The Sun Pursued Across the Sky

Sol, also called Sunna, is the Norse goddess who personifies the sun and drives it across the heavens each day in a chariot drawn by two horses, Arvakr (Early-waker) and Alsvinnr (Swift). A shield called Svalinn stands before her to keep the horses and the world from being scorched by the blaze. What gives her myth its tension is that she does not travel freely: she is forever pursued by a wolf, Skoll, who chases her across the sky, and it is foretold that at Ragnarok the wolf will at last catch and swallow her. Yet even this ending carries a seed of renewal, for the sources say that Sol bears a daughter as bright as herself, who will ride the sky-path of her mother in the new world that rises after the old one burns. The Norse sun is thus a goddess and the moon a god, the reverse of the arrangement in some neighbouring traditions, and Sol's daily course, shadowed by the wolf at her heels, gave the movement of the sun a story of flight, doom and rebirth.