Thor's Journey to Útgarða-Loki
Explore the famous Norse tale of Thor and Loki's journey to the hall of Útgarða-Loki, with its contests of strength and sorcery from the Prose Edda.
In the tale told in Gylfaginning chapters 44 to 47 of the Prose Edda, Thor and Loki travel by chariot into the far north, cross hostile wilderness, and enter the vast hall of Útgarða-Loki, lord of a citadel whose gates touch the sky. There, after a night of feasting, they are challenged to a series of impossible contests — eating a trough, lifting a cat, drinking a horn, and wrestling an old woman — which they lose by a hair, only to learn on the road home that every feat was a disguised confrontation with the primal forces of nature and the world-serpent himself.
How the Journey Begins
The tale, called Þórsför in Old Norse, is a fully developed prose narrative unique to Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning. Snorri opens by saying that Thor and Loki set out together with Thor’s two human servants, Þjálfi and Röskva. The party drives a chariot pulled by two goats. By nightfall, hunger forces them to butcher the goats for supper. Thor blesses the bones, warning the servants not to break them to reach the marrow. Þjálfi, unable to resist, splits a thigh bone to suck out the marrow, and the next morning Thor, resuscitating the goats, sees that one is lame. In fury, he grips both servants but, persuaded by their cries, spares them on condition that Þjálfi and Röskva become his bonded servants — a common motif explaining the origin of human henchmen in heroic legend.
The episode does double duty: it shows Thor’s binding power, the god’s near-limitless strength, and provides a folk-etymological origin for the boy’s name, Þjálfi (related to Old Norse þjálfi, “helper”). It also explains why Thor travels with a man and a woman on his journey: every Norse hero-band needs a squire.
Into Jotunheim
The company travels “eastward and northward, into Jotunheim,” the land of the jotnar giants. After days of travel they reach a vast wilderness where they find a huge hall with a wide door. Inside, an enormous figure lies snoring, and a small companion is described, with characteristic Norse visual humour, as having “a wooden leg” — the man, named Skrýmir, agrees to share the hall with them and to share a bag of food. In the night Thor, who has not eaten enough, tries three times to smash Skrýmir’s head with Mjölnir, but each time the giant awakes merely asking whether a leaf has fallen on him. Skrýmir disappears, and at dawn the travelers find that the entire hall was an enchanted illusion, leaving them in a great forest.
The episode is read by many scholars as a parody of a standard folk tale — a giant’s home that turns out to be an apparition — and it sets up the central conceit: nothing in Útgarðr is what it seems.
The Citadel of Útgarðr
The travelers continue and eventually come to a great citadel with walls “so high you could not see over them” and a gate that opens only by lifting a horizontal bar. They pass through and are presented to the lord, Útgarða-Loki — “Loki of the Outer Enclosure” — whose name signals his kinship with the trickster god but is here a giant in his own right. Útgarða-Loki welcomes them but warns that, among the warriors of his hall, none is small enough to be impressed by their feats, and only a few will agree to take part in contests. The wry setup, with its mixture of menace and politeness, sets the tone for the rest of the tale.
The First Contest: Eating
Útgarða-Loki proposes that Loki compete in eating against an entity called Logi (“Wildfire” or “Flame”). The trough is set down, and the competitors eat from opposite ends. They meet in the middle, but Loki has only eaten the meat, while Logi has eaten the meat, the bone, and the trough itself. The verdict: Loki loses. Snorri comments that Loki, clever as he is, had to yield to brute elemental force.
The Second Contest: Thor’s Cat
The next test pits Thor against a great grey cat. Thor, attempting to lift it from the floor, succeeds only in arching the cat’s back. The judges say that the cat was, in fact, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, who encircles the world, and that Thor had actually lifted one of its paws high enough to nearly detach it from the world — an astonishing image in which Thor’s strength is found to be enormous by cosmic standards, even if not enough to break the world.
The Third Contest: The Drinking Horn
The third test requires Thor to drink a large horn of mead in three draughts. He strains so hard that his feet punch through the floor; he manages two and a half gulps, but cannot finish. Snorri reveals that the horn’s far end was in the sea, and that Thor, with his draughts, had created the tides — the two and a half draughts being the principal tidal shifts.
The Fourth Contest: Wrestling Old Age
In the final and most allegorical of the contests, an old nurse, Elli (“Old Age”), wrestles Thor. Thor, the god of storms and the oak-defender, cannot throw her; the two of them lock and bend, and when at last Thor kneels, Elli throws him. Snorri explains that Elli is personified Old Age itself, and that no one, no matter how mighty, can stand up to her for long.
The Revelation
After the contests, the travelers spend the night. At dawn, Útgarða-Loki walks them out of his realm. Just as they cross the gates, the lord finally reveals himself: “We have been deceiving you,” he says, “by my cunning. I brought you illusions, and I am astonished that you have withstood them as long as you did.” The cat, he confirms, was the world-serpent; the drinking horn reached into the ocean; Elli was Old Age; the bag-of-food giant was Útgarða-Loki himself; the three blows Thor struck on Skrýmir’s skull were, in fact, blows against a mountain, where they can still be seen as three great square indentations.
Thor, in fury, raises his hammer to strike Útgarða-Loki, but the lord vanishes — and the citadel vanishes with him. Thor turns and sees only a vast plain stretching away, and the disappointed god trudges home, having learned that no one escapes the reach of age, that the cosmos can deceive even gods, and that he is just barely able to lift the world.
Sources and Composition
The story is found in no surviving poem; it appears in the Prose Edda only, written down in Iceland in the early 13th century. Scholars debate its age: some argue that Snorri drew on oral tales of the kind that gave rise to the poem Þrymskviða (the “Lay of Thrym”) in the Poetic Edda, in which Thor travels to giant-land to recover Mjölnir. Others treat the Þórsför as a late, learned composition by Snorri himself. The contests are rich with cosmological symbolism: each one pairs Thor with an elemental force (fire, the sea, the world-serpent, old age), and each confirms that even the god of thunder is part of a larger natural order.
Why the Story Matters
The tale of Útgarða-Loki is the most fully developed story of Thor in the Prose Edda and one of the longest, taking up several chapters. It defines Thor in three key ways: he is immensely strong by any standard; he is the friend of humankind, who defends humans even when the giants threaten; and he is mortal in the sense that the world itself outlasts him. Together with the myth of how Odin lost his eye, the tale paints a picture of the Norse gods as beings whose power is real but whose reach is bounded by the cosmos they belong to.
The Burlesque Structure of the Tale
Many modern scholars have read the Þórsför as a literary burlesque — a conscious parody of heroic epic conventions. Thor, the strongest of the gods, is repeatedly shown trying feats of strength that turn out to be utterly impossible by cosmic standards. The fact that he succeeds at all — lifting one paw of the world-serpent, creating the tides, denting a mountain — is, in the structure of the tale, both an affirmation of his greatness and an admission of his limits. The narrative tone of the Gylfaginning is, in this respect, closer to medieval romance than to heroic epic: the hero is tested, the hero fails by a hair, the hero discovers he was tested by beings beyond his reach.
The burlesque tone is reinforced by Snorri’s choice of names. Skrýmir’s name can be glossed as “boaster” or “swaggerer,” and Útgarða-Loki’s name — “Loki of the Outer Enclosure” — combines the trickster’s name with a liminal place. The structure is one of layered deceits: the travelers are deceived by Skrýmir, who is himself revealed to be Útgarða-Loki, who is himself a master of illusion. The image of layers of deception, with Thor at the bottom unable to penetrate them, is one of the most striking in the saga.
The Pattern of the Hero’s Three Attempts
The structure of the tale follows a common folk-tale pattern: a hero attempts a feat three times, fails each time, and on the third attempt is stopped by the very thing he was trying to overcome. The pattern appears in many of the great heroic narratives of the Indo-European world — most famously in the three attempts of Odin’s spear against the rock of the giants in the Hávamál. The pattern of three attempts is a feature of the medieval Scandinavian narrative tradition, and it is one of the most common narrative structures in the surviving sources.
In the Þórsför, the three attempts are explicit. Skrýmir is hit three times with Mjölnir, and each time wakes without harm. The cat is lifted three times, and each time the cat is higher. The horn is drunk from three times, and each time the level is lower but not empty. The pattern is one of repeated attempts, repeated failures, and a final revelation that the failures were, in fact, successes. The reading has been treated in modern scholarship, and it is one of the most common narrative structures in the medieval Scandinavian sources.
Thor as the Defender of the Human World
The tale is, in addition, a meditation on Thor’s role as the defender of the human world. The journey to Útgarðr takes the god of thunder to the far north, to the place where the giants are at home, and the contests test his ability to face the beings of the wild. The result is a mixed one: Thor is shown to be enormously strong by any standard, but the cosmos is shown to be larger than his strength. The reading matches with the medieval Scandinavian imagination of the god as a defender of the human world, and it has been the subject of modern interpretation.
The image of Thor as the defender of the human world is one of the most famous in the Norse tradition. The image of the god, riding across the sky in his chariot, defending the world of humans from the giants, is one of the most enduring in the medieval Scandinavian sources. The tale of Útgarða-Loki is, in this sense, a major expression of the Norse concept of the god as defender of the world, and it has been the subject of modern interpretation.
Why the Snake Is Almost a Triumph
A common question about the tale is why Snorri has Thor fail to kill the world-serpent. The answer, in the structure of the tale, is that the killing of the serpent is reserved for the final battle at Ragnarok, where Thor will kill the serpent and die from its venom. The Útgarða-Loki episode is, in this sense, a prelude to the final battle: the god encounters the serpent in disguise, fails to kill it, and the killing is postponed to the end of the world.
The reading matches with the medieval Scandinavian imagination of the cosmic order. The killing of the world-serpent is, in the Norse tradition, an event of cosmic significance, and it cannot be reduced to an episode in a single journey. The image of the god, encountering the serpent in disguise and failing to kill it, is the image of the god’s destiny postponed. The reading has been treated in modern scholarship, and it has shaped the way the tale is understood.
The Modern Reception of the Tale
The tale of Útgarða-Loki has drawn attention from many modern adaptations. The most famous is the 19th-century opera cycle of Richard Wagner, in which a similar journey is depicted. The image of the god of thunder, traveling to the realm of the giants, has drawn attention from many modern works of fiction, and the tale has been the subject of modern interpretation.
The tale is also a focus of modern academic study. The 20th-century scholar Jan de Vries discussed the tale in his Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, arguing that it is a composite of older folkloric elements that Snorri brought together in a single narrative. The reading appears in the medieval sources, and has been the subject of modern interpretation. The tale is, in this sense, one of the most important in the Norse mythological tradition, and it is likely to continue to be a focus of modern attention.