![]() He's got eight legs, and these seem to make him faster than any other horse. So, it's not surprising that Sleipnir's no ordinary horse. With his giantess wife, Angrboda, Loki spawns 1) an enormous sea-serpent 2) a fierce, world-swallowing wolf and 3) the ruler of the Underworld. Loki is absolutely infamous for producing mutant, monstrous children. For one thing, he's the love child of the amazingly strong stallion Svadilfari and the trickster-god Loki. It turns out there's quite a lot to be said about Sleipnir. The story describing the walling of Asgard is the tale a character named High tells in response to Gylfi's question, "Who owns that horse Sleipnir, and what is to be said of him?" ( Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, Chapter 42, p. King Gylfi attempts to travel to the land of the gods, but instead ends up in a mysterious in-between land where he must engage in a wisdom-contest, asking questions about the Norse cosmos and mythology. Like many of the legends we know about the gods of Asgard, this one is recorded in Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda in the Gylfaginning, or Tricking of Gylfi. It gives an account of how Asgard gained its enormous protective wall and how Odin got his magical eight-legged steed, Sleipnir. "The Walling of Asgard" is one of these stories. A lot of stories in Norse mythology deal with how different parts of the mythological world – beings, magical objects, landscapes, buildings – came to be.
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