Gripla - 20.12.2005, Page 205

fiÓRR’S TRAVEL COMPANIONIN H Y M I S K V I ‹ A 203
amends, the farmer offers fiórr both his children, fijálfi and Rƒskva, and fiórr
leaves his goats for safekeeping with this unnamed farmer while he, fijálfi,
Rƒskva and Loki carry on eastwards to the hall of Útgar›a-Loki. It seems
certain that the last two lines of Hymiskvi›a 38 refer to the children offered to
fiórr, and it is usually assumed that the hraunbúi ‘rock-dweller’ (= giant) of
Hymiskvi›a 38 is the farmer and goat-keeper of Gylfaginning 44, who is
accordingly identified with the goat-keeper Egill in Hymiskvi›a 7.13
Snorri imputes the goat’s lameness to fijálfi, not Loki, and fiórr and Loki
are not traveling to or from Hymir in his account as they head east to Útgar›a-
Loki. And yet Loki is fiórr’s companion when: 1) fiórr visits the goat-keeper;
2) the goat suffers an injury; 3) fiórr receives two children as reparation for the
injury of the goat; and 4) fiórr is on one of his visits east to giant-land. It is
conceivable that fiórr’s goats did not figure originally in the cauldron-adven-
ture of Hymiskvi›a, but it is at all events difficult to see how they could have
entered the narrative and appear there as they do without Loki being fiórr’s
travel companion.
5
Now if the word t‡r in Hymiskvi›a 4 is originally intended as the common
noun meaning ‘god’, then Loki seems an apposite referent for a number of
reasons:
Firstly, one might recall that Loki is called t‡r in Haustlƒng 8, and Loki
was certainly counted among the tívar.
Secondly, though he was usually counted among the gods, Loki was the
son of a giant. His father is given the descriptive name Fárbauti ‘Anger (or
Evil)-striker’ in a few sources,14 but of him we know only that he was imagin-
ed to be a giant (as his name indicates) and the husband of the otherwise un-
known Laufey or Nál, Loki’s mother. Loki’s father might of course have pos-
sessed more than one name like many other mythological figures, including
13 For further discussion see von See et al. 1997:290-291 and 359.
14 Loki is referred to as the son of Fárbauti, Fárbauta mƒgr, in Haustlƒng 5 and Húsdrápa 2. In
Gylfaginning 33, Snorri calls Loki sonr Fárbauta jƒtuns, and he also calls him sonr Fárbauta
in Skáldskaparmál 16. This may simply be based on the aforementioned stanzas in Haustlƒng
and Húsdrápa, which are cited in Snorra Edda. Loki’s father is named Fárbauti also in Sƒrla
þáttr, which is preserved in the late 14th-century Flateyjarbók, where the gods are euhe-
merized and Fárbauti is called both a maðr and karl.