Sköll and Hati: the wolves that chase the sun and moon
In Snorri’s Gylfaginning, written around 1220, a man called Mundilfari names his two children Moon and Sun. The gods take offence at this and set the children in the sky. The girl, Sól, drives the horses that draw the sun, Árvakr, ‘Early-Wake’, and Alsviðr, ‘All-Strong’. The boy, Máni, ‘steers the course of the moon, and determines its waxing and waning’. In Norse the sun is feminine and the moon masculine, the other way round from Latin.
Máni takes two children with him, Bil and Hjúki, and Snorri adds only that ‘these children follow Moon, as may be seen from the earth’. Reading them as the dark patches on the moon is a modern interpretation; the text itself does not say so.
The two wolves
In the next chapter Snorri explains why the sun moves so fast. A wolf called Sköll runs after her, ‘and he shall take her’. Another, Hati Hróðvitnisson, leaps ahead of her and wants to seize the moon. Both come from a brood born to a giantess in Ironwood, east of Midgard. One of that brood, Mánagarmr, the Moon-Hound, ‘shall swallow the moon’ and ‘sprinkle with blood the heavens’. The name Mánagarmr appears nowhere but in Snorri.
The poem Grímnismál, from the Poetic Edda, has the two wolves in one stanza: ‘Skoll is the wolf that to Ironwood follows the glittering god, and the son of Hrothvitnir, Hati, awaits the burning bride of heaven.’ Bellows, the translator, notes that ‘Ironwood’ here is a guess at an obscure phrase.
Swallowed at Ragnarök
Every Norse text puts the actual swallowing at the end of the world. In Völuspá an old giantess in Ironwood bears the brood of Fenrir, and ‘among these one in monster’s guise was soon to steal the sun from the sky’. Later the poem says: ‘The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars down from heaven are whirled.’ Snorri’s account of Ragnarök is plain: ‘The Wolf shall swallow the sun ... the other wolf shall seize the moon ... the stars shall vanish from the heavens.’
Vafþrúðnismál tells it differently: there Fenrir himself takes the sun, but before that she bears a daughter, who will ride her mother’s paths in the new world. The stories do not agree in every detail, and all of them are known only from 13th-century Icelandic manuscripts.
And eclipses?
It is often said that the Vikings thought an eclipse was a wolf eating the sun. No Norse text says so. None links the wolves to an ordinary eclipse, and none tells of people shouting to drive them off. The link was made by Jacob Grimm in 1835, who moved straight from the wolf passages to the heathen fear of eclipses. Grimm noticed the gap himself: the Norse texts, which tell of the swallowing most fully, say nothing of any shouting.
The shouting is real, but it is continental and recorded in Latin by churchmen. Maximus of Turin in the 5th century preached against crowds crying out during a lunar eclipse, and Eligius of Noyon in the 7th forbade anyone to shout when the moon was darkened. An 8th-century list of superstitions mentions people calling ‘Vince luna’, ‘conquer, moon’. None of them names a wolf.
There is another guess worth knowing. Rudolf Simek suggests the two wolves may be a picture of sun dogs and moon dogs, the bright spots that appear beside the sun or moon in icy haze. Swedish dialect really did call a sun dog solvarg or solulf, ‘sun-wolf’. That is a scholar’s idea too, but a pleasing one: the wolves would then be something you could actually see, running alongside the sun.