Angrboda

Angrboða is a giantess of Jötunheim whose name means «the one who announces the pain» or «the one who brings the affliction», and in Norse mythology the names are destiny. The sources that mention her are scarce but decisive: the eddic poem Hyndluljóð calls her the old giantess with whom Loki engendered the wolf, and the Prose Edda of Snorri details that from that union three children came out. She is not a primordial power nor a goddess: she is a jötunn, and that condition matters, because Norse mythology does not separate gods and giants as pure bands but as lineages that mix one and another time. The own Odin descends from giants by maternal way, and Loki, father of his children, is son of giants welcomed among the Æsir.

From Angrboða and Loki are born Fenrir the wolf, Jörmungandr the serpent that girds the world and Hel, lady of the dead. Snorri recounts that the gods, warned by prophecies of the harm they would cause, went to seek them in Jötunheim and distributed them to neutralize them: Odin threw Jörmungandr into the sea that surrounds the earth, where it grew until biting its own tail; he dispatched Hel to Niflheim and gave her authority over the dead who do not fall in combat; and Fenrir they raised among them in Asgard until his size terrified them and they chained him with Gleipnir, the magical bond. None of the three measures prevents anything: the three creatures fulfill their role in Ragnarök exactly as feared.

The Gylfaginning speaks of an old giantess who inhabits the Járnviðr, the Iron Forest east of Midgard, and who there raises a lineage of wolves, among them those who pursue the sun and the moon until devouring them at the end of the world. Tradition has tended to identify that witch with Angrboða, although Snorri does not say it expressly. The reading fits: the mother of the wolf Fenrir as mother of all the wolves that end with the light. Her figure thus functions as the exact reverse of the divine attempt to control destiny, because each measure that the gods take against her offspring is precisely what pushes it to fulfillment. It is one of the scarce figures of Norse myth whose importance is measured entirely by her children.