Idunn, Norse goddess of youth and the golden apples

Who is Idunn?

Idunn is the Norse goddess of youth and renewal — the quiet keeper on whom the immortality of every other god depends. She guards the apples of youth, and when the gods feel age creeping upon them they eat of her store and are made young again. She is the wife of Bragi, the god of poetry, and one of the Aesir; but her importance is out of all proportion to how rarely she speaks in the myths. Without Idunn, the gods of Asgard would grow old and die like men. She is, literally, the reason they do not.

Role, nature and the apples of youth

The whole of Idunn’s significance rests on a single object: the apples she keeps in an ash-wood box. They are not ordinary fruit but the mechanism of divine agelessness. Snorri Sturluson explains it plainly: “she keeps in her box those apples the gods must bite into when they grow old, and then they all become young again, and so it will be until Ragnarök.” The Norse gods, unlike the Greek Olympians, are not immortal by nature. Their youth is a resource that must be constantly renewed — and Idunn is the sole source of that renewal. This makes her a structural keystone of the pantheon: fragile, indispensable, and therefore the perfect target.

The abduction by Þjazi

Idunn’s one great myth is the story of her theft, told in the Skáldskaparmál and in the older skaldic poem Haustlöng. Travelling in the wilderness, Odin, Hœnir and Loki are harassed by an eagle — the giant Þjazi in disguise. To free himself, Loki swears to deliver Idunn into the giant’s hands.

Back in Asgard, Loki lures the goddess out beyond the walls, telling her he has found apples finer than her own and asking her to bring hers along for comparison. The moment she is outside, Þjazi swoops down in eagle form and carries her off to his hall Þrymheimr. At once the gods begin to age: their hair greys, their strength fails, and they realise their youth has been stolen with her. Tracing the plot to Loki, they threaten him with death unless he brings her back. Loki borrows the falcon-feather cloak of Freya, flies to the giant’s hall, turns Idunn into a nut and races home with her in his claws. Þjazi gives chase as an eagle; the gods pile wood-shavings on the walls of Asgard and set them ablaze just as Loki passes over, and the pursuing giant’s wings catch fire — he falls and is killed. The apples are saved, and with them the youth of the gods.

Variants, symbolism and Lokasenna

The myth reads as a cosmic near-miss: the one time the gods almost lost their immortality, undone by their own trickster and rescued by him in turn. It also fixes Idunn as a seasonal figure in the eyes of many interpreters — her removal bringing a kind of winter of ageing to the gods, her return restoring the spring of renewal. The Lokasenna gives a harsher glimpse: there Loki insults her as the most man-crazed of goddesses, said to have embraced her brother’s killer — a slander typical of that poem’s flyting, but a reminder that Idunn was a fully imagined character and not merely a keeper of fruit. Her apples have become one of the most enduring images of Norse myth, echoed in every later story of a fruit that grants agelessness.

What the ancient sources say

The key source is the Skáldskaparmál of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (c. 1220), which tells the abduction and rescue in full and defines the apples’ function. Snorri draws on the older skaldic poem Haustlöng by Þjóðólfr of Hvinir (9th–10th c.), which describes the same episode as painted on a shield — one of the oldest attestations of the tale. In the Poetic Edda, the Lokasenna stages a bitter exchange between Loki and Idunn, and she is named among the goddesses in other catalogues. Together these texts make her role clear: guardian of a youth the gods cannot secure for themselves.

Further reading

For the trickster who both betrays and rescues her, read the page on Loki. For the goddess whose falcon-feather cloak makes the rescue possible, see the page on Freya. For the sovereign of the Aesir who travels with Loki when the giant Þjazi first strikes, consult the page on Odin. For the celestial city whose gods would age and die without her apples, read the page on Asgard.