Broken Bonds

Question: How do Tyr and Fenris feel about each other?

Not wonderful, we imagine.

Tyr and Fenrir are complementary figures in the myth of the binding of the wolf; Fenrir is the great fear, the monster that even all the other Aesir are too afraid to approach, while Tyr is the god who possesses the most bravery and courage and is therefore the only one who can deal with him on an even footing. It's not hard to guess that they probably have some (okay, a lot of) animosity toward one another from that myth; Fenrir was promised by the Aesir that the ribbon he was being tied with was not a trick, a promise that turned out to be false, while Tyr lost his hand to the wolf's gnashing vengeance.

The breaking of an oath was a very big deal in Norse culture, to the point that most people who do it are swiftly punished in Norse myth and the term "oath-breaker" is used as a major insult not to be slung around lightly, so Tyr having made a guarantee to Fenrir that everything was going to be fine here is not something the wolf is ever going to forget, even if it didn't also have the very nasty side effect of getting him put in jail for literally the entire lifespan of the earth. Whether or not there was an official oath or just a lot of lying is unclear from the Edda, so your interpretation is as good as ours, but there was certainly an element of betrayal in the wolf's decision to trust the Aesir, represented by Tyr, and their subsequent binding of him. Tyr (who may have been symbolically "punished" for his false promise with the immediate loss of his hand) is not likely to be very happy about the monster that rendered him handicapped, either - he might have known that was going to happen and intentionally taken one for the team, but that doesn't mean he's going to therefore forgive and forget.

What might add a more interesting shade to their relationship, however, is the fact that Tyr is also the only one of the Aesir (other than Loki) who might have had a pre-existing connection with the wolf before the decision to bind him was made. In the Edda, it is said that the Aesir brought Fenrir to live with them in Asgard instead of his original home in Jotunheim, the only one of Loki's three monstrous children to explicitly get such treatment; why they did this is anybody's guess, although one of our favorite theories is that Odin (who already has some connection with wolves thanks to his position as god of battle and carnage) was hoping to use the wolf as a servant the way he does Loki's other son Sleipnir, and later realized that Fenrir was too dangerous to try to be brought to heel by the gods. It's also possible that the Aesir might have taken in one of Loki's children as a gesture of goodwill, since Loki is after all the All-Father's blood-brother and therefore killing off or imprisoning all his children without at least making an effort might be a politically thorny prospect, but that's also just a theory. Loki's never around when the Aesir are binding his children (yeah, dude, where is he?), so we don't get any input on what he thinks of the situation.

But, anyway, Fenrir lives in Asgard for a little while, or at least in close proximity to the gods, who are trying to keep an eye on him. However, he's so terrifying that none of them want to go near him, and therefore it's once again Tyr, god of being way braver than you, who is the only one who can handle interacting with the great canine menace. It becomes Tyr's job to feed Fenrir, which he does regularly while the other Aesir quietly freak out about how much meat the wolf eats, and that means that we have an interesting question of how much time the two of them might have spent together and whether or not they had any pre-existing relationship. Normal animals tend to be fond of, or at least trusting of, people who regularly feed them, so there may be more than one reason it had to be Tyr to calm Fenrir down and get him bound than just that god's stunning amount of heroism. Fenrir is also sapient, capable of thinking, conversing and interacting with the gods on their level, which also begs the question of what feeding him was like. The Edda never tell us - did he and Tyr ever talk? Did they hang out? What did Fenrir think of being held in Asgard away from the rest of his family, and of the other Aesir avoiding him? What did he think of Tyr?

We don't know any of this, because Fenrir's point of view is not addressed in Norse mythology until the binding myth occurs, at which point his point of view becomes "suspicious" followed by "very, very pissed off". However, there's a wealth of possibility there for Storytellers to monkey around with if they want to do something interesting, plot-wise, with the god of courage and the wolf of fear. It's not a stretch to think they were on at least cordial terms, possibly even friends, thanks to Tyr being the only real contact Fenrir had among the Aesir; so the betrayal of the binding and the violent removal of Tyr's hand afterward might have been doubly devastating for both parties, each of which trusted the other and were proven wrong. That's a rift that probably won't ever heal, no matter what you think they thought about each other before it happened.

Another interesting point here is the prophesied battle between Tyr and the hound Garm at Ragnarok, which Storytellers might want to tie in to the whole Tyr-Fenrir mess. Garm is a discrete character in Norse mythology, the bloody watcher at the gates of Hel, similar in role to other dogs that guard underworlds; however, while the poetic Edda mentions him several times in connection with death and the afterlife, only one line in the prose Edda claims that he will be involved in Ragnarok, when Snorri specifically says he'll come fight Tyr and both figures will be killed. Scholars have debated whether or not the fight between Tyr and Garm is legit for centuries; some believe that it probably refers to a myth that simply hasn't been written down anywhere else, a common problem in Norse mythology, while others point out that Snorri does a lot of editorializing and believe that it's just as likely he invented the combat between them for his own reasons since it's never mentioned or depicted in any art anywhere else.

There are a lot of questions about what this means, and as usual a veritable stew of scholarly suppositions and suggestions to answer them. One theory is that Snorri simply confused Garm and Fenrir, and thought that the two monstrous canines were the same beast, therefore repeating the original myth of their opposition in the context of Ragnarok. Another is that Snorri, seeking to balance the deaths of the Aesir and the myth of the resurrection of the world as evenly as possible, needed to give a story removing Tyr from the equation and therefore dredged up the idea of him killed by a great wolf or dog as a continuation of the story of his animosity with Fenrir, pulling Garm in as one of the only major canine monsters left who wasn't already doing something at Ragnarok. Another is that Garm, in spite of being said to be a dog rather than a wolf, may be one of the spawn of Fenrir like Hati and Skoll and that therefore he targets Tyr at Ragnarok in order to take vengeance for his monstrous father. And another is that there was originally a myth in which Fenrir comes after Tyr at Ragnarok as well as Odin - his direct betrayer as well as the king of the gods who conspired to bind him - and Snorri accidentally substituted Garm for the wolf, either because he misread something or thought that it was a continuity error to have the wolf attacking (and killed by) two different gods at the same battle. Even further down the well of scholar craziness, there are also theories that suggest that all evil canines in Norse mythology are really Fenrir, simply being called by different names or only split into different creatures late in Norse mythology, so therefore even if Tyr is fighting Garm, he's really fighting Fenrir anyway.

So, like a lot of Norse myth, there's a lot of room for interpretation since our sources are kind of scarce. Personally, we're inclined to think that there's a lot of soreness and broken trust between those two, and that both of them probably hate the other with a passion born from betrayal and shock at one anothers' actions and would love to visit vengeance upon them for doing such a thing to a one-time friend.