The Jaws of Fenrir

1 hour ago
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This embroidery piece was submitted at Ymir 51 in the open medium competition category of "The Jaws of Fenrir." Artists were tasked with creating an item in any medium that captured the fearsome spirit of the great wolf, Fenrir, and must include wolf imagery.

Background

In Norse mythology, Tyr is the god of war and courage, and lost his right hand after it was bitten off at the wrist by the gigantic and fierce wolf, Fenrir.¹ Fenrir was the son of Loki and the giantess, Angerboda.² When it was learned that Fenrir and his two siblings were being raised by their mother in the giant’s realm of Jotunheim, Odin led an expedition to take the children from their mother.³ Only Fenrir was kept alive and brought to Asgard to be kept as a pet.³ Growing up in Asgard, Fenrir was cared for by Tyr, the only god unafraid to feed him, but as he started to grow too big, the Aesir feared that he would destroy them and demanded that he be bound.⁴

Disguised as a test of strength, the gods created two chains to bind him, Loeding and Dromig, both of which Fenrir broke with ease.⁴ Fearing his immense strength, the gods then commissioned the dwarves to create a third, magical chain called Gleipner.¹ This chain was made of six elements: a cat’s footsteps, a woman’s beard, mountain roots, sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird.³ Growing more distrustful of the gods and their “tests,” Fenrir required that Tyr place his hand in Fenrir’s mouth as a test of trust, and as the chains grew tighter and Fenrir could not escape, he bit off Tyr’s hand.¹

Process

After identifying my subject, I created a rough sketch of the elements that I wanted to include in my embroidery, Fenrir, the chain, and Tyr’s severed hand. After mapping out a rough sketch, I transferred the sketch of Fenrir to a blue cotton cloth. I selected the color blue because I had read that blue is one of the sacred colors associated with Tyr by his followers. But more importantly, I wasn’t going to use this fabric for anything else and needed to get rid of it to create space for MORE fabric!

I initially laid down padding to create a fluffy effect on the wolf. I continued working with the padding up until the end of the neckline, but got so tired of the fuzz from the Polyfill and the entanglement of the other threads, that I removed the padding from the rest of the body and continued stitching over it as normal. I used metallic thread and laid down stitches in a series of overlapping long and short stitches to create a textured fur effect. This is a bit harder to achieve with metal thread because of how rigid it is and how easily it tangles and shreds, but I wanted to do a goldwork piece, so this is my punishment. I used contrasting colors to outline the mouth, teeth, eye, and ears.

For Tyr’s hand, I opted to do a stumpwork piece. To achieve this, I sketched out an image of a severed hand onto a separate piece of cloth, filled in the details of the hand, and stitched a thin wire into the piece. Afterwards, I carefully cut the hand out and attached it inside the wolf’s mouth by stitching it into the teeth of the wolf. To add a little more detail, I created blood droplets running from the hands using a combination of red metallic thread and some red beads, and stitching them onto the wrist and fingers.

To represent the binding of Fenrir, I took a contrasting gold metallic thread and used a simple chain stitch, weaving it in and around the wolf.

Lessons Learned

Metallic thread is a pain in the butt!! Do yourself a favor and invest in thread wax, please.
I should take anatomical drawing classes for both animals and human hands...
I should have budgeted more time because it’s embarrassing how many attempts it took me to get the hand looking somewhat like a hand, and it’s still pretty “ehh.”
Don’t budget so much blank space unless you plan to use all of it; Using an appropriately shaped and sized loom would help with that.