Dogs Won't Attack

Odin and Frigg sat in Hlidskialf and looked into all the worlds. Odin said, ‘Do you see Agnar, your foster-son, there raising children with a giantess in a cave? But Geirrod, my foster-son, is king and rules over the land.’ Frigg says: ‘He is so stingy with food that he tortures his guests if it seems to him that too many have come.’ Odin says that is the greatest lie. They wagered on the matter.

Frigg sent her handmaid, Fulla, to Geirrod. She told the king to beware lest a wizard, who had come into the country, should bewitch him, and said he could be known by this sign: that no dog was so fierce that it would leap on him. And that was the greatest slander that Geirrod was not generous with food; however, he had that man arrested whom no dog would attack. He was wearing a blue cloak and called himself Grimnir, and would say nothing more about himself, though he was asked. The king had him tortured to make him speak and set him between two fires, and he sat there eight nights.


- Poetic Edda, Grimnismal


(Note: "Grimnir" is another name for Odin.)