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Quaser

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The Scandinavian Edda tells us that the divine families of the Asas and Vanas, having warred against each other for many years, felt tired at last of these never-ceasing disputes, tand determinedh to create a being on whose wisdom they might safely rely, and whom they would take for their umpire. The Asas and Vanas spat into a common vessel, and formed Quaser. He was so wise that no one could ask him a question which he was not able to answer. Therefore, having pronounced his sentence in the. quarrel of the gods, he travelled about in the world to impart his wisdom to men. But two gnomes, Fialar and Galar, killed him, mingled his blood with honey, and thus prepared a delicious mead, which made poets of all those who tasted it. The gods having shown some anxiety as to what had become of the great sage, the gnomes managed to spread the rumor that Quaser had been choked by his own wisdom (a phrase which has become proverbial in the north), as nobody could relieve him of it by his questions. Shortly afterwards the same dwarfs killed the giant Gilling and his wife by crushing them with a mill-stone while sleeping. The giant Suttung, Gilling's son, avenged his father by exposing the murderers on a deserted island, to die there of starvation. In this extremity they offered him, to ransom their lives, their poetical mead. Suttung listened to their proposition, set them free, and had the precious liquid carefully guarded by his beautiful daughter Gunloda in the interior of a mountain. Odin, by a stratagem, penetrated into the mountain, gained the favor of the yotung giantess, and drank the mead to the last drop.