Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

In our mythical records there is mention made of a giantess whose very name,
Leikin, Leikn is immediately connected with that activity which Loki's kinswoman - and
she too is a giantess - exercises when she makes a person leikinn. Of this personal
Leikin, 5 we get the following information in our old records:
1. She is, as stated, of giant race (Prose Edda, Nafnaþulur 15).
2. She has once fared badly at Thor's hands. He broke her legs (Leggi brauzt þú
Leiknar - Skáldskaparmál 11, after a song by Veturliði). 6
3. She is kveldriða. The original and mythological meaning of kveldriða is a
horsewoman of torture or death (from kvelja, to torture, to kill). The meaning, a
horsewoman of the night, is a misunderstanding. Compare Vigfusson's Dict., sub voce
"Kveld." 7
4. The horse which this woman of torture and death rides is black, untamed,
difficult to manage (styggr), and ugly-grown (ljótvaxinn). It drinks human blood, and is
accompanied by other horses belonging to Leikin, black and bloodthirsty like it. (All this
is stated by Hallfreður Vandræðaskáld in Heimskringla, Ólafs saga Tryggv., ch. 29.)
Tíðhöggvit lét tiggi,
Tryggva sonr, fyr styggvan
Leiknar hest á lesti,
ljótvaxinn, hræ Saxa;
vinhróðigr gaf víða
vísi margra Frísa
blökku brúnt at drekka
blóð kveldriðu stóði.
"At last, Tryggvi's son placed
the often-hewn corpses of Saxons
in front of the peevish
ugly-grown horse of Leikn (i.e. the wolf);
the friend-famous one (i.e. the king)
widely gave the brown blood
of many Frisians to the black horse-pack
of the evening-rider (i.e. the wolf-pack)."
Perhaps these loose horses are intended for those persons whom the horsewoman
of torture causes to die from disease, and whom she is to conduct to the lower world. 8
Popular traditions have preserved for our times the remembrance of the "uglygrown"
horse, that is, of a three-legged horse, which on its appearance brings sickness,
epidemics, and plagues. The Danish popular belief (Thiele, I. 137, 138) knows this
monster, and the word Hel-horse has been preserved in the vocabulary of the Danish
language. The diseases brought by the Hel-horse are extremely dangerous, but not always
fatal. When they are not fatal, the convalescent is regarded as having ransomed his life
with that tribute of loss of strength and of torture which the disease caused him, and in a
symbolic sense he has then "given death a bushel of oats" (that is, to its horse). According
5 Only Leikn is attested to in the sources as the name of a giantess. Leikin is found nowhere.
6 This is the only passage where the name Leikn is attributed to a specific giantess, the other instance given
below designates a giantess in general.
7 The connection between these two words is superficial at best. Vigfusson notes only that kveld is "akin to
kvelja (to torment), for evening is the quelling or killing of the daylight," and then provides examples where
it only means "evening" with no connotations of death; he defines kveldriða as an "evening-rider, a
nighthag, a witch"
8 Rydberg presented this strophe in a footnote without translation. The horse of a giantess (here Leikn, and
kveldriða) is simply a kenning for wolf. Such kennings cannot be taken as mythological evidence.