Máni

• 1. Introduction

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  Máni is the Moon personified in Germanic mythology. One of the oldest surviving poems about him admits something startling: "the moon knew not what might was his." That line comes from Völuspá, part of the Poetic Edda, a collection gathered in the 13th century from older traditional material. Snorri Sturluson wrote his own account in the 13th century, in a book called the Prose Edda. There, Máni moves through the sky as a proper figure, followed by two children as he goes. Why would medieval poets picture the moon as unsure of its own power? What is the story behind the pair trailing behind him overhead? And what do fragments of skaldic verse hint about a chapter of Máni's life that survives nowhere else?

• 2. Voices In The Poems

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  In stanza 23 of Vafþrúðnismál, a disguised Odin, calling himself Gagnráðr, questions the giant Vafþrúðnir about where the Sun and Moon came from. Vafþrúðnir answers in verse, naming Mundilfari as the father of both Sól and Máni. "Mundilferi is he who began the moon, and fathered the flaming sun," he says. The same verse explains their daily task: circling the sky each day to count the years for mankind.

  In stanza 39 of Grímnismál, Odin, now disguised as Grímnir, describes wolves pursuing both lights across the sky. Sköll chases the sun, called there the shining god, toward what the poem calls the protecting woods. A second wolf, Hati Hróðvitnisson, chases the moon in the same verse.

  In stanza 13 of Alvíssmál, the god Thor quizzes the dwarf Alvíss about names for the Moon. Alvíss answers with six different terms. Mankind calls it "moon," the gods call it "fiery one," and in Hel it becomes "the whirling wheel." The jötnar call it "the hastener," the dwarves "the shiner," and the elves "the counter of years."

  The Poetic Edda never says who follows Máni through the sky. Snorri's own Prose Edda would soon give that pair names of their own.

• 3. Children Of Mundilfari

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  In chapter 11 of Gylfaginning, the enthroned figure called High expands on the family story. The children were so fair that their father named them "moon" and "sun," after the two lights in the sky. The gods saw this as arrogance and, angered, placed the brother and sister in the heavens. There, as the text puts it, Máni "guides the path of the moon and controls its waxing and waning."

  Two more children, Hjúki and Bil, follow Máni across the sky, visible from the earth below. According to Gylfaginning, Máni took the pair from the earth while they were fetching water from a well.

  In chapter 51, High foretells Ragnarök and says that Máni will be swallowed by one of two wolves chasing the heavenly bodies.

  In the Prose Edda's second book, Skáldskaparmál, chapter 26 calls Sól simply "sister of Máni." Chapter 55 lists still more names for the Moon: "lune," "waxer," "waner," "year-counter," "clipped," "shiner," "gloam," "hastener," "squinter," and "gleamer."

  A separate strand of poetry, composed by skalds rather than named authors, would leave behind one more riddle about Máni. That riddle hides inside kennings used to describe giant women.

• 4. Kennings And Riddles

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  The 10th century skald Guthormr sindri once used the kenning "desired woman of Máni" to describe a female jötunn. Scholars read that phrase as a hint of a lost story: a marriage or sexual union between Máni and a giantess.

  John Lindow, weighing the same kenning, states that if such a story once existed, "it has left no other trace in the extant mythology."

  Rudolf Simek examined two separate skaldic kennings and reached a similar conclusion. "Máni is apparently a gigantic being in a myth of which we otherwise know nothing," he wrote.

  Simek also points to an early stanza in Völuspá, where the Æsir set up the Moon "in order to be able to reckon the year." He connects this to a broader Germanic habit of measuring time by the Moon rather than the Sun.

  That habit shows up in how time itself was counted. Stretches in the old Germanic world were measured in nights, not days, a quiet trace of watching the moon overhead.