Iðunn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Iðunn, the Norse goddess associated with apples and youth, stands at the center of a killing that the Prose Edda calls 'greatly renowned.' The victim is a jötunn who dies in the shape of an eagle. The cause is a goddess who turns up in only a handful of surviving passages. She is attested in the Poetic Edda, which was compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources. She also appears in the Prose Edda, written in the same century by Snorri Sturluson. Who was she, and why did the gods need her so badly? How did Loki end up bargaining with an eagle for her? And why do modern scholars see in her a trace of something far older than Norse myth?

  1

• 2. The Ash-Wood Box

  ›

  In section 26 of Gylfaginning, the first part of the Prose Edda, Iðunn is introduced as the wife of Bragi. She keeps an eski, a wooden box made of ash wood and often used for carrying personal possessions. Inside are her apples. When the gods feel themselves growing old, they bite into the fruit and become young again. The text says this goes on until Ragnarök.

  The man listening to this is Gangleri, who is really King Gylfi in disguise. Gangleri remarks that the gods seem to depend greatly on Iðunn's good faith and care. High answers with a laugh. Misfortune once came close, he says, and he could tell the tale. First, though, Gangleri must hear the names of more of the Æsir, and High goes on listing gods.

  In chapter 55 of Skáldskaparmál, Iðunn is one of eight ásynjur, or goddesses, seated on thrones at a banquet in Asgard for the sea-giant Ægir. Chapter 33 counts her among six ásynjur who visit Ægir. Chapter 75 lists her one last time, with other ásynjur.

  Chapter 86 of the same book gives poets ways to refer to her. She can be 'wife of Bragi' or 'keeper of the apples', and her apples become 'the Æsir's age old cure'. Chapter 10 returns the favor by offering 'husband of Iðunn' as a way to name Bragi. The tale High promised begins with a pole, an eagle, and a trickster who cannot let go.

  1112151617

• 3. The Abduction

  ›

  Bragi himself tells Ægir how it began, when Loki struck an eagle with a pole. The eagle was the jötunn Þjazi in disguise, and Loki found himself stuck fast to the bird. Þjazi hauled him higher and higher, with his feet banging against stones, gravel, and trees. Afraid his arms would be torn from their sockets, Loki roared for mercy.

  The eagle would let go only on one condition. Loki had to swear a solemn vow to lure Iðunn out of Asgard, bringing her apples of youth with her. Loki agreed and returned to his friends Odin and Hœnir. When the appointed time came, he led Iðunn into 'a certain forest'. He told her he had found apples she would think worth keeping, and he asked her to bring her own for comparison. Þjazi arrived in eagle shape, snatched her up, and carried her off to his home, Þrymheimr.

  At a thing, the Æsir started asking one another when Iðunn had last been seen, because they had begun to grow grey and old. The answer was that she had left Asgard with Loki. They had him arrested and brought before the assembly, where he was threatened with death and torture. Terrified, Loki offered a deal. If the goddess Freyja would lend him her falcon shape, he would search for Iðunn in Jötunheimr.

  Freyja agreed, and Loki flew north. One day later he reached Þjazi's home and found the giant out at sea in a boat, with Iðunn left alone. Loki turned her into a nut, gripped it in his claws, and flew away as fast as he could.

  When Þjazi came home to an empty house, he took eagle shape again and set off after the thief. His mighty wings stirred up a storm as he went. The Æsir saw a falcon with a nut in its claws, hotly pursued by an eagle. They hurried to pile up a great heap of wood shavings and set it alight. The falcon swept over the battlements of Asgard and dropped down behind the wall. The eagle overshot, could not stop, and plunged through the flames. His feathers caught fire, he fell to the ground within the gates, and the Æsir set upon him and killed him. The killing was remembered in verse, and Iðunn herself speaks, briefly, in a poem of insults.

  11121415

• 4. Voices in Verse

  ›

  At the feast of Ægir in the poem Lokasenna, a prose introduction places Iðunn at her husband's side. Loki has just insulted Bragi, and in stanzas 16, 17, and 18 Iðunn trades words with him. Loki accuses her of sleeping with the killer of her brother. No other surviving source mentions either this brother or this killer. Then the goddess Gefjon speaks up, and the poem moves on.

  The scholar Lee Hollander suggests Lokasenna was meant to be humorous. In his view the charges Loki throws are not necessarily 'generally accepted lore' of the time. They are accusations that are easy for Loki to make, and hard for his targets to disprove or that they do not care to refute.

  The late poem Hrafnagaldr Óðins, included in some modern editions of the Poetic Edda, offers information found nowhere else. It names Iðunn as descended from elves, one of 'Ivaldi's elder children', and as a dís who dwells in dales.

  A poet from the 10th century gave her abduction a very different setting. Þjóðólfr of Hvinir wrote Haustlöng about a richly detailed shield he had received, which showed the scene. In the cited portions he calls her 'the maid who knew the Æsir's old age cure', 'the gods' lady', 'ale-Gefn', and 'the Æsir's girl-friend'. He names her outright only once. The Prose Edda adds one more phrase tied to the abduction, 'Þjazi's booty'. Even her name has been read in more than one way.

  2151316

• 5. What's in a Name

  ›

  Scholars have explained the name Iðunn as meaning 'ever young', 'rejuvenator', or 'the rejuvenating one'. The modern English alphabet lacks the eth character, so the name is sometimes written Idhunn, Idunn, Idun, or Ithun. An -a is sometimes added to mark femininity, giving forms such as Iduna and Idunna.

  In Iceland, the Landnámabók records Iðunn as a personal name in use since the pagan period of the 10th century. It names two women who bore it. One was Iðunn Arnardóttir, the daughter of an early settler. The other was Iðunn Molda-Gnúpsdóttir, the granddaughter of one of the earliest settlers in the book.

  The 19th-century scholar Jacob Grimm proposed a link between the goddess and the idisi. He wrote that 'with the original form idis the goddess Idunn may possibly be connected.' He added that Iðunn 'would seem by Saem. 89a to be an Elvish word, but we do not hear of any other name for the goddess.'

  The 19th-century author C. M. Yonge traced the Old English name Idonea back to the goddess. She called the derivation 'almost certain.' Idonea may be the feminine of the Latin idoneus, meaning fit. Yonge noted, however, that its absence in the Romance countries 'may be taken as an indication that it was a mere classicising of the northern goddess of the apples of youth.' That phrase, 'apples of youth', points to the question scholars have asked most often, which is what the apples meant.

  12346

• 6. Apples and Fertility

  ›

  Buckets of apples were found in the 9th-century Oseberg ship burial site in Norway. The English scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson cites them as evidence that apples belonged to the religious practices of Germanic paganism. Fruit and nuts have also turned up in early graves of the Germanic peoples in England and on the European continent, and they may have carried symbolic meaning. Nuts are still a recognized symbol of fertility in Southwest England, and Iðunn, the source says, was turned into a nut.

  Davidson also ties apples to the Vanir, a group of gods associated with fertility. In stanzas 19 and 20 of Skírnismál, Skírnir offers eleven 'golden apples' to woo the beautiful Gerðr. He is acting as messenger for the major Vanir god Freyr. In stanza 16, Gerðr mentions her brother's slayer. Davidson says this has led some to suggest a connection between Gerðr and Iðunn, who are alike in this way.

  Chapter 2 of the Völsunga saga supplies a stranger example. King Rerir prays to Odin for a child while sitting atop a mound. The goddess Frigg sends a messenger in the guise of a crow, who drops an apple in his lap. Rerir's wife eats it. The result is a six-year pregnancy and a caesarean birth, and the child is the hero Völsung.

  An 11th-century poem by the skald Þórbjörn Brúnason uses the 'strange' phrase 'apples of Hel'. Davidson says this may imply that the skald thought of the apple as food of the dead. She adds that the potentially Germanic goddess Nehalennia is sometimes shown with apples, and that parallels exist in early Irish stories.

  Apple cultivation in Northern Europe goes back to at least the time of the Roman Empire, and the fruit came from the Near East. The native apple trees of Northern Europe, though, bear small, bitter fruit. From all this Davidson concludes that in Iðunn 'we must have a dim reflection of an old symbol: that of the guardian goddess of the life-giving fruit of the other world.'

  1819168

• 7. Eagles and Older Patterns

  ›

  David Knipe sees Iðunn's abduction by Þjazi as an example of an Indo-European motif, that 'of an eagle who steals the celestial means of immortality.' He notes a parallel in a Celtic myth. There, Brian, Iuchar, and Icharba, the sons of Tuirenn, take the form of hawks to steal sacred apples from the garden of Hisberna. As in the Norse tale, there is a pursuit, and the guardians are female griffins.

  John Lindow reads the name 'ever young' as a clue that Iðunn could keep the gods youthful without her apples at all. He points out that Haustlöng never mentions apples. It calls her instead the 'maiden who understood the eternal life of the Æsir.' Lindow also argues that her abduction is 'one of the most dangerous moments' for the gods. In his reading, the usual movement of female jötnar toward the gods is reversed.

  Richard North, studying Haustlöng, offers a bolder identification. He writes that Iðunn 'is probably to be understood as an aspect of Freyja, a goddess whom the gods rely on for their youth and beauty.' Freyja is the same goddess who lent Loki her falcon shape. Whatever Iðunn was, artists took her up early. In 1821, H. E. Freund made a statue titled Idun.

  2092223

• 8. Idun in Art and Orbit

  ›

  Sculptors and painters returned to Iðunn throughout the 19th century. After Freund's statue of 1821, C. G. Qvarnström made one in 1843 and a plaster statue in 1856, titled Idun som bortrövas av jätten Tjasse i örnhamn. Nils Blommér painted Brage sittande vid harpan, Idun stående bakom honom in 1846. C. Hansen's Iduns Rückkehr nach Valhalla became an 1862 woodcut modeled on a painting by C. Hammer. K. Ehrenberg drew Bragi und Idun, Balder und Nanna in 1882.

  J. Doyle Penrose painted Idun and the Apples in 1890. In 1901 Carl Larsson painted Brita as Iduna, and E. Doepler made his own Idun. B. E. Ward produced a watercolor in 1905, and John Bauer painted Loki och Idun in 1911.

  The composer Richard Wagner gave her a place in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Freia, a figure in that opera cycle, is a version of Freyja combined with Iðunn.

  Publications have borrowed her name too. The Troth, a United States-based Germanic neopagan group, titled its publication Idunna, edited by Diana L. Paxson. A Swedish women's journal called Idun put the goddess on its banner with her basket of apples. An American Swedish-language women's journal, Nya Idun, meaning 'New Idun', was published from 1906 to 1924.

  Her name has reached the sky as well. The asteroid 176 Iduna was named after the men's association Sällskapet Idun, and Idunn Mons, a mons on the planet Venus, is named after the goddess herself.

  In 2024, the Swedish Maritime Administration renamed a second-hand icebreaker Idun. The ship is decades younger than the other Swedish icebreakers, and the new name was chosen to show how it would 'rejuvenate' the aging state-owned fleet.

  2425282926