogy — which would make the god of poetry the son of the giantess who guarded the mead of poetry, an elegant arrangement that appears too late in the tradition to be trusted. He is married to Iðunn, keeper of the apples. See the family tree for how loosely he attaches to the rest.
What survives of the name in Scandinavia
Bragi has almost no modern presence — no films, no games of note. He survives instead as vocabulary: Swedish and Norwegian brag and the Icelandic bragur for a poem or verse-form, and the Bragi Prize awarded annually for Norwegian literature since 1992. A god of eloquence who ends as the name of a book award is not the worst possible afterlife.
For the substance that makes poets in the first place, see Kvasir and the mead of poetry, and for how Icelandic poets thought about their own craft, the Norse tradition overview.
If Bragi is the god of poetry, why does Odin bring the mead?
They are two separate answers to the same question and the corpus never joins them. Odin's theft of the mead is an origin story explaining where poetic ability comes from — a substance, acquired by a god, dispensed to those he favours. Bragi is a personification of the finished art. One accounts for inspiration, the other for craft, and Snorri, who preserves both, shows no sign of finding the duplication awkward. It is a good example of how a mythology assembled from many centuries of poetry ends up with redundant machinery.
Does anything of Bragi Boddason's poetry actually survive?
About twenty stanzas, nearly all preserved because Snorri quoted them to illustrate kennings. They describe scenes from a decorated shield: Thor's fishing expedition, the killing of Hamðir and Sörli, the eternal battle of the Hjaðningar, and Gefjun ploughing Zealand out of Sweden. That last stanza is the earliest surviving reference to Gefjon and predates Snorri by three and a half centuries. Whatever we conclude about the god, the poet was demonstrably real and his verse is the oldest window we have onto Norse myth.