INTRO
 
Welcome to CHAPTER 58 of the Kinsmen Die podcast, home of fantasy fiction based on Norse mythology that’s written and read by me, Matt Bishop.

In this podcast I read my first novel, Kinsmen Die, one chapter at a time. And, with each episode, when it makes sense, I provide some commentary about the source materials I’ve referenced in the text.

We’re back with Odin in this chapter. While rescuing his uncle Mimir from a trap in the spirit world, Odin was badly wounded by a draugr. Last chapter we were with Frigg; she and Mimir conversed while Odin lay mostly unconscious nearby — though he was awake long enough to say he would raise Angrboda from the dead to get answers from her about the weird ritual in her house—which is where Mimir was trapped. At the end of the last chapter Frigg left to fetch Sleipnir so that she could get Odin back to Baldr for more thorough healing. So, Odin is awake now and kinda not happy.

Chapter Fifty-Eight
Odin
Angrboda. Loki’s first wife. Witch. Mother of three monsters who, the Norns said, would someday cause the death of the Aesir. But they hadn’t said why or how, and Loki’s three children were just newly born when the Norns spoke their prophecy.
Odin had taken Loki to the Norns so that he could learn for himself what lay ahead for his children—the doom of the Aesir. Loki’s expression on hearing those words was still etched into his memory. Shock. Anguish. Anger. Yet as he’d turned to face Odin, hope had burned in his face like the summer sun.
But had it been hope?
He’d thought so at the time. It had not been fear. Loki didn’t fear anything. Loki had grabbed his shoulders, his hands hotter than his intent gaze, and simply said, “Please. There has to be another way.”
Loki hadn’t invoked their oath of brotherhood, which lay between them like the blood price covering Otr’s corpse. But how could he have kept that blood oath if doing so meant the future destruction of the Aesir?
So they stood before the Norns, their old, well-tested vow conflicting with this future doom. He didn’t say anything to Loki. He didn’t need to. His blood brother was completely aware of his turmoil. It was as plain on Loki’s face, as it must have been on his own.
He didn’t break his oath. Instead, he bent it. Rather than kill his brother’s babies because of the Norns’ prophecy, he let them grow up, hoping—foolishly, as it turned out—that because Loki and Angrboda knew the prophecy, they could steer their children from that doom.
Besides, he had reasoned, he could always kill them later. But you could never unbreak a jug.
With each passing winter, the three children had grown increasingly monstrous. And every Midwinter, he and Loki returned to the Norns and asked again for the prophecy. It never changed. Many of his jarls bent his ear, urging him to do what the Norns bid.
He resisted their counsel for a long time, but once Loki’s children nearly reached their full growth, he knew he had to act. Loki had known it, too.
Even now, the memory of Loki’s face was fresh—his friend’s eyes bright with unshed tears and his hands, hotter than forge-tongs, gripping his shoulders.
Again, he bent his oath. He merely banished the three children. The three monsters. Two he’d bound with his power, but the oldest, Fenrir, shook off his charms like dust. Trickery and Svartalvar craftsmanship eventually prevailed, though not without cost.
Loki had said he understood, that the Norns were as cruel as they were kind. And then he asked a boon: to know the way to his children.
Of course he’d shown Loki how to reach his children. How could he not? It was a small thing to grant, considering he’d just robbed his blood brother of his children.
It wasn’t until many winters later, after Hodr’s blinding, that he’d begun to distrust what the Norns said. Kneeling here now, wounded and bleeding, he wondered if he should have distrusted their prophecy about Loki’s children.
Unlike her husband, Angrboda had never accepted her children’s exile. She never forgave him, either. But what mother truly forgave any injury done to her child? Within ten winters of her children’s exile, Angrboda rejoined the Gap, shrieking with hatred for him.
And yet Loki had forgiven him?
Did that make sense?
He conjured up the memory of Loki’s blazing-hot hands on his shoulders. He saw it from afar, like he’d climbed a longship’s tall mast and he was trying to figure out if the ship on the horizon was friend or foe even as Sól set behind it.
As he focused on the memory, fingers pushing hard on his temples, ignoring his pounding head wound, a bit of sound shook loose, the wet thwack of rope on sail. It was Loki speaking to him, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He splashed cool water from Mimir’s spring upon his face. Immediately, the memory clarified. Loki spoke: I can’t stop you, Ygg. We both know that. Yet I’m strong enough to do this.
The memory skipped and sputtered, water on a pan. He splashed more water on his face and he swam into cool shadows beneath a darkening sky. The memory of Loki’s voice returned...
Oathbreaker! I saw it in your eyes. You would have murdered my children, had I not convinced you to exile them. And on the word of those crones? How many boons have I brought to the Aesir? How many humiliations have I suffered? How much mockery? I’ll endure more, “Brother,” since I can’t stop you. But I will have my revenge—maybe not within a ten-span of winters. Or maybe even a hundred. But I will have it. And I say this knowing that someday you’ll pierce this veil I draw over your memories. I will free my children. And when I do, we will destroy everything you’ve built. We will set such a fire to your works that the heavens themselves will burn.
With a gasp, Odin flung himself back from the bubbling spring. He thudded against the grass and his head pounded, both from his wound and the utter horror of his own blindness. His own stupidity. How could he not have remembered this?
“Odin! What is it?”
He was so lost in himself that it took a moment before he recognized Mimir’s voice.
“It’s Loki, Uncle,” he said, his voice sounding dead and horrified even to his own ears.
“What?”
He pushed himself up and faced Mimir. “Loki. He’s behind all of this.”
“Behind what?”
“The trap you were caught in—and those draugr.”
“That’s absurd. He doesn’t have the power to trap me, let alone you.”
“I’m not so sure. He set a charm on me that I’ve only now broken. He swore to destroy everything I’ve built—because I exiled his children. And you were caught in his wife’s house.”
Mimir stared back at him, eyes thoughtful.
“He said I broke my oath of brotherhood with him. I had told him I could not—would not—trade the future of the Aesir for three lives.”
A frown creased Mimir’s face. “The Norns’ prophecy put you in an impossible situation, Odin. You bent as far as you could while accommodating your loyalty to Loki.”
“In this memory, Loki said that the exile was his idea, that I’d intended to kill his children.”
“Only you can say if that’s true.”
Was it? He cast back through his memory, but the events and words and faces were like dappled sunlight on a forest floor. He shook his head, and the wound across his forehead flared like sunlight on spears…and then the pounding began. He gritted his teeth, trying to think clearly despite the pain.
“Maybe there was another way out of the doom the Norns foretold. I’ve since learned the tricks they play with words.” 
“They do,” Mimir said. “But their prophecies also come true, as we all learned with Baldr.”
Odin glanced down at the rippling water and then back up at his uncle. “But they didn’t say Hodr would lose his sight because we protected Baldr. They only said that to save Baldr, we’d have to protect him. It was Frigg’s idea to set his spirit in the mistletoe.”
“Perhaps Hodr was doomed to lose his sight no matter what you did to protect Baldr. All that happened was how the events played out. Or maybe—”
“Hodr was never meant to be blind, but by protecting Baldr we traded one tragedy for another.” Or was it that he’d been told about Baldr’s potential death as a way to get him and Frigg to use that old Jotunn magic to protect him? If the Norns could see what would happen to Baldr, then they could certainly see how they’d choose to protect him. But why would that matter—and how did it make any more sense than the other explanation?
He splashed more water in his face and let it soak into the bandage on his head and run through his hair and down his back. But the pounding, the hammering, continued.
Mimir seemed to understand what he was thinking. “It’s impossible to see how all events unfold. Maybe there are multiple routes to the same doom and we just get to pick between them without ever realizing what choices we’re making. Or, as I said to Frigg, perhaps we have no choice at all.”
Impossible. No ability to choose? He refused to believe that. If he knew more, he could pick better paths. The Norns saw the paths. Why not him?
There were many ways across a sea. Some past great floes of ice, others on warm currents to lush islands. The more he sailed, the more routes he knew. The same must be true of the future. The more he knew, the better the path—and thus the better doom. And if that weren’t true, he’d make it that way. He shaped his future, no one else.
He shook his head, laughed despite the hammer pounding against his skull, and leaned over the spring to stare at his bandaged, bloody reflection, distorted by the ripples. All his power, all his sacrifices, himself to himself, had clearly not been enough.
“What are you thinking, Odin?” Mimir asked, a wary note in his voice.
“Just that nothing I’ve done is enough. Hanging upon the tree wasn’t enough. Seizing the runes and commanding the dead and learning seidr and mastering all those charms you taught me, Uncle—none of it’s enough.”
“Much of it has helped. You brought me back—”
“To a life that you hate.”
“Yes, but what I see helps you, helps our people.”
Odin snorted.
“Do you trust these new memories, Odin? I watched you splash water on your face. Frigg told me of the trouble you had with the creature who calls them home.”
He looked up at his uncle’s wizened, tattooed head, dripping wet, long gray hair clinging to Yggdrasil’s bark. Could he even trust Mimir, immersed as he was? If that thing below the well could nearly destroy him, surely manipulating his uncle’s mind—as well as his own—was also possible.
But if that were true, he couldn’t trust anyone or anything. The fruit that kept them young came from Yggdrasil, and its roots drank from these same waters.
No. Nothing was that powerful. Not Aegir. Not Rán. And if not them, then certainly not some creature lashing out at him from the dark.
Even so, he’d been a blind, stupid fool. Had he been charmed by Loki? Or had it been this...serpent…from the waters? Neither was preferable. Both alternatives meant that he’d been weak-minded. Blind.
He laughed again, mocking himself. He had been blind? No, he was blind.
His gaze lingered on Frigg’s slender knife, still lying where she’d dropped it by the spring.
He stared down past his distorted image into the cool waters that had seemingly brought clarity. If those memories were false, he needed to see through them, too. If he couldn’t trust this place, he’d have to reclaim it.
Pain flared in his side where the spear had bitten. That had been his first true sacrifice, himself to himself; there had been many since then. He and Frigg continued to give up unlived years to preserve Baldr. Just like the eyes Hodr had given up unwittingly so that his brother would live.
Tyr had given his hand; Freyja, her body; Freyr, his sword.
What had he given? Not enough.
He snatched up Frigg’s blade and bared it.
“Odin, what are you doing?” The worried note was back in Mimir’s voice.
Don’t worry, Uncle. Hodr gave his sight. Tyr gave his hand. He would give an eye so that he might see more clearly.
With one hand, he pulled his eyelids back. With his other, he raised the slender blade. A part of him tried to shrink back from the approach of the cold skymetal, but he grabbed that cowardly fragment of his mind and held it steady. Just like his hand and the unwavering blade.
“Odin, stop!” Mimir shouted hoarsely, the death scrabble of a man’s heels upon stone. “Frigg! Get back here now!”
He didn’t flinch when the cold blade touched the tender skin just below his eye. But in that chilly instant, his inner coward almost won, almost made him fling the blade far away.
Myself to myself.
I shape my own doom.
The slender blade’s first cut was a nibble. The second, well, he hauled in a ragged, shaking breath. Guided by his own distorted reflection, he cut true. And he did not scream.
Not when the blade bit deep nor when the blood flowed or when sharp skymetal severed his eye’s root and it popped free. Nor did he scream when he held his slick orb in the palm of one hand.
His blood pattered on the crushed grass beneath his knees and then dripped into the pool, red ripples spread outward. His empty socket pounded like one of Bragi’s largest drums, but the beat was a friend to the agony that visited him when he’d pushed the spear through his own ribs.
From outside himself he looked down at the bloody white-and-gray orb in his hand, but he did not scream. Soon he would see more with it outside his flesh than when it had been a part of him.
Holding the slender blade steady, he cut the rune for “life” into the back of his eye. He whispered the rune word and breathed upon his eye, giving of his own life so that the rune would live and would, in turn, give life to his dead eye. 
Then he cast his sacrifice into the waters.
He didn’t scream when it splashed into the water. He watched it sink, spinning slowly, trailing blood, the hair of a drowning man. Hot coppery blood pooled in his mouth. When his eye struck the pool’s gravelly bottom, he spoke the rune again.
His sacrifice flared golden and took root. Only then did Odin scream. 


OUTRO
Well, folks, that was CHAPTER 58 of Kinsmen Die. I hope you enjoyed it.

So, yeah, Odin cut his own eye out and dropped it into the Well of Mimir, which is what Odin does in the myths. 

There’s a lot going on in this chapter. First up, is the whole idea of the Norns’ prophecy that Loki’s three children by Angrboda — Hel, Jorm and Fenrir — would be the doom of the Aesir. 

How they do this … and what Odin does about it … is told in several places. But I’ll focus on Snorri’s Gylfaginning, chapter 34, which says that those three kids were: 

nourished in Jötunheim, and when the gods perceived by prophecy that from this kindred great misfortune should befall them; and since it seemed to all that there was great prospect of ill--(first from the mother's blood, and yet worse from the father's)-then Allfather sent gods thither to take the children and bring them to him. 

Note that Angrboda’s name means “the one who brings grief”

After that happened, Odin exiled the kids — Jorm to the seas, Hel to Niflheim but Fenrir the Wolf was the problematic one. 

He had grown so strong and powerful that the gods were afraid he could kill him. In a sequence called the Binding of the Wolf, the Aesir resorted to trickery —  basically saying: Wow, you’re so strong, but I bet you can’t break this chain. But Fenrir was so powerful that he broke each one they tried. 

It wasn’t until the last one, the chain Gleipnir, that was forged by the Svartalvar out of impossible things — that actually held him. But the Wolf was wary and refused to allow the chain till Tyr placed his hand into Fenrir’s mouth. The chain worked; Fenrir couldn’t break it as he broke all the others. And, while raging, Fenrir bit off Tyr’s hand.

The larger challenge for me as the writer was to give Odin a reason to exile these dangerous kids rather than just kill them which seemed like the thing Odin would do.

But, Odin and Loki are blood brothers. That oath was serious. He couldn’t just break it. That’s why he brought Loki to the Norns. He hoped that hearing the prophecy directly would convince Loki that the best course was to kill the kids.

Would that convince you?

It didn’t convince Loki. In that memory, Loki says he used magic to convince Odin to only exile his kids not kill them.

Apparently, it worked. Or did it? The waters that gave Odin a clear view of that memory are tainted, perhaps, by that serpent in the well. So Odin couldn’t trust the memory.

Which leads us to the sacrifice of his eye.

In the Prose Edda, section 15, Snorri quotes the Voluspa, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, to describe how Odin sacrificed his eye in exchange for a drink from the well. 

Snorri writes:

Mímir's Well — wherein wisdom and understanding are stored … he is called Mímir, who keeps the well. He is full of ancient lore, since he drinks of the well from the Gjallar-Horn. Thither came Allfather and craved one drink of the well; but he got it not until he had laid his eye in pledge.

This is how that same tale reads in the Voluspa. I’m reading both Bellows and Larrington.

Voluspa, Bellows, verses 28 and 29

28. Alone I sat when the Old One sought me,
The terror of gods, and gazed in mine eyes:
"What hast thou to ask? why comest thou hither?
Othin, I know where thine eye is hidden."

29. I know where Othin's eye is hidden,
Deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir;
Mead from the pledge of Othin each morn
Does Mimir drink: would you know yet more?

Voluspa, Larrington, Verse 29
29 Alone she sat outside, when the old man came,
the Terrible One of the Æsir and he looked in her eyes:
‘Why do you question me? Why do you test me?
I know all about it, Odin, where you hid your eye
in Mimir’s famous well.’
Mimir drinks mead every morning
from Father of the Slain’s pledge—do you want to know more: and what?

	⁃	
So you’ll note a few things: first is that Mimir drinks from the Gjallarhorn…which is Heimdall’s horn. I left that out of my Mimir’s well b/c I couldn’t figure out a way to reasonably incorporate it. And, I needed Heimdall’s horn with him at all times — he is the watchman of the gods, after all.

Next, Mimir in the myths says that Odin can drink from the well if he plucks out his eye. It’s certainly plausible that an uncle might require his nephew to give up something important to gain phenomenal cosmic knowledge, but the scene in the myth was too transactional. I wanted to deliver something that was very “in the moment,” gut-wrenching and visceral. Hopefully I delivered on that.

The idea from the myths is that Odin sacrificed his eye to gain wisdom and knowledge. But why an eye? Because “seeing” is associated with knowing, with clarity — you see what I’m saying? 
 
So, I tried to give Odin a reason to mutilate himself that was in keeping with his character. In the scene he feels that he’s been blind…been duped…been deceived…that he doesn’t know what’s what. 

He sacrifices his eye to see more clearly…to see through deceptions…to see all the different outcomes that branch from decisions made (which is something Mimir says is impossible and he’s been immersed in the waters for a very long time). 

So, he sacrifices himself to himself to gain power and knowledge that he didn’t have before. But it’s not just about power and knowledge for their own sake…or for himself; he wants to use what he gains to protect his family and his people.

Odin also mentions other sacrifices he’s made and that others have made. Tyr gave his hand to bind Fenrir. Freyja gave her body to gain the necklace she wears. Freyr gave his sword in exchange for a woman he wanted. And if you recall, in the memory Loki hid, Loki also cited everything he sacrificed for the Aesir and Odin.

And now just a few minor things — the myths never explicitly state which of Odin’s eye is missing nor does this chapter. 

If you go back and listen to the various chapters, you’ll notice that I refer to Odin’s eyes pretty often — and always in the plural. That was deliberate.

And in the past few chapters I referred several times to Frigg’s slender-bladed knife and I made sure she discarded it right where Odin would be. Chekov would be pleased.

This scene is also an example of how the Aesir in my books are “younger” than those described in the myths. My books are about how the Aesir became those mythic figures.

Next week, we’re back with Frigg.

Until then, if you have the time and inclination, please rate and/or review the podcast — that helps boost the show’s visibility. As does sharing it.
  
As always, I’m going to read from both the Bellows and Larrington translations of the Havamal, the sayings of the High One, Odin himself.

Bellows, Verse 58

He must early go forth who fain the blood
Or the goods of another would get;
The wolf that lies idle shall win little meat,
Or the sleeping man success.


Larrington, Verse 58
He should get up early, the man who means to take
another’s life or property;
seldom does the loafing wolf snatch the ham, nor a sleeping man victory.

This is the twisted version of “early bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”


Thanks for listening.