Hafgufa: the Giant Glowing Sky Creatures of Alfheim

The Hafgufa are giant glowing creatures, shaped a lot like jellyfish, that float through the skies of Alfheim in God of War Ragnarök. Two of them are found trapped underground in the desert, and the pain they are in is what drives the sandstorms across the sands. Kratos frees both, and the pair meet in the sky, breed and die. (God of War Ragnarök)

What is the Hafgufa in God of War Ragnarök?#

In the game, a Hafgufa is a huge, soft-bodied creature that drifts through the air with bluish skin that gives off its own light. The two Kratos finds are much bigger than normal. Mimir is stunned by the size of the first one and says it's the largest he has ever seen. (God of War Ragnarök)

Kratos has seen something like it before. In his journal he writes that he met a creature of this kind as a boy in Greece, only it was a small sea animal and it couldn't fly. (God of War Ragnarök)

Where to find the Hafgufa and how to free them#

Both Hafgufa are in Alfheim, buried in caverns under the desert. At some point, nobody says how, they were sealed inside hive material and cut off from the light. Their pain is what stirs up the sandstorm over the Barrens and a second storm further west. (God of War Ragnarök)

Atreus is the one who first picks up that a creature is suffering somewhere below the Barrens. Kratos and his companions track it to a cavern, find the first Hafgufa caught in the hive and cut it free. With the first storm gone, they head west and do the same for the second. Kratos can make this trip with Freya as well, and she and Mimir talk on the way about how the creatures grew so big and how they breed. (God of War Ragnarök)

Once both are free, the two Hafgufa find each other and dance together in the sky. Then they mate, give birth and die, and the sky fills with countless newborn Hafgufa. The sandstorms stop, which opens the deserts up for exploring. (God of War Ragnarök)

Why the Hafgufa die after breeding#

A Hafgufa has to give its own light to its young to breed. Passing it on drains the adults, and they die so the next generation can live. That also explains their size. Trapped underground with no light from Alfheim and no young to feed, the two grew far bigger than their kind normally does. (God of War Ragnarök)

Kratos takes something from it. In his journal he writes that their species will live on, and that he's glad he got to spend this time with the people close to him. (God of War Ragnarök)

The trophy for freeing both is called "Full Gufa", a play on the "haf" in the name, which sounds like "half". (God of War Ragnarök)

The Hafgufa in Norse mythology#

The real hafgufa is a sea monster, not a sky creature. The name joins Old Norse haf, "sea", with gufa, "steam", so it means something like "sea-reek" or "sea-steamer". (Konungs skuggsjá)

The fullest early description is in Konungs skuggsjá, the King's Mirror, a Norwegian teaching book from the mid 13th century written as a father answering his son's questions. He describes a fish so vast it looked more like an island than a living thing. To feed, it belches up food, fish crowd into its open mouth to eat it, and then it shuts its jaws and swallows them all at once. He thinks there are only two in the whole sea and that they can't breed, or the oceans would be full of them. (Konungs skuggsjá)

Örvar-Odds saga, an Icelandic legendary saga, puts the hafgufa on Oddr's voyage. His ship sails past what the crew take for two rocks rising from the water, which turn out to be the monster's nostrils and lower jaw as it lies under the surface. The same saga has a second, similar beast called the lyngbakr. (Örvar-Odds saga)

The game keeps the two-of-a-kind detail from the King's Mirror and flips the rest. The old text says the pair can never breed, and God of War Ragnarök makes breeding the whole point of their story. The giant mouth swallowing shoals of fish is gone too, swapped for a gentle creature that dies for its young. (God of War Ragnarök; Konungs skuggsjá)