Marbles: the soul stones of the Jötnar

The Marbles, known also as Spiritual Stones, were among the last works of Giant magic left in the Nine Realms. Small stones engraved with names in the runes of Jötunheim, they held within them the souls of the Giants who had chosen to vanish rather than be hunted down by Odin and Thor. For years the collected stones were guarded by Angrboda, one of the last of her kind, until prophecy brought Atreus, the boy the Giants named Loki, to the hidden valley of Ironwood to receive them.

Origins in a Dying Race#

The Marbles were born of fear. After the extermination of the Giants of Midgard, the survivors withdrew to Jötunheim, a refuge that only those who knew its secret rune could enter. Yet the Jötnar understood that no wall would hold Odin out forever, and their dread of the Allfather and his son Thor only grew. A decision was made by Angrboda's father, joined it was believed by her mother and by Grýla, to whisper the souls of the remaining Giants of Jötunheim into stones of his own crafting. Each soul passed into a marble engraved with its owner's name in Nordic Jötunn runes, and there it rested in peace, waiting for the one who was prophesied to end Odin's tyranny.

The deception was thorough. Giant corpses were scattered through the mountains of Jötunheim so that, if the Aesir ever found their way in, they would believe the last of the race had died out long before. The marbles that held the sleeping souls were then hidden across the Nine Realms by the last living frost giants, scattered so that no single raid could claim them all.

The Powers of the Stones#

The stones served two purposes. The first was preservation: a Giant's soul, sealed within its named marble, endured beyond the death or abandonment of its body. Restoring such a soul was no simple matter, for only someone with knowledge of the Giants' own magic could transfer a soul from a stone into a living body.

The second power was passage. A marble could carry its bearer to the place where a matching stone lay, crossing between the realms and even beyond them in an instant. This travel worked regardless of whether the stone still held a soul, and it was this property that first revealed the marbles' nature to the one they had waited for. Not every stone was accounted for; Angrboda admitted that beyond the few in her keeping, more marbles remained missing somewhere in the realms.

The Chosen One Finds the Shrines#

The first marble to come to light was Hati's, which Atreus discovered in the shrine of Sköll and Hati. It was an empty stone, its name meaning nothing to him yet. The second was Gróa's, found in the shrine of the murdered seeress. When Atreus handled Gróa's marble, it carried him without warning to a place no map named, the Jötunn refuge of Ironwood, where the last daughter of the Giants had been waiting out her days.

There he met Angrboda. When he showed her the empty marble he had found, she explained that she kept a whole bag of identical stones, the souls of the Giants that her father had helped whisper into them. At a rock formation overlooking the Giants' Fingers, the mountain where Kratos and Atreus had once scattered the ashes of Faye, Angrboda revealed the truth: the stones did not belong to the Giants, they were the Giants. Her destiny, set down long before either of them was born, was to show the marbles to Loki and place them in his hands, for he was to be the keeper of the Giants' souls.

The Keeper of the Giants' Souls#

What the chosen one was finally meant to do with the souls was never made plain, and Atreus wrestled with the weight of it. When he and Angrboda found a snake whose own soul had been stolen, they attempted the old magic and placed Jörmungandr's soul inside it. The snake revived, then slithered away without a word. Atreus took the silence as failure, and in his disappointment he handed the bag of marbles back to Angrboda. As he turned to leave, she pressed one more stone on him, Laufey's, the marble of his own mother, and it carried him home to Midgard in a heartbeat.

Angrboda did not sit idle with the bag. She resolved to search the remaining shrines across the Nine Realms for the stones still missing. From Loki's own shrine in Jötunheim she collected his marble, and she used it to reach him in Muspelheim, where the two of them recovered Surtr's stone from the fire giant's shrine. She used Loki's marble again to visit him and Fenrir in Midgard, the stone letting her cross the realms as easily as walking through a door.

Ragnarök and After#

The stones earned their place in the histories during Ragnarök. While Angrboda fought beside Fenrir in the great battle, she used Loki's marble one final time in war, crossing into Asgard as Asgard came apart and pulling Atreus, Kratos, Freya, and Mimir clear of its destruction.

Laufey's marble met a harder end. After Odin's defeat, Atreus used his mother's stone to seal away the Allfather's soul, trapping the god who had spent lifetimes hunting the Giants inside the very magic they had made to escape him. The imprisonment did not last, for Sindri took the marble and destroyed it, and Odin's soul perished with the stone.

When the war was over, Atreus fully accepted his name Loki and chose to travel beyond the Nine Realms in search of other surviving Giants, carrying the souls of his people with him. Before he left, Angrboda gave him her own marble, so that wherever his search led him, he could return to her at any time.

The Known Stones#

Of the marbles named in the accounts, five passed through the chosen one's hands empty of souls: Gróa's, found in her shrine and the stone that first carried Atreus to Ironwood; Hati's, taken from the shrine of the two wolves; Jörmungandr's, emptied when its soul was given to the snake; Loki's own, recovered by Angrboda from his shrine in Jötunheim; and Surtr's, claimed from his shrine in Muspelheim. Three stones in Angrboda's bag still held their sleepers, Bára, Thiazzi, and Hróðr. Angrboda's marble went with Atreus beyond the realms, and Laufey's was destroyed with Odin's soul inside it. Sköll's stone was never found in the shrine he shared with his brother, one of the missing marbles still scattered somewhere across the Nine Realms.