Grýla

Grýla was an elderly Giantess of Jotunheim and the grandmother of Angrboda, one of the last Giants left in the realm. Grief for her dead family and the ruin of her kind drove her to steal the souls of animals with an enchanted cauldron, until Atreus and Angrboda put an end to it.

A broken lineage#

Grýla was descended from the ancient line of the Giants, counting Ymir, Bergelmir, and Nal among her ancestors. Many years before Ragnarok she lived in Jotunheim with her son, her daughter-in-law, and her young granddaughter Angrboda. When her son refused to challenge the fate the Giants foresaw, and he and his wife died, Grýla turned cold and withdrawn. She largely left Angrboda to fend for herself in Ironwood, telling her never to return home, though she claimed she did not care for the girl even as she left her loaves of bread.

As the years passed, her kind crumbled around her. Her fellow Giants allowed themselves to be bound by the fates they had glimpsed, and Thor's slaughter of the Giants thinned their number further, until Grýla was among the last of her people left in Jotunheim. Sunk in sorrow and immense loneliness, she began to use an enchanted cauldron to capture animals and harvest their souls, living vicariously through their memories in a brief bid to ease her grief. The practice left the animals as lifeless husks and worked horribly on Grýla herself, making her vicious and desensitized.

The destruction of the cauldron#

When Atreus came to Jotunheim, his arrival coincided with Grýla going out to check her traps, where she found a wolf caught near where Atreus and Angrboda stood. While she checked her other snares, the two young Giants slipped into her house, meaning to put an end to her destructive ways. Grýla returned with the captured wolf and prepared to take its soul, but Angrboda knocked over a jar to draw her attention, and Atreus freed the beast.

After a brief argument with her granddaughter, Grýla noticed Atreus and seized him. Startled to learn he was the Loki of prophecy, she turned aggressive, wielding her cauldron as a weapon and taunting him over his foretold allegiance to Odin and the loss of his father. At last she was subdued, and Atreus and Angrboda destroyed the cauldron, to her horror. Erupting in fury, she told Angrboda she should have thrown her to the wolves at birth, threatened her with a shard of the broken cauldron, and drove her from her home, shouting that she was nothing and that no one would ever remember her. Atreus tried to defend Angrboda, but she advised against it, and the two left.

A grief, not a monster#

For all her cruelty, Grýla was not simply wicked. Angrboda recalled that her grandmother had not always been so, and held that she was not a horrible person but someone who had lost herself in grief, broken by the death of her family and by the long despair of watching her kind vanish. Even as she claimed not to care for her granddaughter, Grýla left her bread, and she showed flashes of an old tenderness, telling Angrboda that of all the things she had forgotten, she refused to let her be one of them.

After the fall of Odin, when Kratos, Mimir, and Freya came to Jotunheim and met Angrboda at her treehouse, Angrboda told them that Grýla was still with her, helping her forage for supplies. Asked whether her grandmother might be proud of her, Angrboda spoke of their strained bond and said that she might be, someday, though she could not yet be sure.