Sol was the Norse goddess of the sun — the radiant maiden who drove the sun-chariot across the sky each day, pursued forever by a ravening wolf that is fated, at Ragnarök, to catch and devour her. She is the personified sun of the north, beautiful and doomed, racing across the heavens in eternal flight from the jaws that hunger to swallow the light.
The Sun-Maiden
Sol (Old Norse Sól, “sun”; also called Sunna) was the goddess who personified and drove the sun. She and her brother Mani (the moon) were the children of a man named Mundilfari, who named them so proudly for the sun and moon that the gods, offended at his presumption, took the two and set them in the heavens to guide the chariots of the sun and moon across the sky. So Sol became the driver of the sun-chariot, drawn by two horses, Árvakr (“early-waker”) and Alsviðr (“all-swift”), beneath whose shoulders the gods set bellows or iron to keep them cool from the sun's heat.
The Wolf at Her Heels
Sol does not cross the sky at leisure: she flees. Behind the sun-chariot races a great wolf named Sköll, who pursues Sol endlessly, hungering to catch and swallow her — and it is this eternal chase that drives the sun so swiftly across the heavens, for Sol dares never slow. (Her brother Mani is likewise chased by the wolf Hati.) The Norse explained eclipses as the moments when the wolf drew near and seemed about to seize the light. The sun's daily race, in this telling, is a flight for its very life.
The Devouring at Ragnarok
The chase has a foreordained end. At Ragnarök, the doom of the gods and the world, the wolf Sköll will at last catch Sol and devour her, and the sun will be swallowed and the world plunged into darkness — one of the terrible signs that the end has come. Yet even here the Norse vision holds a thread of renewal: before she is taken, Sol will give birth to a daughter as bright and beautiful as herself, and after the old world has burned and a new one risen, this daughter will take up her mother's course and drive a new sun across the sky of the cleansed and reborn world.
The Light That Flees and Returns
Sol endures as the Norse personification of the sun — the radiant maiden in eternal flight, the light pursued by the wolf, doomed to be devoured yet promised renewal in her shining daughter. She embodies a profoundly northern vision of the sun: not a serene and unchallenged ruler of the sky, but a beautiful fugitive racing the darkness, precious precisely because the wolf is always at her heels — and because, even after the wolf swallows her at the end of all things, the light is promised to rise again.
The sun races across the sky not in triumph but in flight, a wolf forever at her heels — and though he will swallow her at the end of the world, her bright daughter will rise to drive the sun of the world reborn.