5 - Misalliance and the Summer King

Summary

1. Misalliance

Wed in haste, repent at leisure.

English proverb

One might have expected myths about the ‘sacred marriage’ between the fertility god and the earth-giantess to be celebrations of a joyful union, but in fact the fundamental hostility between gods and giants was so strong that they are usually misalliances. The myths of Njõrðr and his son Freyr have many features in common:

The protagonist is one of a dynasty that descends through the male line.

He is (wholly or partly) responsible for the death or threatened death of the giantess's father or brother.

He or his representative goes on an expedition to win the giantess (but in the myth of Njõrðr and Skaði this motif is reversed).

The protagonist and the giantess marry.

The marriage is unsuccessful, and the wife becomes hostile to the protagonist.

This hostility may lead to the death of the protagonist.

Njõrðr and Skaði

Njõrðr often appears in eddic and skaldic verse, but rarely with Skaði. He may be referred to as her husband and as god of ships in the damaged text of Eyvindr skaldaspillir's Háleygjatal 3–4 (c. 970), but the actual statement here is that Skaði lived for a long time with Óðinn and bore him many children. If Eyvindr mentions Njõrðr at all, therefore, it is in the embarrassing role of cuckold. However, he later contradicts the family's descent from Óðinn, referring to Hákon Grjótgarðsson as Freys õttungr ‘Freyr's descendant’. This family, like the Ynglingar, seem originally to have claimed descent from the Vanir, and the Óðinn–Skaði union was perhaps invented in the later tenth century, when the aristocratic cult of Óðinn was popular. But the myth of an unhappy marriage between Njõrðr and Skaði probably already existed, for Þórðr Sjáreksson (lausavísa 3, eleventh century) also notes that she did not love him.

The name Skaði (and Sca(n)dinavia and Skáney ‘Skåne’) may be related to Gothic skadus, Old English sceadu, Old Saxon scado, Old High German scato ‘shadow’.