Tyr

Tyr's defining deed is an act of deliberate self-sacrifice unique among the gods. When the Aesir resolve to bind the monstrous wolf Fenrir, whose growth threatens them all, with the magical fetter Gleipnir, the wolf, suspecting a trick, agrees to be bound only if one of the gods will lay a hand between its jaws as a pledge of good faith. Tyr alone is willing, and when the binding holds and the wolf finds itself trapped, it bites off his hand at the wrist. The story, told by Snorri, makes Tyr the god who keeps faith at a personal cost for the safety of all, and gives Norse myth its clearest image of justice bound up with sacrifice: the pledge was made in bad faith, and Tyr pays for the community's necessary deception with his own hand.

Very few images of Tyr survive from the Viking Age, but two stone monuments are widely read by scholars as depicting his defining myth. The tenth-century Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, England, carved after Norse settlers had brought their traditions into Christian Britain, shows a figure with one hand thrust into the mouth of a great beast, generally identified as Tyr and Fenrir, standing alongside explicitly Christian imagery on the same monument, a striking case of pagan and Christian symbolism carved side by side. The Swedish Ledberg stone carries a comparable scene. Such finds are rare enough that most of what is confidently said about Tyr still rests on the written Eddic sources rather than on surviving pictorial evidence.

Tyr is widely thought to be, in origin, a very ancient sky- and war-god, his name descends from the same Indo-European root as Greek Zeus and Latin Jupiter (from Dyeus), and the Old Norse word tyr could be used as a common noun meaning simply a god. This suggests that Tyr was once far more central, perhaps a supreme sky-father, before Odin and Thor overshadowed him in the mythology that survives. His antiquity shows in the calendar: the Germanic peoples used him to render the Roman god of war, so that dies Martis, Mars's day, became Tiw's day, English Tuesday. He remained the god invoked for victory, law and the sworn oath, the just and courageous power behind both the battlefield and the assembly.

Tyr's antiquity is documented outside the Norse sources too: the Roman historian Tacitus, writing his Germania around 98 CE, describes the Germanic peoples honouring a god he calls Mars above their other war-gods, in keeping with the Roman habit of naming foreign deities after their nearest Roman equivalent, and scholars generally read this Mars as an early form of Tyr, centuries before the Icelandic sagas were composed. The rune named for him, Tiwaz, shaped like an upward arrow or spear-point, was carved for victory in battle; the Old Norse poem Sigrdrifumal instructs a warrior to cut Tyr-runes twice into a sword hilt and invoke the god's name to win in combat, a piece of documented runic magic tied directly to his name.