Sunna- Germanic GodDeity

The Merseburg Charm

A horse twisted its foot. Phol and Wodan were riding to the forest when it happened, and the animal could not go on. Four goddesses sang over the injury: Sinthgunt and Sunna, then Frija and Volla, each chanting in turn. None of them healed it. Then Wodan spoke his own charm, and the bone snapped back into place.

The Second Merseburg Charm, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript from the cathedral library at Merseburg, is Sunna's only surviving literary appearance on the Continent. She stands in the company of Wodan and Frija, and the charm gives her a sister, Sinthgunt, otherwise unknown. Whatever else has been lost, this one scene places her among the highest gods of the Continental Germanic world.

The Chase

In the Norse telling, Sunna's passage across the sky is not serene. The wolf Sköll runs behind her chariot every day, close enough that she never slows. This is why the sun moves without stopping. At Ragnarök, Sköll catches her. He swallows the sun, and the world goes dark.

Before that end, she bears a daughter. The daughter takes her mother's course across the sky after the old world burns, carrying light into the one that follows. Her name is not recorded. The grammatical gender of the sun in Germanic languages is feminine, preserved in modern German die Sonne and in Sunday itself: Old English Sunnandæg, German Sonntag.

The Chariot in the Bog

In 1902, a farmer on the island of Zealand pulled a bronze sculpture from a Danish bog. It dated to roughly 1400 BCE: a horse on six wheels drawing a gilded disk the size of a dinner plate. One side of the disk was covered in gold leaf, the other left dark bronze. The bright face for the day crossing, the dark for the night return. The Trundholm sun chariot sits now in the National Museum of Denmark, the oldest known image of a horse drawing the sun across the sky.