A giantess arrives at Ásgarðr in helmet and mail with her weapons, alone, to collect a debt. Her father Þjazi has been killed by the gods after abducting Iðunn, and she has come to demand the compensation Norse law would require of any killer.
What follows is not a battle. It is a settlement negotiation, and Skaði wins it — she just does not get what she asked for.
The terms
The Æsir offer bætr, atonement, and she names three conditions. She will choose a husband from among them; they must make her laugh, which she believes is impossible; and — in Skáldskaparmál — Odin throws her father's eyes into the sky as stars, a term the gods add themselves.
The husband is chosen by a rule she does not set: she may see only the feet. She picks the finest pair, expecting Baldr, and gets Njörðr, whose feet are immaculate because he lives at the water's edge. There is no suggestion the gods cheated. She agreed to the method.
The laughter is produced by Loki, who ties one end of a cord to the beard of a goat and the other to his own testicles, and the resulting contest of tugging and shrieking ends with him falling into her lap. She laughs. The atonement is complete, and it has been paid in a wedding, a joke and two stars.
The marriage does not last: the two of them cannot agree on where to live, and both go home. Their separation is told from Njörðr's side in his own entry, and it is worth noticing that in a corpus full of abducted brides, this is the marriage a woman walks out of.
Öndurdís: the ski-goddess
Her titles are öndurdís and öndurguð — ski-lady, ski-god, from öndurr, the Old Norse word for a ski. Gylfaginning says she travels much on skis, carries a bow, and shoots wild animals; her home Þrymheimr was her father's, in the mountains.
This makes her the only figure in the pantheon whose defining equipment is a piece of practical Scandinavian winter technology. Skis in Scandinavia are very old — preserved examples from Swedish and Norwegian bogs date back several thousand years, and Bronze Age rock carvings at Rødøy in Norway show a figure on what appear to be skis with a stick. A hunting deity on skis is exactly the kind of god a subarctic population would have, and she is the trace of it.
That she is a giantess who hunts, rather than a goddess of hunting, is part of the same picture. In Norse cosmology the mountains and the winter belong to the jötnar. Skaði keeps her father's country and her father's métier, and joins the gods without ever stopping being what she is.
The serpent
At the end of Lokasenna, after Loki has insulted every deity at Ægir's feast, the prose coda describes his capture and binding in a cave on three stones, with his son's entrails for a rope. Skaði is the one who fixes a venomous snake above his face so the poison will drip onto him. She does it, the poem says, so that he will suffer.
Inside the flyting itself she and Loki exchange the sharpest lines in the poem: she tells him ice-cold counsels will come from her dwellings, and he replies that she spoke more softly when she invited him to her bed. Whether that is a real tradition or a flyting insult is unrecoverable, but it is Skaði's grievance that motivates the snake. Loki reminds her that he was foremost among those who killed her father, and the punishment she designs is the one image of Loki that everyone remembers — see Sigyn, who spends the rest of eternity holding the bowl.
Ynglinga saga, and the earls of Hlaðir
Snorri's Ynglinga saga says that after leaving Njörðr, Skaði married Odin and bore him many sons, including Sæmingr, from whom the earls of Hlaðir traced their descent. The skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir composed Háleygjatal for Earl Hákon on exactly that genealogy, which means the claim is not Snorri's invention but a piece of tenth-century Norwegian dynastic propaganda: a ruling house tracing itself through a giantess rather than through the Æsir alone.
Is Scandinavia named after her?
The proposal is old and it is genuinely unsettled. The Latin forms Scadinavia and Scatinavia in Pliny and Scadinauia elsewhere contain an element resembling Skaði, and one line of argument reads it as "Skaði's island" or "Skaði's land."
The competing derivation takes the root as a Germanic word for damage or danger — related to English scathe — describing the treacherous sandbanks off Skanör in Scania, with the second element meaning island. On that reading the resemblance to her name is a shared root, not a naming.
The direction of borrowing cannot currently be established, and reference works generally present both. It is worth stating clearly because the "Scandinavia is named after Skaði" claim circulates online as settled fact and is not.
Modern reception
God of War Ragnarök and several recent novels have taken her up, generally as an ice-and-vengeance archetype. Norwegian and Swedish usage keeps Skadi and Skade as rare given names. Modern winter-sports branding reaches for her regularly — an unusually well-matched borrowing, given that skis are the one attribute the sources actually give her.
She is one of very few figures in this mythology who enters the story as an antagonist, negotiates, joins, disagrees, leaves, and is still there at the end — see the family tree for how thoroughly the gods and giants are the same family, and the tradition overview for why that boundary was never as solid as it looks.
Why do the gods pay compensation to a giantess at all?
Because Norse society had no state to prosecute a killing, and the alternative to payment was feud. A slaying created a debt owed to the dead man's kin, and the kin's right to demand bætr did not depend on liking the claimant. The Æsir treat Skaði exactly as an Icelandic household would treat the aggrieved relative of a man they had killed: they meet her, they let her name terms, and they close the case. The strangeness is not that they pay — it is that the poem takes the legal procedure completely seriously and the terms not at all.
Was Skaði originally more important than the surviving myths suggest?
There are hints. Her name is grammatically masculine in form despite being borne by a female figure, which sometimes indicates an older layer; she is one of the few jötnar with an established hall and titles; and the Hlaðir dynasty's descent claim implies a status worth claiming. Against that, place-name evidence for her is thin and disputed — a handful of Swedish forms such as Skedvi have been proposed and none is secure. The gap between her narrative prominence and her cultic footprint is real and unexplained.