Aegir is the personification of the sea in Norse myth, a jotunn or giant rather than one of the Aesir, yet on friendly terms with the gods. He is famous above all as a brewer of ale and a lavish host: in his hall beneath the waves, lit by gleaming gold in place of fire, he holds great feasts for the gods, and it is at one such banquet that the poem Lokasenna has Loki burst in to insult the assembled deities one by one. To supply ale for the gathering the gods must first obtain a cauldron vast enough, the quest told in Hymiskvida.
Aegir's wife is Ran, who draws drowning sailors down into her net, and their nine daughters are the waves of the sea. Between the generous host of the feasting-hall and the wife who gathers the drowned, Aegir holds together the two faces the sea showed to a seafaring people: bounty and danger, the ale-cup and the grave.
Aegir carries alternate names in skaldic tradition, Hler and Gymir, both used in kennings for the sea itself, "Hler's fire" or "Gymir's field" standing for the ocean's surface or its gold; the multiplicity of names for a single sea-power is typical of the dense, allusive vocabulary Old Norse poets built around Aegir and his kin. Unlike many Aesir and Vanir, Aegir has left no clear trace in place-names or votive inscriptions, so his whole presence rests on the poetic corpus, a giant honoured in verse as a boundary figure between the divine and the elemental world of the sea rather than as an object of cult.