Tyr and his Jotun Heritage

Like Skadi, another etin who has allied himself entirely with the Aesir is Tyr. In fact, he is so thoroughly enmeshed with them that we forget that according to the Hymskvida, he is the son of a fire-giant and a frost-thurse. Lyn writes again: "Tyr!  What a difficult Jotun from a Rokkatru perspective. I've learned a lot about doing what had to be done from Tyr. I think that he is more of a priest than others know. I think that he was/is a priest for the Aesir, teaching them about the time before they wrote themselves into legend. I think it was aligning himself with the new, denying the old, that cost him his hand. I look at Fenris being bound as a changing of the guard, the last loose strings that need to be taken care of. As guardian of those strings, it was Tyr's job to put them in the closet. He still can be seen in the setting sun, and is the dying light over the land. He is the sunbeam that is the single ray on the way out."

In many ways, Tyr is a way for those who are unfamiliar with the Jotun to understand the Norse word "trolltryggr", which means "faithful as a giant". We think of trolls as nasty ugly creatures, due to centuries of human folklore and decades of fantasy novels, but when a Jotun says that they are going to do something or be a certain way, they are dedicated loyally to that in its entirety, sometimes beyond all reason. We humans, especially in this sound-bite age of convenience, could learn something from this.

There are two other origins of Tyr. In other lore, he is spoken of as a son of Odin. While this may seem irreconcilable with the Hymskvida, it is not entirely difficult to extrapolate. Tyr's visit to his parents' domain in Hymskvida is not exactly a happy reunion. If we assume that it is told from the point of view of Thor and (a rather young) Tyr, the latter seems somewhat ashamed of his giant parents, and especially his nine-headed grandmother. In fact, his entire reason for going there is to aid and abet Thor in robbing his parents of their huge cauldron. It is intimated that Tyr has not been home in a long time, and that this is the last time he ever goes there.

For a Jotun to ally himself so completely with the Aesir, to the point of rejecting (and robbing) his own kin, the cut must be complete. In joining the new tribe of the Aesir, Tyr lost his father figure, and it is not unimaginable that Odin stepped in, adopting the young Jotun and trusting him as a son. In many ways, even if he was born of Hymir and Hrod, he is still more Odin's son than theirs.

The other origin of Tyr is not one in the history of the Nine Worlds. The god Tyr is mythically descended from the Indo-European Teiwaz/Deus, the Sky Father who gave his name to the very word "god". Unlike the Rokkr, who may or may not be derived from deities worshipped by pre-Indo-Europeans, Tyr clearly bears the name of an Indo-European god. This makes placing him in Nine-Worlds history difficult. An added difficulty is that those who work with and speak to Tyr have long reported that he does not speak of his origins, preferring them to be none of anyone's business. However, nothing is neat and tidy when it comes to the nature of Deities, and we can also include Tyr here among Jotun-kind as well as pure Aesir, in all his ambivalent glory, controversial as he is in this context.

Artwork by Manuel Rodriguez Rojas.