Garmr

Garmr appears in the Völuspá inside a refrain the seeress repeats three times as the end of the world advances: now Garmr howls loud before Gnipahellir, the fetter will break and the ravener run free. That is everything the poem says about him, and it is worth noticing what it does not say. The fetter has no name: the text uses the ordinary word for chain, festr, and never christens it. Calling it the hope of the gods, or anything else, is a modern addition that probably comes by contagion from Gleipnir, which really is the proper name of Fenrir's fetter and really does appear in the sources. Nor is it known where Gnipahellir is: the name means something like the cave of the crag, it never recurs in any other Norse text, and nobody has managed to place it in the geography the Eddas describe. The dog is bound before a cave mouth that exists only in that verse.

The duel with Tyr, in which the two kill each other, is told by Snorri Sturluson in the Gylfaginning, in these words: Heimdall and Loki fight and kill each other, and so do Tyr and the dog Garm from the Gnipa Cave. It is the only source that says so. The Völuspá describes Ragnarök parcelled out in pairs (Odin against the wolf, Thor against the serpent, Freyr against Surt) and never assigns Garmr an opponent, so part of the scholarship suspects that the pairing with Tyr was composed by Snorri himself to balance the books, because Tyr was short of an enemy. This is not a gratuitous charge of invention: Snorri writes in Christian Iceland in the thirteenth century, two hundred years after the conversion, and his job is precisely to arrange into continuous prose a body of material that reached him in verse, scattered and sometimes contradictory. This entry therefore reports it for what it is: Snorri's version, useful and venerable, but not a datum of the poem.

Garmr is not a jailer of souls nor a devourer of spirits: the sources credit him with neither, and everything told along those lines is material later than the nineteenth century. His function rests on two gestures, and both are simple. The first is being tied up, which is what measures time: as long as the chain holds, the world stands. The second is barking, and that bark threatens no one in particular, it warns. In the Völuspá the bark is not the attack, it is the clock: the seeress slips it three times between the stanzas of disaster, like someone striking the quarters before the hour. What Garmr guards, then, is less a gate than a deadline.

The usual picture of Garmr is a huge wolf, and the two sources that name him say something else. Snorri calls him the dog Garm, using the word hundr. And the Grímnismál puts him in a very specific list, the best of each kind: Yggdrasil among trees, Skíðblaðnir among ships, Odin among gods, Sleipnir among horses, Bifröst among bridges, Bragi among poets, Hábrók among hawks, and Garmr among hounds. He does not appear in a list of monsters but in a list of excellences, next to the world ash and the rainbow bridge.

The confusion with the wolf comes from two places. One is the Völuspá refrain itself: the line following Garmr howls speaks of the freki, the ravener, which almost everyone reads as Fenrir, and from there it is one step to supposing that Garmr and Fenrir are the same being. Many philologists have taken that step, and the hypothesis is respectable, but it cannot be proved from what survives. The other is Mánagarmr, the moon-hound, whom Snorri does describe as a wolf of the iron wood who will swallow the moon and stain the sky with blood. They share half a word and are not the same being.

In the poem Baldrs draumar, Odin rides towards Hel to ask a dead seeress why his son is having nightmares. On the way a dog comes out of Hel to meet him, its breast stained with blood and its jaws craving slaughter; it barks at the father of incantations and howls at him a long while before letting him pass. The poem never names it.

Almost everyone takes it for granted that this dog is Garmr, and the assumption is reasonable, since there is no other dog posted there. But the identification cannot be proved, and it is worth saying so because it explains why the figure is so blurred. Garmr is in fact three loose appearances in three different texts: a repeated refrain, a list of excellences and one sentence of thirteenth-century prose, plus this nameless dog that barks at Odin. He is a character assembled from four pieces that may not even belong to the same set. Everything else usually told about him (that he devours souls, breathes fire, drags the dead down) was written much later, when Nordic romanticism began filling in the gaps.

Garmr's post is not exclusively Norse. In Greece, Cerberus guards the gates of Hades and does exactly the same thing in reverse: he lets everyone in and no one out. In the Rigveda, the god Yama has two four-eyed dogs, the offspring of Saramā, who watch the road of the dead, and the funeral hymn asks them directly to let the deceased pass and to escort him. Three peoples with related languages posted a dog at the gate of the afterlife, and in all three cases the dog does not judge: it only controls passage.

Attempts to turn that resemblance into linguistic kinship have not taken. In 1991 Bruce Lincoln proposed that Garmr and Kerberos came from an Indo-European root meaning to growl; the idea is elegant and little accepted, just like the nineteenth-century etymology that made Kerberos a relative of Sanskrit śabala, the spotted one. The motif recurs with impressive constancy; the names, as far as anyone can tell, do not.