East of the settled world, in an iron forest, an old woman gives birth to wolves. She is a witch, and her children come into the world already in the shape of the beast that hunts the sun and moon—the crone as mother of a whole devouring wolf-race.

The witness is Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (Old Norse prose, composed about 1220 CE), in the dialogue where the questioner Ganglere presses the god-figure Har about the wolves that chase the sun across the sky. Asked whose offspring these pursuing wolves are, Har answers that “A hag dwells east of Midgard,” in a wood called Jarnved, or Ironwood, “where reside the witches called Jarnvidjes.” This hag is no shape-shifter caught in a single act; her witchcraft is generative. “The old hag gives birth to many giant sons, and all in wolf’s likeness”, Har says, and “Thence come these two wolves”—Skol, who runs down the sun, and Hate, who lunges for the moon. Of that brood the worst is Moongarm, “filled with the life-blood of all dead men”, who will one day swallow the moon and stain the sky with gore. The account then quotes the older seeress-song, the Völuspá, to seal it: “In the east dwells the old hag, / In the Jarnved forest; / And brings forth there / Fenrer’s offspring”—binding this witch-mother to the great wolf Fenrir's line.

The served witness is single and clean; the address's other authorities, a Danish reference and a Swiss one, wait unread on the shelf.

Here the witch is defined not by the wolf-form she wears but by the wolves she bears—her monstrousness lodged in her womb rather than her skin. When a tradition makes the destroyers of sun and moon the literal children of a woman in the woods, what is it saying about where it thinks the world's undoing is born?