Skadi is the giantess-goddess of winter, of the mountains, of hunting, of skiing and of the bow. Her story begins in grief and vengeance: after the gods kill her father, the giant Thjazi, she puts on armour and weapons and comes to Asgard to avenge him. Rather than fight, the gods offer her recompense, and part of the settlement is that she may choose a husband from among them, but she must choose by their feet alone, seeing no more. Hoping for the beautiful Baldr, she picks the finest pair of feet, and finds she has chosen Njord, the god of the sea and its wealth. As a further condition of peace, the gods must make her laugh, which Loki manages by a piece of undignified clowning with a goat.
In Snorri's Prose Edda, the section on poetic diction, Skaldskaparmal, lists Skadi among the goddesses under the kenning Ondurdis, the ski-deity or snowshoe-lady, one of the clearest textual confirmations that her association with skiing and winter travel was a recognised part of her identity for medieval Icelandic poets composing formal verse, not merely a modern inference drawn from her general wintry character. The same source preserves several alternative kennings built on her name, used by court poets to refer obliquely to giants, mountains and winter more broadly, showing that Skadi functioned as a stock poetic reference point within the formal, riddling vocabulary of skaldic verse.