Fenrir was the monstrous wolf of Norse myth — the gigantic, ever-growing child of Loki whom the gods feared so much that they bound him with an unbreakable magical fetter, and who is fated, at Ragnarök, to break free and devour Odin himself. He is the embodiment of the destructive chaos the gods could chain but never destroy, the wolf whose breaking loose signals the end of the world.
The Wolf the Gods Feared
Fenrir (Old Norse Fenrir, also Fenrisúlfr, “Fenris-wolf”) was one of the three monstrous children of the trickster Loki by the giantess Angrboda — brother to the world-serpent Jörmungandr and to Hel, queen of the dead. He was a wolf, but a wolf of supernatural and ever-increasing size and strength. The gods, learning through prophecy that Fenrir was fated to bring them great harm, took the wolf to raise in Asgard where they could watch him — but he grew so swiftly and so vast that soon only the brave god Tyr dared to approach him to feed him, and the gods' fear of him deepened by the day.
The Binding with Gleipnir
Resolving to bind the wolf, the gods tried twice with great iron chains — Leyding and Dromi — but Fenrir, proud of his strength, allowed himself to be bound and then burst both fetters with ease. So the gods sent to the dwarves, who forged a magical fetter called Gleipnir — made of impossible things (the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird), and as a result smooth and soft as a silk ribbon, yet unbreakable. But Fenrir, suspecting a trick in something so slight, refused to be bound by it unless one of the gods would place a hand in his jaws as a pledge of good faith. Only Tyr was brave enough; he laid his right hand between the wolf's teeth. The gods bound Fenrir with Gleipnir, and when the wolf found he could not break free, he bit off Tyr's hand. The bound wolf was then fastened to a great rock deep in the earth, with a sword propping his jaws open, and there he must remain — howling and drooling a river of saliva — until the end of the world.
The Devouring of Odin
At Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, Fenrir breaks free of Gleipnir at last. He advances across the world with his lower jaw against the earth and his upper jaw against the sky, his gaping mouth swallowing everything in his path, fire blazing from his eyes and nostrils. On the final battlefield, Fenrir meets Odin, the All-Father — and the great wolf swallows him whole, devouring the king of the gods, fulfilling the doom the gods had foreseen and tried in vain to prevent. But Fenrir does not long survive his triumph: Odin's son Vidar avenges his father, planting his great shoe on the wolf's lower jaw and tearing Fenrir's mouth apart, killing the beast.
The Chaos That Could Not Be Killed
Fenrir endures as one of the most powerful and terrifying figures in all of Norse myth — the monstrous wolf the gods could bind but never destroy, the chained chaos waiting to break loose, the devourer of Odin. He embodies the dark heart of the Norse vision of fate: that the forces of destruction cannot be killed, only delayed; that the gods, knowing their doom, bound the wolf and bought time but could not change the end; and that one day the fetter breaks, the wolf runs free, and the world ends in his jaws.
The gods could chain him but never kill him — and they knew it: the bound wolf waits, drooling a river, for the day the fetter breaks and he swallows the All-Father whole.