When the wolf found himself unable to break free, he bit off Tyr’s arm. When Fenrir laid eyes on the chain that would eventually bind him, he was suspicious, and declared that he would only allow the gods to put it around him if one of them would stick an arm in his mouth as a pledge of good faith. The gods feared for their lives, so they endeavored to tie up Fenrir in fetters from which he couldn’t escape.
The dreadful wolf Fenrir was only a pup, but he was growing quickly. īut the most compelling evidence for Tyr’s role as divine jurist – and a heroic one at that – comes from the tale of The Binding of Fenrir, the only surviving myth to feature Tyr prominently. Those Roman inscriptions to him as “Mars,” for example, sometimes invoke him as Mars Thincsus – that is, Mars of the Þing, the ancient Germanic legal assembly. In fact, his primary role seems to be that of an upholder of law and justice. This connection survives in the modern English “Tuesday,” from Old English “Day of Tiw (Tyr)” ( Tiwesdæg), which was in turn based on the Latin Dies Martis, “Day of Mars.” (The Romans’ identification of Tyr with Mars also reinforces the point that he was quite a significant god otherwise they surely wouldn’t have identified him with one of their own major gods.)īut Tyr is far from only a war god. Some centuries earlier, the Romans identified Tyr with Mars, their own principal war god. Another Eddic poem, the Lokasenna, corroborates this picture by having Loki insult Tyr by saying that he could only stir people to strife, and could never reconcile them. For example, in the Sigrdrífumál, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, the valkyrie Sigrdrifa instructs the human hero Sigurd to invoke Tyr for victory in battle. Tyr’s role as one of the principal war gods of the Norse, along with Odin and Thor, is well-attested in sources from the Viking Age and earlier. Other kinds of evidence show us that Tyr was once one of the most important gods to the Norse and other Germanic peoples. His role in the surviving Viking Age myths is relatively slight, and his status in the later part of the Viking Age may have been correspondingly minor.
Tyr (pronounced like the English word “tier” Old Norse Týr, Old English Tiw, Old High German *Ziu, Gothic Tyz, Proto-Germanic *Tiwaz, “god” ) is a Norse war god, but also the god who, more than any other, presides over matters of law and justice.
The Swastika – Its Ancient Origins and Modern (Mis)use.