Listen! You all know the usefulness of the fishing net, which sustains many of our people who live on the shores of the ocean. This is how it was discovered – a great good out of a great ill.
After Baldur’s death, the anger of the Aesir against Loki, who had brought it about, knew no bounds. In fear for his life, he fled from Asgard, and hid himself on a distant mountain, in a hut which he built with his own hands. This hut had four doors, so that he could watch for approaching danger in every direction. From time to time, wearying of watching, he changed himself into a salmon, and in that form he hid in a nearby river, which descended the mountainside in a series of sparkling falls.
One day while Loki was sitting in his hut, he gave thought to how the Aesir might try to catch him in his fish form. Fishhooks and fish spears and fish traps he knew and could avoid, and the turbulent currents of the river would hide him from grasping hands, but there might, he thought, be other ways of catching a fish. And one morning as he walked outside his hut, he saw the web of a spider, glistening with dew, in the grass; and it gave him an idea. He unpicked a few linen threads from the hem of his tunic, and knotted them together in a pattern not unlike that which the spider had woven. A large enough web of this sort, he thought, might catch one fish – or many. So charmed was he with his idea that he forgot to keep proper watch. It was only when the ground beneath him began to tremble that he looked up, and beheld the approach of Thor and the other Aesir.
In panic, Loki dropped his web of threads into his morning fire, and fled to the river, where he took his salmon-form. Most of the Aesir followed him, but wise Kvasir stopped to inspect Loki’s hut. In the ashes of the fire he saw the pattern of the thread-web, burnt but not destroyed. For a long moment he stared at it, and then he smiled, knowing that Loki had woven his own destruction.
With linen cords, at Kvasir’s direction, the Aesir created a net – the first fishing net ever made. They made it long enough to span the river, and wide enough to reach from the riverbed to some way above the surface of the water, and they weighted the bottom edge with stones. Then Thor waded across the river holding one end, while the rest of the Aesir held the other, and they began to drag the net from the waterfalls toward the sea. Twice Loki evaded them, hiding between stones or leaping the net, but at last they caught him, and took him away to his long punishment.
But what, you may ask, happened to this first fishing net? The stories do not say. But I think that Njord, the God of the Sea, looked at it lying abandoned beside the river, and saw how it might benefit the sea-faring men he loved. He carried it away and gave it to them, teaching them its use and its making – a great gift which has been the life of many of our people.
And that is how the fishing net came to men.
