Norse Mythology and Religion: Odin, Thor, and the Nine Worlds

Introduction

The Norse religion of the Viking Age was a complex of beliefs, rituals, and stories in which gods and giants, humans and dwarfs, elves and the dead all had their place. It was a polytheistic religion with a large and varied pantheon, a moral vision that prized courage and honor, and an eschatology that looked forward to a great final battle and the destruction and renewal of the world. The Norse religion is the best-documented of the Germanic paganisms, in part because it was recorded, just in time, in the Icelandic manuscripts of the Eddas and the saga literature, and in part because Christian writers like Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus described the pagan practices they were replacing. The Norse gods and their stories have remained a fundamental part of European literary culture, from the Norse romantics of the nineteenth century to the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien and the modern marvel of cinema. For the broader society in which this religion was practiced, see the Viking society and culture; for a focused account of the pantheon, see who were the Norse gods; for the end of the world in Norse myth, see what was Ragnarok.

The Gods

The Norse gods, the æsir, were a divine aristocracy, governing the world from their halls in Asgard. The principal gods were Odin, Thor, Freyr, and Freyja, with a host of lesser deities — Tyr, Baldr, Höðr, Bragi, Idunn, Heimdall, and others. Each had a distinct personality, a special set of skills, and a defined place in the cosmos. Odin, the Allfather, was the god of war, of poetry, of wisdom, of magic, and of the dead. He was the lord of Valhalla, the great hall in which the warriors who died in battle would feast until the day of Ragnarok. He was a god of cunning, willing to sacrifice for knowledge, and his wandering through the nine worlds in search of wisdom was one of the great mythic themes of Norse religion. For more on Odin and the other deities, see who were the Norse gods.

Thor, Odin’s son, was the god of thunder, of strength, and of the common people. He was a fighter of giants, a protector of the human world, and a god of the working farmer. His great weapon was the hammer Mjöllnir, with which he smashed the heads of the giants and the trolls who threatened the world of gods and humans. His chariot, drawn by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, produced the thunder of his flight through the sky. Thor was the most popular god of the Viking Age, and his name, the Old Norse Þórr, gave rise to the place-name element -thor, common in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Freyja and Freyr were the twin deities of fertility, prosperity, and peace. Freyr was the lord of the earth’s fruits, of fine weather, of sunshine, and of human and animal fertility. Freyja was the goddess of love, of beauty, of fertility, and of the special magic known as seiðr, a kind of shamanic practice associated with the Norse gods. Freyja received half of those who died in battle; the other half went to Odin in Valhalla. She had a great hall at Sessrúmnir, a chariot drawn by cats, and a cloak of falcon feathers that allowed her to fly.

The Other Beings

The Norse cosmos also contained a number of other kinds of beings. The giants, the jötnar, were the original inhabitants of the world, born from the primordial union of fire and ice. They were the enemies of the gods, but they were also the source of much of the gods’ wisdom and power. The dwarfs, the dvergar, were skilled craftsmen who lived in the bowels of the earth and produced the most beautiful and the most deadly of objects: the ship Skíðblaðnir, the boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and the spear Gungnir. The elves, the álfar, were a race of luminous beings associated with fertility, beauty, and the natural world. The land-spirits, the landvættir, were the protective spirits of particular places; the law required that ships approaching Iceland should lower their sails or take down their figureheads to avoid alarming the landvættir of the land.

The dead, too, had their place. Warriors who died in battle were received by Odin in Valhalla, where they would fight and feast until the day of Ragnarok. Others went to Freyja’s hall at Sessrúmnir. The dead who did not die in battle went to Hel, the half-dark realm ruled over by the goddess Hel, daughter of Loki. Hel was not a place of punishment, in the Christian sense, but a kind of gray afterlife for the great majority of the dead. Burial customs varied: in the earlier part of the Viking Age, the dead were often buried in ships or in elaborate grave-mounds, with grave-goods including weapons, jewelry, and food; later, the Christian practice of burial in consecrated ground became universal, and the great ship-burials of the Viking Age gave way to churchyards.

The Nine Worlds and Yggdrasil

The Norse cosmos was structured around a great world-tree, Yggdrasil, an immense ash tree that connected nine worlds. The gods lived in Asgard, the highest of the worlds. Midgard was the world of humans, the Middle Earth, surrounded by an ocean in which the great sea-serpent Jörmungandr coiled. Jotunheim was the world of the giants, lying to the east of Midgard. Vanaheim was the home of the vanir, a second divine race associated with fertility and magic. Alfheim was the home of the elves. Svartalfheim was the home of the dwarfs. Muspelheim was the fiery world to the south, ruled by the fire-giant Surt, and Niflheim was the icy world to the north. Hel, the realm of the dead, was below Midgard, and the ninth world, sometimes called Náströnd, was a place of punishment for oath-breakers and murderers.

Yggdrasil itself was a great ash tree, with roots that reached into Asgard, into Jotunheim, and into Niflheim. Three springs, the Well of Urd, Mimir’s Well, and the spring of Hvergelmir, were at its roots, and the Norns, the three great fates of Norse myth, drew water from the Well of Urd to nourish the tree. The tree was constantly under attack: the goat Heiðrún ate its leaves, the dragon Níðhöggr gnawed at its roots, and the squirrel Ratatöskr ran up and down its trunk carrying insults between the eagle that nested in its crown and the dragon below. Yggdrasil’s fragility was a symbol of the fragility of the world itself, and its shuddering in the storm was the visible sign of cosmic danger.

The Creation and the End

The Norse story of creation begins with a great void, Ginnungagap, lying between the fiery world of Muspelheim and the icy world of Niflheim. Where the heat of Muspelheim met the ice of Niflheim, the first being, the giant Ymir, was born, and from Ymir the first gods, the æsir, were descended. The gods killed Ymir and made the world from his body: the earth from his flesh, the mountains from his bones, the sea from his blood, the sky from his skull. The first human couple, Ask and Embla, were created by Odin, Hoenir, and Lodur from two tree-trunks they found on the seashore. The Norse creation story is bleak and violent, and the world it describes is one in which the gods are doomed to fight and to fall.

The end of the world, in Norse myth, is Ragnarok. According to the Völuspá, the great prophetic poem of the Poetic Edda, the signs of Ragnarok are the death of the god Baldr, the Fimbulvetr, a great and terrible winter, the loosing of the wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jörmungandr rising from the sea, and Loki breaking free from his chains. The gods, led by Odin, will meet the forces of chaos on the field of Vígríðr, and most of them will fall. Odin will be swallowed by Fenrir, Thor will kill Jörmungandr and die from its venom, Freyr will fall before Surtr, Heimdall and Loki will kill each other. The world will be destroyed by fire and flood, and a new world will rise from the ashes, green and fair, with a new sun and a new human couple. The survival of two human beings, Líf and Lífþrasir, and the survival of some of the gods — Vidar, Váli, and the sons of Thor — ensures the continuity of the world. For the full account of this end, see what was Ragnarok.

Sacrifice and Ritual

The Norse religion was a religion of sacrifice. The Old Norse word blót meant both the sacrifice itself and the feast that followed, and the great feasts of the Norse year were religious occasions. At Uppsala, according to Adam of Bremen, every nine years a great festival was held at which nine of every kind of animal were sacrificed and the bodies were hung in a sacred grove. The practice of human sacrifice is also attested, both in the sagas and in the archaeology; the bog-bodies of northern Europe, including the famous Tollund Man and Grauballe Man in Denmark, are evidence of the practice of sacrifice by ritual killing and burial in sacred bogs.

The Norse also had a developed cult of the ancestors. The dead were buried with grave-goods, and the relationship between the living and the dead was a matter of ritual attention. The hauntings of the sagas, the draugar, the walking dead, are a sign of the seriousness with which the Norse treated the relationship. A dead man who had not been properly buried, or who had not received the proper grave-goods, could return to trouble the living, and a chieftain whose father had been unburied was obliged to provide a proper funeral, even years after the death.

The Christianization of the North

The Norse religion was gradually replaced by Christianity over the course of the Viking Age. The process began in the ninth century, with the mission of Ansgar, the “Apostle of the North,” to Denmark and Sweden, and was completed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The first Scandinavian king to be baptized was Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, around 965, an act celebrated on the great Jelling stone. By the time of the Christianization of Iceland in 1000, the older gods were still being worshipped in many parts of Scandinavia, but the political and economic center of gravity was moving toward the Latin Christian world.

The conversion was rarely sudden. The early Norse Christian churches were often built on the sites of pagan shrines, and the first generation of Scandinavian Christians combined Christian and pagan practices. The runestones of Sweden and Denmark, raised in the tenth and eleventh centuries, often carry both pagan memorial formulae and Christian prayers. The Norse gods were not forgotten; they survived in the saga literature of the thirteenth century, in the folklore of the Scandinavian countryside, and in the deep structures of the Scandinavian imagination. For the broader process of Christianization, see christianization of Europe.

Conclusion

The Norse religion was a developed system of belief, ritual, and story that served the Norse people for the best part of a millennium. Its gods, its cosmology, and its eschatology have remained part of the European cultural inheritance, and the surviving texts of the Eddas and the sagas are among the most fascinating products of medieval literature. The religion was not the static thing it sometimes appears in modern retellings; it changed over the Viking Age, was adapted to the political needs of the new kingdoms, and was eventually absorbed into the Christian world of the high Middle Ages. Yet the gods, the giants, the dwarfs, and the apocalyptic vision of Ragnarok have never entirely disappeared from the European mind.