Skadi

While Iduna's friends were still crowding around her, joyful and glad to have her home again, they saw someone far off coming toward Asgard. As the figure drew nearer, they recognized Skadi, the tall daughter of the frost giant Thiassi, who had chased Iduna. She was dressed all in white fur and carried a shining hunting-spear and arrows. Slung over her shoulder were snowshoes and skates, for Skadi had come from her mountain home in the icy north. Very angry about the loss of her father, she had come to ask the Æsir why they had been so cruel to him.

Father Odin spoke kindly to her, saying, "We will honor your father by placing his eyes in the sky, where they will shine forever as two bright stars. The people in Midgard will remember Thiassi whenever they look up at night and see those twinkling lights. Besides this, we will also give you gold and silver." But Skadi, thinking that money could never repay her for the loss of her father, remained angry.

Loki looked at her stern face and said to himself, "If we can only make Skadi laugh, she will be more willing to agree to the plan," and he began to think of a way to amuse her. He took a long cord and tied it to a goat. It was an invisible cord that no one could see, and Loki himself held the other end. Then he started to dance and leap about, and the goat had to do whatever Loki did. It was such a funny sight that all the gods shouted with laughter, and even poor, sorrowful Skadi had to smile.

When the Æsir saw this, they proposed another plan: Skadi might choose one of the gods for her husband, but she must choose only by seeing their bare feet. The giantess looked at them all as they stood before her, and when she saw the bright face of Baldur, more beautiful than all the rest, she agreed to their plan, saying to herself, "Perhaps I will choose him, and then I will surely be happy."

The gods then stood in a row behind a curtain, so that Skadi could see nothing but their bare feet. She looked carefully at them all and finally chose the pair of feet that seemed to her the whitest and the finest in shape, thinking those must be Baldur's. But when the curtain was removed, she was surprised and sorry to find she had chosen Niörd, the god of the seashore.

The wedding took place in Asgard, and when the feasting was over, Skadi and Niörd went to dwell in his home by the sea. At first they were very happy, for Niörd was kind to his giant bride. But how could anyone expect a god of the Æsir to live happily for very long with a frost giantess as his wife? Skadi did not like the roar of the waves and hated the cries of the sea-gulls and the murmur of gentle summer winds. She longed for her frozen home, far away in the north, amid ice and snow.

And so they finally agreed that for nine months of the year Niörd would live with Skadi among her snowy mountains, where she found happiness in hunting over the white hills and valleys on her snowshoes, with her hunting dogs at her side, or skating on the ice-bound rivers and lakes. Then for the three short months of summer Skadi must live with Niörd in his palace by the sea, while he calmed the stormy ocean waves and helped the busy fishermen to have good sailing for their boats.

Niörd loved to wander along the shore, his jacket trimmed with a fringe of lovely seaweeds and his belt made of the prettiest shells on the beach, with friendly little sandpipers running before him, and beautiful gulls and other sea birds sailing in the air above his head. Sometimes he loved to sit on the rocks by the shore, watching the seals play in the sunshine, or feeding the beautiful swans, his favorite birds. There is a kind of sponge that the people in the north still call Niörd's glove in memory of this old Norse god.