Seiðr Loom

giant

Baugi

Suttungr's brother, who hires the disguised Odin to replace nine dead farmhands, then bores into the mountain where the mead of poetry is hidden and tries to cheat him.

Baugi is Suttungr's brother and appears only in Snorri's account of the mead of poetry Skáldskaparmál 1. Odin first gets Baugi's nine thralls to kill each other in a scramble for a whetstone. Then he arrives at Baugi's farm, calling himself Bölverkr. Baugi complains that he has lost his workers; Bölverkr offers to do nine men's work in exchange for one drink of Suttungr's mead.

After the summer's work, Suttungr refuses to pay, so Baugi helps Odin steal the mead. He drills into the mountain Hnitbjörg with Odin's auger Rati. He claims he is through, but when Odin blows into the hole the chips fly back out. On the second try they blow inward. Odin slips through as a snake, and Baugi stabs at him with the auger and misses Skáldskaparmál 1.

That is all we know of him. Hávamál mentions the auger ("The mouth of Rati made room for my passage") but not Baugi Hávamál 105.

In the sources

Quoted from the hosted translations; each line is checked against the text when the site is built. Select a reference to read it in context.

Odin sought a night's lodging with the giant who is called Baugi, Suttungr's brother.
Skáldskaparmál 1 Baugi enters the story as Odin's employer.
Then he discovered that Baugi would have deceived him, and he bade him bore through the rock.
Skáldskaparmál 1 Baugi pretends to have drilled through the mountain.

Where the sources disagree or fall silent

  • Baugi appears only in Snorri. Hávamál tells the story without him, and gives the boring to the auger Rati alone (Hávamál 105).

Myths with Baugi

The mead of poetry From the spittle of the gods' peace comes Kvasir, wisest of beings; from his blood two dwarfs brew a mead that makes poets. It passes to the giant Suttungr, and Odin wins it by labour, seduction and theft, flying home as an eagle.

Related

Suttungr The giant who takes the mead of poetry from the dwarves as compensation for his father's murder, hides it inside a mountain with his daughter Gunnlöð, and loses it to Odin. Odin Óðinn Chief of the Æsir: a one-eyed god of wisdom, poetry, magic, war and the dead, who gave an eye and hanged himself on a tree for knowledge, and who dies at Ragnarök. Gunnlöð Suttungr's daughter, set to guard the mead of poetry inside a mountain. Odin spends three nights with her and leaves with all the mead; Hávamál remembers her as a woman he wronged. The mead of poetry skáldskapar mjaðar The mead brewed from the blood of the wise Kvasir: whoever drinks it becomes a poet or a scholar. Odin steals it from the giant Suttungr and gives it to the gods and to poets. The giants (jötnar) jötnar The giants of Norse myth: the oldest race in the world, descended from Ymir, wise and often wealthy, enemies of the gods yet their kin, their wives and their mothers.