Sól (Germanic mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sól, the Old Norse word for the sun, names a goddess who races across the sky in a horse-drawn wagon, chased by a wolf that will one day catch her. That pursuit is not a metaphor. In Norse myth, it is the literal engine of the sky, and the terror behind the sun's daily speed. The source of this story reaches back well before the Viking Age, to the Nordic Bronze Age, when Scandinavians placed a gilded sun disc on a wheeled chariot now known as the Trundholm sun chariot. The same image, the sun pulled by horses, survived for well over a thousand years into the written records of medieval Iceland. Who exactly was this goddess? Where do her oldest roots lie? And what happens to the world when the wolf finally wins?

• 2. Names Across Languages

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  Sól carries several names depending on which Germanic language is speaking. In Old Norse she is Sól, pronounced with a long vowel; in Old High German she is Sunna, a name that also functions as an Old Norse and Icelandic synonym. Gothic texts render the name in runic script as a form that transliterates to Sunno. Scholars have noted that the family resemblance between these Germanic names and cognates in other Indo-European languages is striking. The Sanskrit sun deity Surya, the Lithuanian goddess Saulė, the Common Brittonic Sulis, and the Latin Sol all share a root with the Norse Sól, which has led researchers to propose that she may descend from a single Proto-Indo-European deity of the sun. The Norse s-rune, shaped like a lightning bolt and called Sól, references the goddess or the sun itself. An Icelandic rune poem describes the sun as the shield of the skies, a shining halo, and the destroyer of ice, phrases that sit on the border between describing a celestial body and addressing a divine figure.

• 3. The Oldest Written Witness

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  The Merseburg Incantations, written down in the 9th or 10th century in Old High German, are among the earliest surviving texts to name a Germanic sun goddess. One of the two incantations describes a scene in a wood where Phol and Wodan were riding, and Balder's foal sprained its foot. A sequence of healing charms follows. Sinthgunt sang charms, then her sister Sunna sang charms, then Friia and her sister Volla, and finally Wodan himself sang the charm that healed the foal's bone. Sunna appears here not as a central character but as a participant in a chain of divine healers, paired with a sister named Sinthgunt whose identity is otherwise lost. That the 9th or 10th century scribes thought Sunna's name needed no explanation suggests she was already familiar to the audience. The incantation is one of only two pieces of evidence, alongside the Poetic Edda, that Rudolf Simek identifies as providing actual attestation of the sun's personification in Germanic religion.

• 4. The Edda Portraits

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  The Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, gives Sól her richest portrait across several poems. In Völuspá, a dead völva recounting the history of the universe describes the sun in the early days of creation as not yet knowing where she had a dwelling. Benjamin Thorpe's translation renders the moment as the sun casting her right hand about the heavenly horses, while Henry Adams Bellows describes her casting it over heaven's rim. In Vafþrúðnismál, the god Odin questions the jötunn Vafþrúðnir, who identifies Mundilfari as the father of both Sól and Máni, the personified moon, explaining that they ride through the heavens every day to count the years for man. In Alvíssmál, the dwarf Alvíss explains to Thor that the sun is called sól by mankind, sunna by the gods, Dvalins leika, meaning Dvalinn's deluder, by the dwarfs, eygló or everglow by the jötnar, fagrahvél or lovely wheel by the elves, and alskír or all-shining by the sons of the Æsir. Grímnismál adds that a shield called Svalinn stands before the sun, and if that shield were to fall, mountain and sea would burn up.

• 5. The Wolf and the Race

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  Grímnismál stanza 39 names the wolf pursuing Sól as Sköll, meaning the bright bride of the heavens is never safe. The wolf Hati Hróðvitnisson, meanwhile, runs ahead of Sól to chase Máni. The Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, dramatizes the chase through a dialogue. When Gangleri, who is King Gylfi in disguise, remarks that the sun moves almost as if she fears something, the enthroned figure of High replies that it is not surprising, because the one chasing her comes close and there is no escape except to run. The two horses drawing her chariot are named Árvakr and Alsviðr. The gods placed bellows beneath the horses' shoulders to cool them during the journey, and according to Snorri these bellows are called Ísarnkol. The chariot itself was built by the gods from burning embers that flew out of Muspelheim, the fiery world, in order to illuminate the worlds. The arrogance that put Sól and Máni in the sky was their father Mundilfari's, who named his children so beautiful he dared to name them after the Sun and the Moon, which angered the gods into making the siblings drive the heavenly chariots as a consequence.

• 6. Ragnarök and the Daughter

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  Sól's fate is fixed. During Ragnarök, the wolf Sköll will catch and kill her. Both the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda agree on this endpoint, and the Prose Edda chapter 53 states it plainly. The world does not end with her death, however. Before Fenrir, the great wolf, assails her, Sól will give birth to a daughter. Vafþrúðnismál stanza 47 describes this daughter as one who will ride on her mother's paths after the events of Ragnarök, and Snorri quotes the stanza in support of his account. The daughter will be no less beautiful than her mother, according to the Prose Edda. The 11th century skald Skúli Þórsteinsson, quoted in Skáldskaparmál, describes Sól as the god-blithe bedfellow of Glen who steps to her divine sanctuary with brightness. Her husband Glenr is named in Skáldskaparmál alongside the kennings daughter of Mundilfæri, sister of Máni, wife of Glen, and fire of sky and air.

• 7. Scholarly Debates

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  John Lindow cautions that even kennings like hall of the sun for sky may not suggest personification, given the rules of kenning formation. He argues that in the Poetic Edda, only the stanzas associated with Sól in Vafþrúðnismál are certain in their personification of the goddess, and observes that Sól being female and Máni being male probably reflects grammatical gender rather than theological design. Lindow concludes that while the sun appears to have been a focus of older Scandinavian religious practices, surviving Norse mythology does not place it in a central role. Rudolf Simek takes a different angle. He points to the Trundholm sun chariot and other Bronze Age rock carvings as evidence that the sun was already seen as a life-giving heavenly body long before the written sources appear. Simek notes that the combination of sun symbols with ships in religious practice, recurring from the Bronze Age into the Middle Ages, seems to derive not from a personified sun deity but from practices surrounding fertility gods such as the Vanir, specifically Njörðr or Freyr. A separate cluster of kennings for Sól published by Olaus Verelius in 1675 draws on Icelandic tradition, adding names such as day-star, disc, all-bright seen, fair-wheel, grace-shine, elf-disc, doubt-disc, and ruddy to the roster of the goddess's identities.