The Mead of Poetry

Snorri Sturluson tells the story in the Skaldskaparmal, and it begins with a peace treaty. The Aesir and the Vanir end their war by spitting into a single vessel, and out of the mingled spittle they make a man called Kvasir, so wise that no one can ask him a question he cannot answer. He travels the world teaching until two dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar, invite him in and kill him. They drain his blood into two vats and a kettle, mix it with honey, and the drink that results makes a poet or a scholar of whoever tastes it. They tell the gods that Kvasir choked on his own wisdom because nobody was clever enough to question him.

The dwarfs go on killing, and it costs them the mead. They drown a giant and his wife, and the giant's son Suttungr takes them out to a skerry to drown at the tide in return; they buy their lives with the drink. Suttungr hides it inside the mountain Hnitbjorg and sets his daughter Gunnlod to guard it.

Odin goes after it and does not fight for it. He takes work as a labourer under a false name, engineers the deaths of nine mowers by getting them to cut each other's throats over a whetstone, claims the winter's wages he is owed in the form of a drink, is refused, bores a hole through the mountain with an auger, slips through as a serpent, and spends three nights with Gunnlod for the three draughts she agrees to. He drinks all of it in three swallows and leaves as an eagle with Suttungr in pursuit, reaching the gods in time to spit the mead into the vessels they have set out. What he loses on the way is the share that falls to bad poets.

The Skaldskaparmal is not a collection of stories for their own sake. It is a handbook for poets, and Snorri tells the story of the mead in order to explain a working vocabulary. Skaldic verse names things by periphrasis, and the accepted periphrases for poetry are almost all drawn from this myth: poetry is Kvasir's blood, the dwarfs' drink, the liquid of the vats, Odin's find, Odin's drink, the gift of Odin, the drink of the Aesir. A listener who did not know the story could not follow the verse.

That gives the myth an unusually practical function. Other sacred substances explain a rite; this one explains a craft, and it explains it in a way that makes every competent poem a demonstration of the claim. To compose skaldic verse at all is to use the mead vocabulary, so the poet is continually asserting that what he is doing is the distribution of a stolen divine liquid.

The valuation that follows is worth noticing. Poetic ability is not a gift of temperament or the result of training in this account. It is a substance that was made by murder, acquired by murder, held by a giant, stolen by seduction and deception, and vomited into cups. Nothing about the chain is dignified, and Snorri does not present it as though it were. The one moral distinction the myth draws is between good poets and bad ones, and it is a matter of which portion you got.

Odin's part in it is characteristic. He obtains the most valuable thing in the world by lying about his name, murdering nine workmen indirectly, seducing his enemy's daughter and breaking his word to her, which is the same method he uses for the runes and for wisdom generally.