Sol

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.

Centuries before the Eddas were written down, Scandinavian Bronze Age people appear to have already imagined the sun's daily journey in remarkably similar terms. The Trundholm sun chariot, a bronze artifact discovered in a Danish bog in 1902 and dated to roughly 1400 BCE, shows a horse drawing a wheeled chariot on which sits a large disc, gilded on one side and plain bronze on the other, an arrangement widely interpreted by archaeologists as a representation of the sun being pulled across the sky by day, shining, and returning beneath the earth or sea by night, unlit. No text survives from this Bronze Age culture to confirm what stories, if any, its people told about this image, so any connection to the much later, textually attested myth of Sol driving her sun-chariot pulled by named horses must remain an inference rather than a proven continuity, one separated from the Viking Age sources that preserve Sol's story by well over two thousand years and an entirely different, non-literate culture.

Scholars of Nordic religion nonetheless frequently point to the Trundholm chariot as evidence that a sun-chariot image had deep roots in the region long before the Viking Age poems were composed, suggesting that Sol's myth, when it finally reaches written form in medieval Iceland, may be preserving, in altered and elaborated form, a genuinely ancient Scandinavian way of picturing the sun's movement that this single, extraordinary Bronze Age object happens to let us glimpse directly.