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Does Skaði choose the husband with the best butt?

(Warning: I do not know anything about Old Norse, so everything I say about it should be understood as ill-informed speculation. I welcome corrections.)

In one of my favorite episodes from Norse mythology, the Æsir owe a payment to the Jötunn Skaði in compensation for killing her father. But they know she is very wealthy, and offer her an alternative compensation: one of their men in marriage.

Skaði wants to marry Baldr, because he is extremely handsome. But Baldr is already married. Odin proposes a compromise: the Æsir will line up behind a short curtain, and Skaði will choose her husband. She will marry whomever she picks; if she can pick out Baldr by his legs, she can have him. Skaði agrees, assuming that the beautiful Baldr will have the best legs.

(She chooses wrong. Njörðr has the best legs.)

Thinking on this as an adult, I said to myself “Aha, this is like that horn full of milk that was actually mead. I bet this was also cleaned up in the version I read, and that in the original material, Skaði was actually choosing the husband with the best butt.”

I went to check, and I was wrong. The sources say she was looking only at their feet.

I was going to just quote this:

she should choose for herself a husband from among the Æsir and choose by the feet only, seeing no more of him.

(Brodeur, 1916.)

But then I got worried. This is of course not the original source but an English translation; what if it is inaccurate?

Well, there was nothing else to do but ask Snorri about it. He says:

En æsir buðu henni sætt ok yfirbætr ok it fyrsta, at hon skal kjósa sér mann af ásum ok kjósa at fótum ok sjá ekki fleira af.

(Sætt is recompense or settlement; yfirbætr similarly. (Bætr is a cure, as in “I was sick, but I got better”.) The first (fyrsta) part of the settlement is that she “shall choose a man for herself” (skal kjósa sér mann) but choose by the feet (kjósa at fótum) seeing nothing else (sjá ekki fleira af).)

The crucial word here is fótum, which certainly looks like “foot”. (It is the dative form of fótr.) Could it possibly mean the buttocks? I don't think so. It's hard to be 100% certain, because it could be a euphemism — anything could be a euphemism for the buttocks if you paused before saying it and raised one eyebrow. (Did the Norse bards ever do this?) Also the Norse seem to have divided up the leg differently than we do. Many of the words seem to match, which is sometimes helpful but also can be misleading, because many don't. For example, I think leggr, despite its appearance, means just the shank. And I think fótum may not be just the foot itself, but some part of the leg that includes the foot.

But I'm pretty sure fótum is not the butt, at least not canonically. To do this right I would look at all the other instances of fótr to see what I could glean from the usage, but I have other work to do today. So anyway, Skaði probably was looking at their feet, and not at their butts. Oh well.

However! the other part of Skaði's settlement is that the Æsir must make her laugh. In the version I first read, Loki achieves this by tying his beard to a goat's. Nope!

Þá gerði Loki þat, at hann batt um skegg geitar nökkurrar ok öðrum enda um hreðjar sér, ok létu þau ýmsi eftir ok skrækði hvárt tveggja hátt.

Skegg geitar nökkurar is indeed some goat's beard. But hann batt … ok öðrum enda um hreðjar sér is “he tied … the other end to his own scrotum”.

Useful resources:

• Skáldskaparmál, English translation of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
• Skáldskaparmál, original Old Icelandic (1220-ish)
• Zoëga's Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910)

Addendum 20240712

Toph has asked an excellent question about this.

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