Sól and Máni: the Sun and the Moon

The story and what it means

Old Norse turns the familiar Latin pattern round: the sun, sól, is feminine and the moon, máni, masculine. In the poems they are persons as well as lights. The giant-wise Vafþrúðnir tells Óðinn that a man called Mundilfari fathered them both, and that they run the round of heaven every day to tell the time for men.

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written in Iceland around 1220, tells the fuller story. Mundilfari thought his two children so beautiful that he named them after the Sun and the Moon. The gods took offence at his pride, took the children and set them in the sky: Sól drives the horses Árvakr and Alsviðr, which pull the Sun's chariot, and Máni steers the Moon and determines its waxing and waning. Grímnismál adds the shield Svalinn that stands in front of the Sun; if it fell, mountains and sea would burn.

Máni also took two children from the earth, Bil and Hjúki, as they carried a pail from a well, and Snorri says they follow him as may be seen from the earth. Many readers take that to mean the dark markings on the Moon's face, though Snorri does not say so. A nineteenth-century guess that they became the Jack and Jill of the English nursery rhyme has no evidence behind it.

The myth fits what you can watch for yourself. The Sun keeps to a fixed daily path and never changes shape; the Moon changes every night, rises about fifty minutes later each day and wanders north and south of the Sun's path. A steersman who decides when the Moon waxes and wanes is a good way of describing a light that never does the same thing two nights running.

Sources

Texts: Vafþrúðnismál 22–25; Grímnismál 37–38; Gylfaginning 11; Völuspá 5. 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.