Gefjon was a goddess who wandered. The gods had Asgard and everything that came with it, the whole package, yet Gefjon grew restless under golden roofs and eternal feasts. She wanted to see Midgard. She wanted to see the humans. Above all, she wanted to see what the humans had that was worth taking.
She came to Svitjod one autumn, disguised as an old woman with a crooked back and ragged clothes. Her hair was grey and matted. Her feet were filthy. She smelled like someone who had slept in the forest for a week, which she probably had, because details mattered.
King Gylfi of Svitjod sat in his hall with his men and his dogs and his mead barrel. It was the time of year when evenings grew long and cold, and entertainment was hard to find. So when the guards dragged in a ragged old woman who claimed she could tell stories, Gylfi waved her over to the fire. Why not. It was better than staring at the same bearded faces all night.
Gefjon told stories. She sang. She was good at it. Bloody brilliant, in fact. She told tales of trolls in the north, elves in the west, dragons sleeping under mountains, waiting. Gylfi and his men leaned forward, forgot their mead, forgot their dogs, forgot to breathe sometimes. The old woman by the fire was hypnotic.
Three days she stayed. Three evenings by the fire. Gylfi was enchanted, and Gylfi was drunk, and the combination is dangerous for kings who own things.
"You have given me fine evenings, old woman," Gylfi said on the third night, his eyes glazed with mead and sentiment. "I wish to give you a gift. I give you as much land as four oxen can plow in a day and a night." He smiled generously. He was picturing a small plot. Maybe two acres. Enough for an old woman to grow turnips on.
Gefjon bowed deeply. "Thank you, great king," she said, and her voice trembled with gratitude. She was good at that too. "You are too generous." Gylfi waved his hand dismissively, pleased with himself. He had just given away a piece of his kingdom to a goddess in disguise. He knew nothing about it, of course.
Gefjon left the hall before dawn. Quietly. Quickly. Her back was suddenly straight again.
She went north. Far north, past the border of Midgard, into Jotunheim, where the giants lived and the air smelled of stone and old snow. She had four sons there. Their father was a giant, and the boys had inherited his size. They were enormous, wild, with hands like shovel blades and shoulders broad as barn doors.
"You are going to help me plow," Gefjon told her sons. They looked at her. "I am going to turn you into oxen." They kept looking. Giants rarely ask questions when their mother has that look in her eye.
Gefjon transformed them. Four sons became four oxen, and these were no ordinary oxen. They were oxen the size of hillsides. Their hooves were wide as millstones. Their horns cut through the air with a sound like falling timber. The ground shook when they moved, and each step left prints deep as wells.
She came back to Svitjod with her four monstrous oxen and a plow of gold and iron, forged in Asgard. Gylfi saw her coming. Everyone saw her coming. It was bloody impossible to miss.
Gylfi stood on his hall and watched the oxen approaching, and for the first time in his life he felt something cold in his stomach that was not mead. "I promised four oxen," he muttered. "I never said they would be the size of houses." A promise is a promise, though. That was how it worked for kings in those days.
Gefjon yoked her sons to the plow and began. The plow cut through the earth. Through the topsoil first, then through the clay, then through the bedrock. Deeper and deeper. The oxen stamped and pulled, their muscles swelling under black hides, and the sweat ran and steamed in the morning air. The ground screamed. There is no other word for it. It screamed, a long drawn-out sound of stone splitting and earth tearing apart.
They plowed all day. They plowed all night. The furrow grew wider, deeper, and the ground behind the plow sank, as though the earth itself was trying to come loose. Gylfi stood on his hill and watched. He was no longer drinking. He was completely sober and completely powerless.
At dawn on the second day there came a sound no human had ever heard before. A sound of mountains separating from mountains. A sound of roots, millions of roots, being torn apart. The landmass inside Gefjon's furrow began to move. It shuddered, slid, and broke free from the rest of Sweden with a crack that echoed through all nine worlds.
Gefjon drove her oxen westward, and they dragged the mass of earth with them. Through the water. The whole damn piece of land slid into the sea like a ship off a slipway, and the waves rose and foamed and the coastline changed forever.
Zealand. Denmark's largest island. Plowed free from Sweden by a goddess with four giant sons and a king who was too drunk and too generous for his own good.
And the hole she left behind? It filled with water. Slowly, over weeks and months, it flowed in from all directions, from streams and rivers and rain, until it became a lake. Malaren. Sweden's third-largest lake. If you look at a map, really closely, you can see that the contours of Malaren resemble the shape of Zealand. As if a piece of a puzzle had been pressed out and set down a little further away.
Gylfi was a wise king, they say. Gefjon taught him to be careful with promises made to old women by the fire.
Gefjon took her island and her glory and her sons, who were boys again, and settled at Lejre on Zealand. She had made an island out of nothing. Or rather, out of Sweden.