Angrboda

Angrboda is the giantess with whom Loki had the three children the gods dreaded most: the wolf Fenrir, the World Serpent Jormungandr and Hel. Her name means “she who brings grief”, and two of her children will kill Odin and Thor at Ragnarok.

Almost everything known about her comes from Gylfaginning, the part of the Prose Edda that Snorri Sturluson wrote in Iceland around 1220. Snorri calls her simply a giantess in Jotunheim, where her children grow up. When prophecies warn the gods that great harm will come from the three, first because of their mother's nature and worse still because of their father's, Odin has them seized and brought before him. He throws the serpent into the ocean, where it grows until it circles the whole earth and bites its own tail. He casts Hel, half blue-black and half flesh-colored, into Niflheim and gives her power over nine worlds and over all who die of sickness or old age. The wolf the gods raise among themselves, and only Tyr dares to feed it, until they bind it with the fetter Gleipnir and Tyr loses his hand in its jaws. At Ragnarok Fenrir swallows Odin, and Thor kills the serpent but dies of its venom.

The only poem that names her is Hyndluljod, in the stanzas known as the Short Voluspa, which says that Loki fathered the wolf on Angrboda. No medieval text describes her, gives her a single word to speak or says what became of her. Calling her the giantess of Ironwood rests on a later identification: Voluspa tells of an old giantess who sits in Ironwood, in the east, breeding Fenrir's kin, and Snorri describes the same forest, but neither of them gives her a name.