The God of Poetry, and a Poet Made Divine

Bragi is the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, wisest in words and finest of singers, husband of Idun who keeps the apples of youth; in Snorri's Prose Edda he welcomes the honoured dead to Valhalla and, in the poem Lokasenna, trades insults with Loki. His name is intriguing because there was also a real ninth-century Norwegian poet, Bragi Boddason, among the earliest skalds whose verse survives, and scholars debate whether the god is a personification of the skaldic art (bragr means poetry, or the best of something) that later drew the historical poet's name to itself, or whether the poet was in some way deified.

The uncertainty is a good example of how thin and literary much of our knowledge of the lesser Norse gods is, resting on Snorri's thirteenth-century systematizing more than on any evidence of active cult. The word bragarfull, the "Bragi cup" or vow-cup drunk at a king's funeral feast before his heir formally took the throne, described in Snorri's Heimskringla, may preserve the god's name in ritual practice, though scholars are divided over whether the term derives from the god Bragi or simply from bragr in its sense of "the finest" or "first," so that the ceremony may honour the god of poetry directly or only share his name's root.