Note to Þjóð Haustl 2III
[5-8]: According to Snorri’s prose narrative, three of the Æsir, Óðinn, Hœnir and Loki, were travelling away from Ásgarðr and ran short of food. They managed to kill an ox and prepared it for cooking in an earth-oven, but the oven would not cook the meat. Eventually, they became aware of an eagle (Þjazi) sitting in an oak-tree above them, and he admitted preventing the food from cooking (presumably by means of sorcery), demanding his fill of the ox in return for letting the meat cook. In support of the notion that Þjazi used sorcery to stop the ox cooking is an invocation on a rune stick from Bergen (Run N B252VI) in which a supernatural being named Ími is exhorted to prevent food from cooking (in the þulur Ímr is a heiti for ‘giant’ and ‘wolf’; see Þul Jǫtna II 1/4 and Þul Vargs 1/9).
References
- Internal references
- Elena Gurevich (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Þulur, Vargs heiti 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 903.
- Elena Gurevich (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Þulur, Jǫtna heiti II 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 719.