What the Wolf Was Promised

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — Gosforth, Cumbria, deep winter

I went to Gosforth in December, when the Cumbrian light gives out by mid-afternoon and the churchyard is empty enough that you can stand before the cross without feeling watched. The cross itself is sandstone, tall, weathered past reading in places, and it has stood in that ground since long before anyone thought to write down what its carvings meant. Antiquarians looked at the figure on its shaft, a wolf with its jaws forced open by something wedged between them, a smaller figure setting a foot on its lower jaw, and decided they were looking at Fenrir at the end of the world, and Vidar come to avenge his father. I am not sure the reading is beyond argument, but standing there in the cold it is hard not to feel that the stone knows something the guidebooks do not quite manage to say.

The story I grew up with, from the Prose and Poetic Eddas, begins earlier and less monumentally: with a wolf cub born to Loki and the giantess Angrboda, brought up among the gods at their own insistence, because Odin had heard a prophecy and wanted the beast where he could watch it. It did not stay small. The gods tried a chain called Leyding, and the wolf snapped it like wet string, so they made a stronger one, Dromi, and he broke that too, straining until the metal gave. What finally held him was not iron at all. The dwarves made a ribbon called Gleipnir out of six things that do not properly exist, the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird, and it looked too slight to hold anything. Fenrir, no fool, agreed to be bound by it only if one of the gods would put a hand in his mouth as a pledge that there was no trick. Tyr did it, knowing there was a trick, and lost the hand when the wolf found he could not break free.

They took him to a lake called Amsvartnir, to an island called Lyngvi, and left him there with a sword wedged upright in his jaws to keep them from closing, so that his drool ran out and became, in the telling, a river called Ván, want or expectation, which is as good a name as any for what an age of waiting must feel like. The story does not pretend the binding is a resolution. It is a postponement. At Ragnarök the wolf gets free, whether the chain finally fails or the world simply ends around it, and the first thing he does is go for Odin, and the last thing Odin does is die inside him. It is Vidar, the quiet son built for exactly this, who finishes it, tearing the jaw or driving a boot through it depending on which version you are reading, and the versions do disagree on the particulars.

What has stayed with me since Gosforth is less the violence of the ending than the shape of the middle: a household raising something it fears, feeding it, naming it, and still needing to lie to it in the end to survive it. The old sources do not moralise this. They simply set it down as fate, a thing that was always going to happen once the wolf was born, and leave the reader to decide what that says about the ones who raised him.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.