Mani

Mani is the Norse personification of the moon, who guides it on its nightly course, and his sister Sol drives the sun, an arrangement that inverts the more familiar Mediterranean gendering, for in Norse and wider Germanic tradition the moon is masculine and the sun feminine, a pattern still preserved in the grammatical gender of the German words der Mond and die Sonne. The Norse cosmos sets both luminaries in flight: each is pursued by a wolf, and at Ragnarok the wolf Hati is fated to catch and swallow Mani.

The poem Vafthrudnismal names him among the ordered features of the sky, and Snorri adds a folktale-like detail in which Mani takes up two children, Bil and Hjuki, who are seen following him across the heavens, an image sometimes connected with later European lore of figures in the moon. Snorri's episode of Bil and Hjuki, the two children Mani takes up from earth to follow him across the sky, has long invited comparison with the English nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill tumbling down a hill with a pail of water, a connection first proposed by nineteenth-century folklorists and still debated rather than confirmed, since the rhyme's own written record does not appear until the eighteenth century, many centuries after Snorri wrote. The Norse pairing of a masculine moon and feminine sun, opposite the pattern found in Greek, Roman and many other Indo-European traditions, is also preserved outside mythological poetry in the ordinary grammatical gender of Old Norse and modern Icelandic nouns for sun and moon, evidence that the association ran through everyday language and not only poetic invention.

The wolf that pursues Mani has a name and a lineage set out in eddic poetry: the poem Grimnismal names him Hati Hroovitnisson, son of Hroovitnir, a byname elsewhere used for the great wolf Fenrir, and pairs him with a second wolf, Skoll, who chases the sun in the same relentless race across the sky. The two wolves are thus drawn into the same monstrous, wolfish bloodline as Fenrir himself, the beast fated to break free and devour Odin at Ragnarok, so that the everyday motion of the sun and moon through the heavens is imagined, in Norse cosmology, as a race being run one step ahead of destruction, a race the luminaries are fated finally to lose only at the world's end. This mythic image maps onto a real and widely shared human experience, the solar or lunar eclipse, and comparative folklore across many unrelated cultures preserves a similar instinct: when a wolf, dragon or other beast is thought to have briefly caught the sun or moon, communities have historically responded with noise, shouting, drumming, banging on metal, in the belief that commotion could startle the beast into releasing its prey.

Whether the Norse audience of Grimnismal understood eclipses specifically as brief, temporary previews of Hati's ultimate success is not spelled out in the surviving sources, but the poem's insistence on naming both pursuing wolves, rather than leaving the danger vague, suggests that the anxiety of being chased and eventually caught was treated as integral to Mani's character, not an afterthought to his gentler role as a guide of children across the sky.