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Dagr and Nótt: Day, Night and their horses

Night rides first on Hrímfaxi, whose bit drips the morning dew; Day follows on Skinfaxi, whose mane lights the sky.

Story: Medieval source

What the sources say

Skinfaxi is he, the steed who for men / The glittering day doth draw; / The best of horses to heroes he seems, / And brightly his mane doth burn.

Vafthruthnismol 12, tr. Bellows (1923)

Hrimfaxi name they the steed that anew / Brings night for the noble gods; / Each morning foam from his bit there falls, / And thence come the dews in the dales.

Vafthruthnismol 14, tr. Bellows (1923)

Then Allfather took Night, and Day her son, and gave to them two horses and two chariots, and sent them up into the heavens, to ride round about the earth every two half-days.

Gylfaginning, ch. 10, tr. Brodeur (1916)

The names

ᚾᚢᛏNótt
night; a giant's daughter
ᛏᛅᚴᚱDagr
day; her son
ᚼᚱᛁᛘᚠᛅᚴᛋᛁHrímfaxi
'frost-mane', Night's horse
ᛋᚴᛁᚾᚠᛅᚴᛋᛁSkinfaxi
'shining mane', Day's horse
ᛏᛁᛚᛁᚾᚴᚱDellingr
Day's father; the name is linked with dawn
ᚾᚢᚱᚠᛁNörfi
Night's father

Runes: our letter-by-letter spelling in the Viking-age Younger Futhark; these names come down to us in manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet. How we write runes.

The story and what it means

Night, Nótt, is the daughter of a giant, dark like her kin. Her third husband was Dellingr, of the family of the gods, and their son Day, Dagr, was bright and fair like his father. Óðinn gave each of them a horse and a chariot and sent them round the sky, one after the other, every twelve hours.

Night rides in front on Hrímfaxi, 'frost-mane', and the foam from his bit falls as the dew you find in the morning. Day follows on Skinfaxi, 'shining mane', whose mane lights up the air and the earth. The order matters: night comes first. The Roman historian Tacitus noticed in the first century that the Germanic peoples counted time by nights rather than days, and the English 'fortnight', fourteen nights, still does.

Twilight is the time when one horse has gone and the other is still coming. Astronomers split it into three stages by the Sun's depth below the horizon: civil twilight (to 6°), when you can still read outside; nautical (to 12°), when the horizon at sea fades; and astronomical (to 18°), after which the sky is fully dark. Close to midsummer in Iceland and northern Norway the Sun never gets 18° down, so Hrímfaxi never quite arrives: the night stays blue.

In tonight's sky

CitySól setsFull darkMániMoonriseMoonsetSól rises
Reykjavík– 99% —
Oslo– 99%
Stockholm– 99%
London– 99%
New York– 98%
Sydney– 100%

Each city page shows tonight hour by hour, from Skinfaxi's last light to full dark and back.

Sources

Texts: Vafþrúðnismál 11–14, 24–25; Gylfaginning 10; Skáldskaparmál (lists of horse names). Quotations from the public-domain translations of the Poetic Edda by Henry Adams Bellows (1923) and the Prose Edda by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916); Brodeur's chapter numbers.

More Norse sky lore