Sköll

• 1. Introduction

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  Sköll, also spelled Skoll, is a wolf in Norse mythology, and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda describes him in the middle of a race that never ends. Of the Sun, the text says: "Sun goes at a great pace; her pursuer is close behind her and there is nothing she can do but flee." The account adds that two wolves give chase, and that the one she fears is called Skoll. It also says he will catch her at the end of the world. Who is this wolf, and who sent him? What does his name actually say? And what might early observers have seen in the sky to imagine a hunter behind the Sun? The answers begin with a chariot and a family.

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• 2. The Endless Pursuit

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  Sól is the Sun personified as a goddess, and in the Prose Edda she receives a chariot to carry the Sun across the sky. The wolf appears in the telling just after she takes it. By night a second wolf takes up the hunt. He is Hati Hróðvitnisson, and his quarry is the Moon, personified as Máni. The two wolves are brothers, the sons of the wolf Fenrir and an unnamed giantess. Their parentage ties them to one of the most feared creatures in the myths. The chase is not meant to last forever. It is foretold that the wolves will run after the Sun and Moon until Ragnarök. At that moment they finally close the gap and devour the celestial beings. The name Sköll carries its own charge, and it points back to the language of the Norse.

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• 3. A Name That Barks

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  The Old Norse word skǫll is the feminine form of skall, which means a bark or any sound that is widely audible and echoing. It is related to the verbs skjalla and skella, meaning to bark or to scold. Swedish keeps close cousins in skäll, meaning scolding or barking, and skall, meaning bark. English reaches the same root through the word scold, which has an older relative in skæld. Besides the rendering already given, translators have also taken the name to mean Mockery. A wolf named for a noisy bark or a scolding voice is a fitting hunter of the sky. Yet some scholars wonder whether this wolf was ever a separate animal at all.

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• 4. Sun Dogs and Moon Dogs

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  Rudolf Simek, a scholar of Norse myth, raises the possibility that Sköll is simply another name for Fenrir. If so, he suggests there could be a nature-mythological reading of Sköll and Hati. In that reading the wolves describe parhelia and paraselenae, the bright spots that sometimes flank the Sun or the Moon. These are known in English as sun dogs and moon dogs. Scandinavian languages carry the same wolf image in their own words for the sun's companions, which are called sun-wolf. Norwegian says solulv, and Swedish says solvarg. On this view, the animals that shadow the Sun in the myth were once something people could look up and see.

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• 5. A Wolf in the Stars

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  Simek goes a step further and theorizes that Sköll, Hati and Fenrir are all one and the same. He traces them to the Hyades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The stars of the cluster form a V shape. A viewer looking up could easily have read that V as the open mouth of a wolf. The cluster itself never moves out of Taurus, so a single wolf could have gained three names and two jobs in the telling. Whether the wolf of the sky began as a star pattern, a halo of light or a pure invention, Snorri's pages leave him still running behind the Sun.

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