Týr

Týr is the Norse god of lawful combat and of law itself, and he bears the oldest name in the pantheon. It comes from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz, which descends from the same Indo-European root that produced Greek Zeus and Latin Iuppiter: the root of the god of the daylit sky. No Norse text says any of this, however. The reconstruction is the work of comparative philology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and from it springs the much-repeated but never-attested notion that Týr was the original sovereign of the sky and that Odin dethroned him. In the surviving sources Týr rules nothing at all. His name has moreover become a common noun meaning simply «god», and the skalds call the gods tívar in the plural. His most living trace is not in the Edda but in the calendar: Tuesday is the day of Mars in Latin, and in English it is the day of Týr.

«He is very daring and stout-hearted; he decides victory in war, and therefore warriors should call upon him.» The sentence is Snorri Sturluson's and stands in the Gylfaginning, that is, in the Prose Edda, written around 1220. This is worth stating precisely, because it is constantly credited to the Poetic Edda, which contains nothing of the sort: the old poems praise Týr nowhere at all, and the only one that gives him verses, the Lokasenna, does so in order to insult him. Snorri adds besides a warning that is almost never quoted: «he is not called a reconciler of men.» That is exactly the reproach Loki flings at him at Ægir's feast, telling him he never knew how to carry concord between two people. The god of law reconciles nobody. He determines who is in the right and who is not, which is a different thing and a considerably colder one.

The gods reared Fenrir among themselves, and only Týr dared come near enough to feed him; this is why Snorri calls him «the wolf's fosterer». When the cub grew until it frightened them, they did not bind him at the first attempt. They put on him a chain called Lœðingr, and he broke it. They forged another twice as strong, Drómi, and he broke that one too, and the wolf was delighted to have shown it in front of everyone. Only then did they commission from the dwarves the ribbon Gleipnir, soft as silk, made from the sound of a cat's footfall, a woman's beard, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. Fenrir grew suspicious precisely because it looked harmless, and demanded a pledge: that someone lay a hand in his mouth while he let himself be bound. Týr laid his in. When the ribbon tightened and the wolf could not break loose, everyone laughed except Týr, who lost the hand.

The sources do not agree about his father. In the Skáldskaparmál, Snorri lists how Týr is to be named in poetry («the one-handed god, the wolf's fosterer, the god of battles, son of Odin») and with that he makes him Thor's brother and an Æsir in full standing. The Hymiskviða, a poem of the Poetic Edda, tells something else. There Týr goes with Thor to the house of the giant Hymir to obtain a cauldron for the gods' ale, and he calls Hymir father. In the same scene he meets his grandmother, who has nine hundred heads and whom he loathes, and his mother, «the bright-browed one», who comes covered in gold and serves them drink. That is: in one text he is the son of the king of the gods, and in another the grandson of a nine-hundred-headed monster. This encyclopedia follows Snorri's genealogy, because it is the one that holds the rest of the pantheon together, but the contradiction is not concealed: it belongs to the figure as much as the missing hand does.

Týr is not merely a warrior: he is the god of the assembly. The Sigrdrífumál instructs whoever would win to carve the runes of victory «on the sword's hilt, on the guard and on the blade», and to name Týr twice while doing so. The rune that bears his name, ᛏ, is an arrow pointing upward. And there is a piece of material evidence that stands in no poem. In 1883, at the Roman fort of Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall, two altars came to light, dedicated between the years 222 and 235 by Frisian soldiers of Tuihanti, present-day Twente, «to the god Mars Thincsus». Thincsus comes from the Germanic word that yields thing, the judicial assembly of free men. It is the oldest known written mention of that institution, and for a good share of scholars it is also the oldest appearance of the god himself: not a warrior at the head of an army, but a god presiding over a court, a thousand years before Snorri wrote a single line about him.

Týr's end is not brought upon him by the wolf that left him one-handed. Snorri writes that at Ragnarök Garmr, bound before the cave Gnipahellir, will break loose, and that he and Týr «will kill one another». Fenrir has a different adversary reserved for him, Odin, and a different avenger, Víðarr. The symmetry is deliberate: the god who gave up a hand to chain a wolf is due to die fighting another chained hound, and to die at the same instant as it, with no victor. It is worth pointing out where this comes from, because it does not come from where it is usually said to. The duel is told by Snorri alone, in the Gylfaginning. The Völuspá, two centuries older, names Garmr howling before the cave and repeats that the wolf will break loose, but it does not say who kills him, nor that Týr is there at all. It is the same case as the hand and as the praise: the god's best-remembered episode depends, in the form in which it is told today, on a single Christian author of the thirteenth century.