Norse poetry has a homicide at its origin, and the murder weapon was hospitality.
Skáldskaparmál tells it. The Æsir and the Vanir end their war by making a truce, and the ratification is physical: both sides spit into a vat. To keep the token of the treaty from being wasted, the gods make a man out of the spittle. He is called Kvasir, and he is so wise that no one can ask him a question he cannot answer. He travels widely, teaching.
Two dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar, invite him in and kill him. They drain his blood into two vats, Són and Boðn, and a kettle, Óðrerir, mix it with honey, and make mead. Anyone who drinks it becomes a poet or a scholar. When the gods ask what became of Kvasir, the dwarfs say he choked on his own wisdom, because there was no one there clever enough to question him.
That lie is the best joke in the Prose Edda and it is also, in its way, the point: knowledge unshared is fatal.
What happens to the mead
The dwarfs' luck does not hold. They drown a giant called Gillingr by capsizing a boat, then drop a millstone on his wife's head when her weeping annoys them. His son Suttungr takes them out to a skerry that floods at high tide and leaves them there until they buy their lives with the mead.
Suttungr hides it inside a mountain, Hnitbjörg, with his daughter Gunnlöð set to guard it. Odin gets it out by a long confidence trick: he causes nine field-hands to cut each other's throats with a sharpening-stone, takes their work in exchange for a drink of the mead, bores through the rock with an auger called Rati, goes in as a serpent, sleeps with Gunnlöð for three nights in exchange for three draughts, empties all three vessels in three swallows, and flies out as an eagle with Suttungr behind him. He spits the mead into containers the Æsir have set out in Ásgarðr — and, pressed, lets some out the other end on the way, which is left for anyone who wants it and is called the poetaster's share.
The full narrative belongs to that myth's own page and to Odin. What belongs here is Kvasir, and the fact that he does not appear in it after the second paragraph. Once he is mead, he is a substance.
The other Kvasir
Ynglinga saga gives a second account of the hostage exchange and includes Kvasir with no mention of spittle: he is simply the wisest of the Vanir, sent to the Æsir as part of the settlement. There is no manufacture and no murder.
Snorri wrote both. Which he thought was the older story, if he thought about it, is not recorded.
Kvasir also turns up in a third role: when the gods hunt Loki after Baldr's death, it is Kvasir — described as the shrewdest of them — who examines the ashes in Loki's abandoned house, works out from the burnt remains what the net-pattern scratched in them was for, and tells the gods to make a net and drag the river. He is thus alive and functioning as a detective, in a story that takes place well after the one in which he was drained into a vat. Snorri's material does not run on a single timeline.
Kvasir, kvass, and crushed fruit
Kvasir is usually connected to a family of Slavic words for fermented drinks — Russian kvas, a fermented rye beverage still made today — and to a Germanic root for crushing or pressing fruit, surviving in Danish kvase, to squeeze, and in Norwegian dialect words for mashed berries.
That derivation makes the name mean something like "fermented juice" or "the crushed one," which reverses the story's logic entirely: rather than a wise man whose blood happens to become mead, we may have a personified drink around whom a wise man was invented. The spitting detail supports it. Chewing or spitting grain into a vessel to start fermentation is a real technique, attested across several cultures, and a truce sealed by both sides spitting into a vat is describing the making of an alcoholic drink before it describes anything else.
Why this matters for how skalds saw themselves
Norse poets did not talk about inspiration as a gift. They talked about it as a liquid that was stolen — the kennings are relentless: Odin's drink, the dwarfs' ship, Suttungr's mead, the sea of Óðrerir, and the drink of the Æsir. Poetry is a physical quantity, finite, taken by fraud from its owners, distributed by a god who acquired it by seduction and burglary.
Compare that with the Greek muses, who are invoked and asked to sing, and the difference in professional self-image is substantial. A skald was employed, paid, and expected to produce; the origin story he told about his craft is about a substance that changes hands by violence. See Bragi for the other, tidier explanation of poetry that the same sources also carry.
For the war that produced the truce, see the Norse tradition overview; for the other hostages, Njörðr, Hœnir and Mímir.
Was Kvasir a god?
The sources will not commit, and the two accounts pull opposite ways. In Skáldskaparmál he is a made thing — a construct assembled from divine saliva, closer to Gleipnir or Sleipnir than to an Ás. In Ynglinga saga he is one of the Vanir, a person with an origin and a people. He receives no worship, no hall, no domain and no place-names in either version. The most defensible description is that he is a personification of a substance who acquired a biography, which is a category Norse myth uses more often than it admits.
Does the mead ever run out?
Nothing says it does. Snorri's framing implies an ongoing supply held by the Æsir and dispensed to those Odin chooses, which is how skalds explained why some people could compose and others could not — and why a poem was a thing you were given rather than something you made. The "poetaster's share," the portion Odin loses on the flight and leaves available to anyone, is the corpus's explanation for bad verse, and it is the only etiology of incompetence in Norse mythology.