So if you’re into certain video games, Swedish metal bands, or the Young Adult fiction writer Rick Riordan, you may have heard the name “Naglfar.” Regardless, you can say you read about the most hideous ship in all of human history here. And that’s because Naglfar was a boat from Viking mythology made up entirely of the finger- and toenail clippings of dead men. The name “Naglfar” actually means “nail-ship,” and appears in stories dealing with the mythological account of the end of the world in Norse mythology, Ragnarok.
The crew of Naglfar was made up of men who had drowned, and the evil God Loki, along with frost giants and a helmsman named Hrymr. The 13th-century _Poetic Edda_ contains a poem called _Völuspá_, which is all about a vision of a female prophetess foretelling how the world began and how it will end, and mentions the passengers on Naglfar, which include creatures from the underworld Hel, that will participate in the final battle of destruction.
Naglfar also appears in a section of the _Prose Edda_ (called the _Gylfaginning_) when a character called “High” warns against burying the dead without having first trimmed their nails — trim them, he warns, so that the dreaded vessel’s construction won’t be hastened.
The image above is a modern interpretation of Naglfar (from The Viking Herald), and the one below is a possible rendition of the boat from the Tullstorp Runestone (c. 1000 CE), which has other scenes from Ragnarok.
Sources: The Tullstorp Runestone image is from Wikipedia. See Neil Price, _The Viking Way_, second edition, 2018, pp 24, 33.
