Aegir

Aegir is the personification of the sea in Norse myth, a jotunn or giant rather than one of the Aesir, yet on friendly terms with the gods. He is famous above all as a brewer of ale and a lavish host: in his hall beneath the waves, lit by gleaming gold in place of fire, he holds great feasts for the gods, and it is at one such banquet that the poem Lokasenna has Loki burst in to insult the assembled deities one by one. To supply ale for the gathering the gods must first obtain a cauldron vast enough, the quest told in Hymiskvida.

Aegir's wife is Ran, who draws drowning sailors down into her net, and their nine daughters are the waves of the sea. Between the generous host of the feasting-hall and the wife who gathers the drowned, Aegir holds together the two faces the sea showed to a seafaring people: bounty and danger, the ale-cup and the grave.

Aegir carries alternate names in skaldic tradition, Hler and Gymir, both used in kennings for the sea itself, "Hler's fire" or "Gymir's field" standing for the ocean's surface or its gold; the multiplicity of names for a single sea-power is typical of the dense, allusive vocabulary Old Norse poets built around Aegir and his kin. Unlike many Aesir and Vanir, Aegir has left no clear trace in place-names or votive inscriptions, so his whole presence rests on the poetic corpus, a giant honoured in verse as a boundary figure between the divine and the elemental world of the sea rather than as an object of cult.

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda preserves something the poetic sources only gesture at elsewhere: individual names for each of the nine daughters of Aegir and Ran, a set of personified waves used by skaldic poets as an entire vocabulary of ocean kennings. The list, given in the Skaldskaparmal, includes names such as Himinglaeva, sky clear, for the wave whose foam catches the light, Dufa, the pitching wave, Blodughadda, bloody haired, for a wave reddened by storm, Hefring, the rising wave, and Kolga, the cool wave, among others, each a poetic figure a skald could invoke to describe the sea's motion without ever naming the sea directly.

Old Norse court poetry prized this kind of indirection, building elaborate kennings, the sea as the field of Aegir, gold as the fire of the waves, out of a shared stock of mythological names that a listener needed to know in order to follow a poem at all, and the daughters of Aegir supplied some of the most productive material for exactly that purpose.

Later in the mythology, the nine daughters are sometimes identified as the mothers of the god Heimdall, said in one Eddic poem to have been born of nine sisters at the edge of the world, a genealogy that ties Aegir's family into the ancestry of one of the Aesir's own watchmen. Whether this reflects an old, coherent tradition or a late skaldic flourish is not settled among scholars, and the poem itself gives few further details.