Sköll was the great wolf that chases the sun across the sky — pursuing the sun-goddess Sol in her chariot day after day, and fated, at Ragnarök, to catch and devour her, plunging the world into darkness. He is the hunger that drives the sun across the heavens, the wolf at the heels of the light.
The Wolf at the Sun's Heels
Sköll (Old Norse Sköll, “treachery” or “mockery”) was a monstrous wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. Each day, as the sun-goddess Sol drives her chariot across the heavens, Sköll races close behind her, hungering to catch and swallow the sun — and it is precisely this pursuit that drives the sun ever onward, never slowing, fleeing across the sky for fear of the jaws at her back. (His counterpart is the wolf Hati, who likewise chases the moon.) The wolves are sometimes said to be the offspring of a giantess in the Iron Wood, born to hunt the heavenly lights.
The Eternal Chase
The image of Sköll forever chasing the sun is the Norse explanation for the sun's ceaseless motion across the sky: the sun does not simply travel, she flees, racing always ahead of the wolf that hungers to devour her. The Norse saw in the occasional darkening of the sun — a solar eclipse — the terrible moment when Sköll drew near and seemed about to seize his prey, and people would make noise to frighten the wolf away and save the sun. Day after day, year after year, the chase goes on, the wolf at the sun's heels, the light always fleeing.
The Devouring at Ragnarok
The chase has a foreordained and terrible end. At Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, Sköll at last catches the sun and devours her — the wolf finally seizes the fleeing light and swallows it, and the sun is extinguished, plunging the world into darkness. This is one of the great signs that the end has come: the sun eaten by the wolf, the light gone out, the world cast into the long night before the final battle. (His brother Hati likewise swallows the moon.) Yet even here the Norse vision holds a thread of hope: before she is devoured, the sun-goddess bears a daughter as bright as herself, who will rise to light the new world after the old has ended.
The Hunger That Hunts the Light
Sköll endures as the wolf that chases the sun — the relentless hunger at the heels of the light, the pursuer whose chase drives the sun across the sky and whose final triumph at Ragnarök extinguishes it. He embodies the Norse vision of the heavens as a place of flight and pursuit rather than serene order, of the precious light forever hunted by devouring darkness, and of the deep truth their myths so often told: that the light is beautiful precisely because it is pursued, and that even the sun, at the end of all things, will be swallowed by the wolf at her heels.
The sun does not cross the sky in peace but in flight, a wolf forever at her heels — and at the end of the world, Sköll catches her at last and swallows the light.