Yggdrasil and The Nine Worlds by stevengoesmyths

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

The world tree Yggdrasil with the 9 worlds.

Midgard

Midgard (Old Norse Miðgarðr, Gothic midjungards, Old English middangeard, Old Saxon middilgard, Old High German mittilgart or mittangard, Proto-Germanic *meðjanagarðaz, “Middle Enclosure”) is one of the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology and an important concept in the pre-Christian world view of all of the Germanic peoples. It’s the inhabited world, and roughly corresponds to the modern English word and concept of “civilization.” It’s the only one of the Nine Worlds that’s primarily located in the visible world; the others, while they may intersect with the visible world at various points, are first and foremost invisible locations.

Midgard

The name “Midgard” (“Middle Enclosure”) has a double meaning. The first meaning of the word refers to civilization’s position “in the middle of” an otherwise wild world, which is reflected on the cosmological plane by Midgard’s being surrounded by the uninhabited wilderness of Jotunheim, the world of the often-hostile giants. This is akin to the way in which the continents are surrounded by the ocean, which is, in the ancient Germanic perspective, also teeming with giants. The serpent Jormungand lives in the sea and encircles the terrestrial Midgard and the wilderness at its borders, and Aegir and Ran dwell in the same watery depths and claim the lives of unfortunate seafarers. You might call this part of the word’s meaning “horizontal.” The second and “vertical” sense of the word’s meaning refers to Midgard’s position below Asgard, the world of the Aesir gods and goddesses, and above the underworld. This vertical axis is represented by the world-tree Yggdrasil, which holds Asgard in its upper branches, Midgard at the base of its trunk, and the underworld amongst its roots.

Both of these senses of the word’s meaning ultimately refer to Midgard’s place in the psychogeographical distinction between the innangard and utangard, one of the most important concepts in the ancient Germanic worldview. That which is innangard (“inside the fence”) is orderly, law-abiding, and civilized, while that which is utangard (“beyond the fence”) is chaotic, anarchic, and wild. This applies both to the geographical plane and the human psyche; thoughts and actions can be innangard or utangard just as readily as spatial locations. Asgard, the “Enclosure of the Aesir,” is the divine model of the innangard, while Jotunheim, the “Homeland of the Giants,” is the model of the utangard. Midgard is, once again, somewhere in the middle. But, as the -gard element in the name implies, Midgard is – at least in theory – striving to be more like Asgard, more ordered according to the divine model upon which it’s patterned.

When the gods gave the world its initial shape, they slew the giant Ymir and created the various part of the world from his body parts. In order to protect Midgard and humanity from the giants, they built a fence around Midgard out of Ymir’s eyebrows. Building fences around farms repeated this paradigmatic act, marking off that which was within the fences as innangard and that which was outside the fences as utangard.

During Ragnarok, the destruction of the world at the end of the Germanic mythical cycle, Midgard sinks into the sea, only to rise again, as green and fertile as ever, when the cycle begins again and the creation is repeated.

Asgard

Asgard (Old Norse Ásgarðr, “Enclosure of the Aesir) is the home and fortress of the Aesir, one of the two tribes of gods (the other being the Vanir, who have their home inVanaheim). Asgard is located in the sky (albeit invisibly, of course – see pantheism andmyth) and is connected toMidgard, the world of humanity, by the rainbow bridge Bifrost.

An anonymous painting depicting Asgard and Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, connecting it to Midgard

The -gard element in Asgard’s name is a reference to the ancient Germanic concept of the distinction between theinnangard and utangard. That which is innangard (“inside the fence”) is orderly, law-abiding, and civilized, while that which is utangard (“beyond the fence”) is chaotic, anarchic, and wild. This applies both to the geographical plane and the human psyche; thoughts and actions can be innangard or utangard just as readily as spatial locations. Asgard is the ultimate model of the innangard, while Jotunheim, the “Homeland of the Giants,” is the epitome of the utangard.

Midgard (“Middle Enclosure”), the world of human civilization, is, as the name implies, somewhere in the middle – not quite as innangard as Asgard and not quite as utangard as Jotunheim. But Midgard is a space enclosed, on the geographical plane, by fences, and on the psychological plane by norms and laws. This makes it much closer – at least in theory – to Asgard than to Jotunheim. In other words, Asgard is the divine model upon which the pre-Christian Norse people patterned their world.

Vanaheim

Vanaheim (Old Norse Vanaheimr, “Homeland of the Vanir“) is one of the Nine Worlds that are situated around the world-tree Yggdrasil. As the name implies, it’s the home of the Vanir tribe of deities, who tend to be somewhat more associated with fertility and what we today would call “nature” than the other tribe of Norse deities, the Aesir, who have their home in Asgard.

“The Course of Empire: the Pastoral or Arcadian State” by Thomas Cole (1834)

The surviving sources for our information on Norse mythology and religion, as fragmentary as they are, don’t contain any explicit mention of where exactly Vanaheim is located. The sole clue we have comes from the Lokasenna (“The Taunting of Loki“), one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, which states that the Vanir god Njordwent eastward when he went to Asgard as a hostage at the conclusion of the Aesir-Vanir War. Presumably, then, Vanaheim lies somewhere to the west of Asgard.

Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that Vanaheim was invented by the thirteenth-century Icelandic Christian historian and poet Snorri Sturluson. However, there is one authentic and reliable Old Norse poem that mentions Vanaheim by name, so we can be reasonably certain that it was a genuine element of pre-Christian Norse religion.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the sources are completely silent as to what kind of world Vanaheim is. However, its name may contain an indication of the place’s character. One of the primary ways the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples classified geographical spaces (as well as psychological states) was with reference to their concept of the distinction between the innangard and utangard. That which is innangard (“inside the fence”) is orderly, law-abiding, and civilized, while that which is utangard (“beyond the fence”) is chaotic, anarchic, and wild. This psychogeography found its natural expression in agrarian land-use patterns, where the fence (the -gard or, in Old Norse, -garðr of the above terms) separated pastures and fields of crops from the wilderness beyond them. Of the Nine Worlds, two are innangard spaces: Asgard and Midgard, the world of human civilization. Both of these contain -gard in their names and are depicted as having a fence or fortification surrounding them. The rest of the Nine Worlds’ names end in -heim, and there’s no reference to their being enclosed in any way, which seems to indicate that they’re essentially utangard places. Such a designation is certainly in keeping with the way these places are described in Old Norse literature. Thus, we can infer that Vanaheim, like the Vanir themselves, is somewhat more wild or “natural,” and less “cultural,” than the world of the Vanir’s Aesir counterparts, or even that of humanity.

Jotunheim

Jotunheim (pronounced “YO-tun-hame;” Old Norse Jötunheimr, “World of the Giants”) is, as the name implies, the homeland of the giants (Old Norse jötnar).

“Mountain out of the Mist” by Albert Bierstadt (1873)

Jotunheim is also known as Utgard (pronounced “OOT-guard;” Old Norse Útgarðr, “Beyond the Fence”), a name which establishes the realm as occupying one extreme end of the traditional Germanic conceptual spectrum between the innangard and the utangard. That which is innangard (“inside the fence”) is orderly, law-abiding, and civilized, while that which is utangard (“beyond the fence”) is chaotic, anarchic, and wild. This psychogeography found its natural expression in agrarian land-use patterns, where the fence (the “gard” or garðrof the above terms) separated pastures and fields of crops from the wilderness beyond them. In fact, the very word “wilderness” comes from a Germanic language, Old English, where the word formed from the roots wild-deor-ness literally means “the place of self-willed beasts.” One would therefore expect the cosmological Utgard/Jotunheim to be symbolized as a vast, mighty wilderness that surrounds a more civilized world.

And, indeed, that is exactly the place Jotunheim occupies in the pre-Christian Germanic cosmology. At the center of this cosmology are Asgard, “The Enclosure of the Aesir Deities,” and its human counterpart, Midgard, “The Middle Enclosure.” Asgard is the divine model of the innangard. Midgard, the visible world and especially human civilization, is patterned upon the divine model. The “Middle” element in its name largely refers to its being surrounded by – in the middle of – Jotunheim.

In the Eddas, the dwelling-places of the giants are described as deep, dark forests, mountain peaks where winter never eases its grip, and similarly inhospitable and grim landscapes, and this certainly seems to be how the heathen Norse and other Germanic peoples symbolically visualized the invisible Jotunheim itself.

Niflheim

Niflheim (pronounced “NIF-el-hame;” from Old Norse Niflheimr, “World of Fog”) is the homeland of primordial darkness, cold, mist, and ice. As such, it’s the opposite cosmological principle of Muspelheim, the world of fire and heat.

“Morning Mist in the Mountains” by Caspar David Friedrich (1808)

In the Norse creation narrativeas related by the medieval Christian Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, the first being, the giant Ymir, was born when ice from Niflheim and fire from Muspelheim met in the middle of Ginnungagap, the abyss that had formerly separated them.

The word “Niflheim” is only found in the works of Snorri and is often used interchangeably with “Niflhel,” a poetic embellishment of “Hel,” the world of the dead. “Niflhel” is found in Old Norse poems that are much older than Snorri’s works. It’s entirely possible that the word “Niflheim” is an invention of Snorri’s. It’s impossible to know whether the attendant concept is of similarly late and spurious origins, because our only source for anything that even pretends to be a full account of the heathen Norse creation narrative comes from – you guessed it – the works of Snorri.

Muspelheim

The word “Muspelheim” is recorded only in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a late work that can’t be taken at face value as representing authentic pre-Christian Norse mythology. However, the basic cosmological principle it represents can be tracked far into the Germanic past. Cognates of Múspell can be found in Old High German and Old Saxon texts, meaning that the word and the concept it denotes likely go back to the Proto-Germanic period. Its oldest meaning, when one compares these various sources, seems to have been “end of the world through fire.” In earlier Old Norse poetry, the word seems to refer to a giant who leads his “people” or “sons” into battle against the gods during Ragnarok. Even if the idea of Muspelheim as a place rather than an event or a person is an invention of Snorri’s, it’s a relatively minor accretion, and one which is broadly consistent with the earlier uses of Múspell.

Muspelheim features in both the creation of the world and its downfall. In the creation narrative given by Snorri, fire from Muspelheim and ice from Niflheim meet in the middle of Ginnungagap and forge the giant Ymir, the first being from whose corpse the world was eventually shaped. During Ragnarok, the fire giant Surt, who should probably be identified with the Múspell of Old Norse poetry, arrives from the south (surely meant to be understood as the realm of heat and fire) with a flaming sword to slay the gods and burn the world. The continental Germanic meaning of the word also implies this connection with a cyclical eschaton (a theological word for the end of the world).

Alfheim

Alfheim is never described in the sources that form the basis of our current knowledge of heathen Germanic religion, but is rather merely mentioned in passing in a few places. However, the elves are described as being luminous and “more beautiful than the sun,” so we may suppose that their homeland was a gracious realm of light and beauty. Although the realms that comprise the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmology are never listed, it seems highly probable that, given the prominence of the elves in Germanic religion, Alfheim was one of them.

The Vanir god Freyr is said to be the ruler of Alfheim. Scholars have long puzzled over what to make of this, and no wholly satisfactory conclusions have been put forth. The relationship between the elves and the Vanir is highly ambiguous and involves considerable overlap between the two groups. Freyr’s position as lord of Alfheim, therefore, while hard to interpret with much precision, shouldn’t be entirely surprising.

Svartalfheim

Svartalfheim (pronounced “SVART-alf-hame;” Old Norse Svartálfaheimr, “Homeland of the Black Elves”) is the world inhabited by the dwarves, who are occasionally called “blackelves” (Old Norse svartálfar) in Old Norse literature.

“Soria Moria Castle” by Theodor Kittelsen (1900)

The dwarves are master smiths and craftspeople who live beneath the ground. Accordingly, Svartalfheim was probably thought of as a labyrinthine, subterranean complex of mines and forges.

Svartalfheim is mentioned by name only once in the surviving sources that discuss elements of the pre-Christian mythology and religion of the Norse and other Germanic peoples. The realm was probably considered to be one of the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmology, although, since the worlds that comprise the Nine are never explicitly named, this must remain a tentative conjecture.

Helheim

Hel lent its name to Hell, the Christian afterlife world where sinners are eternally tormented at the instigation of Satan and the god who created him. In the indigenous worldview of the Norse and other Germanic peoples, however, the underworld has no such associations; it isn’t necessarily an unpleasant place, and one’s moral fiber has no bearing whatsoever on what happens to a person after death. The word “Hel” simply means “hidden/concealed,” referring to the invisible character of the realm and the palpable absence left behind in the wake of the departed.