ᛒᛁᛋᛏᛚᛅ Bestla

The Marriage of Borr

Snorri sets out the pedigree of the Æsir in a single breath: Búri was the first, licked out of the salt rime-stones by the cow Auðhumla; his son was Borr, 'who married the woman named Bestla, daughter of the giant Bǫlþorn, and they had three sons: the first was called Óðinn, the second Vili, the third Vé'. With that one sentence the gods acquire a giantess for a grandmother, and the whole subsequent history of the cosmos — the killing of Ymir, the making of the world from his body, the gifts to the first humans Ask and Embla — is set in motion by Óðinn and his brothers, Bestla's sons.

The genealogy is never treated as a scandal in the sources; it is simply stated, like a fact of weather. Yet its implications run through the whole mythology: the Æsir are kin to the jötnar they fight, and the Allfather himself is half a giant by the mother's side.

The Uncle's Nine Songs

Bestla's one appearance in the Poetic Edda is indirect and extraordinary. Óðinn, recounting his winning of wisdom, says: 'Nine mighty spells I got from the famed son of Bǫlþorn, Bestla's father, and I got a draught of the precious mead, poured from Óðrǫrir.' The famed son of Bǫlþorn is Bestla's brother — Óðinn's maternal uncle. On the giants' side of his own blood, the god who would later hang nine nights on the tree for the runes first received songs of power from his mother's kin.

Scholars have long noted how precisely this fits the old Germanic pattern Tacitus describes: the special bond between a man and his mother's brother, the avunculate, held sacred among the Germanic peoples. In the one place the Edda lets Bestla's family act, it acts as a mother's family should — teaching, gifting, initiating her son.

Among the Names of Giantesses

Outside the two narratives, the tradition files Bestla where it thinks she belongs: the þulur, the great rhymed name-lists appended to the Prose Edda's Skáldskaparmál, count her among the heiti of troll-women — the giantesses of the old world. The lists are verse-fodder for skalds, catalogues of names to be fitted into kennings, and they preserve dozens of jötunn names that no surviving myth ever uses: threats, brides, and ancestresses kept on the shelf like tools. Bestla alone among them is the mother of the gods. The catalogue keeps her with her own kind even as the genealogy marries her out of it — the two facts the sources never try to reconcile, because they never saw a contradiction. For the compiler, a goddess could be a giant's daughter and the queen of the Æsir at once; the categories 'enemy' and 'kin' had not yet hardened into the opposites later retellings needed. Her name in the list is the whole of her cult: filed, remembered, and unexplained.