Norse Cosmology Part II: The Shape of the World

A more realistic proposal for thinking about how the ancient Norse mind conceptualized the world map

At some point, every serious student of Norse mythology stumbles upon the fact that the traditional list of “nine realms” often depicted in popular media is a complete fabrication¹. But this revelation only spurs more questions. If the Norse mythological world isn’t divided into nine marbles floating around in tree branches, what does it look like?

Let’s start with that tree.

There is no question that the Norse cosmos is centered on a very large and important tree, usually called either Yggdrasill² or Askr Yggdrasils³ (Ash of Yggdrasill). However, there is nothing in our mythological source material associating any specific locations with its branches or with tiers going up its trunk or anything else indicating that the cosmos itself can be represented by the structure of the tree.

Rather, we have two descriptions of the entire world being connected by the fact that Yggdrasill’s roots run through it. As far as we are told, there are only three roots. The first statement comes from Grímnismál 31 in the Poetic Edda:

Þrjár rœtr standa á þrjá vega | undan aski Yggdrasils; | Hel býr undir einni, annarri hrímþursar, | þriðju mennskir menn.

Three roots extend out in three directions under the Ash of Yggdrasill; Hel lives under one, (under) the second the frost-thurses, (under) the third, humankind.

This is in contrast with what we find in Gylfaginning 15 of the Prose Edda:

Þrjár rætr trésins halda því upp ok standa afarbreitt. Ein er með ásum, en önnur með hrímþursum, þar sem forðum var Ginnungagap. In þriðja stendr yfir Niflheimi, ok undir þeiri rót er Hvergelmir, en Níðhöggr gnagar neðan rótina. […] Þriðja rót asksins stendr á himni, ok undir þeiri rót er brunnr sá, er mjök er heilagr, er heitir Urðarbrunnr. Þar eiga goðin dómstað sinn. Hvern dag ríða æsir þangat upp um Bifröst.

The tree’s three roots hold it up and extend quite far. One is with the Æsir, and the second (with) the frost-thurses, where Ginnungagap formerly was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. […] The ash’s third root extends to heaven, and under that root is a well which is very holy, called Urd’s Well. There the gods have their judgment-place. Every day the Æsir ride there up over Bifrost.

One interesting quirk of the Prose Edda is that its author(s), although motivated to deliver accurate details as much as possible, see the world through a Christian lens, which results in a tendency to conceptualize certain things as being “in heaven”. That tendency appears to have led to a rather strange notion of the third tree root’s behavior here, which must make a weird, right-angled turn straight up into the sky in order to preside over both the underworld and Urd’s Well.

Fascinatingly, this description does not actually place the gods themselves (and by extension, their enclosure Asgard) “in heaven”. Rather, the gods must “ride up” to Urd’s Well every day in order to hold judgments. It’s an odd detail, but it does coincide with what we are told two sections earlier in Gylfaginning 13, that the gods “made themselves a city in the middle of the world which is known as Asgard.” Whether or not Urd’s Well should truly be thought of as “in heaven” is perhaps questionable given the bizarre behavior of the third tree root, but the idea that the Æsir dwell more or less on the same horizontal plane as humanity while also spending time at locations aloft is repeated⁴ with relative consistency throughout the source material.

The other, less obvious thing to be cautious of here is the word undir (under), because it does not always mean “physically beneath”. Note how this word is used in Gylfaginning 13 with regard to the first humans being given a dwelling-place on Earth:

Hét karlmaðrinn Askr, en konan Embla, ok ólst þaðan af mannkindin, sú er byggðin var gefinn undir Miðgarði.

The man was called Ash, and the woman Embla, and from them were bred mankind, to whom the dwelling was given under Midgard.

In this sense, the word under means something more akin to “within the scope of”. Imagine alphabetizing a stack of papers and saying to yourself, “I’ll file this one under the letter B,” or perhaps describing a company’s hierarchy to a new employee and saying, “Bob works under Sally.” As mentioned, this word does not have to mean “physically beneath” and, in Old Norse, it fairly frequently does not. So when we read that mankind was given a dwelling “under” Midgard, or that any given location is “under” a root of Yggdrasill, it is not actually clear that this should be taken literally. At least in the cases of the homes of humans and frost-thurses, it seems much more likely that these locations are simply demarcated by their associated tree roots.

Grímnismál describes these roots as marking the home of the dead, the home of the frost-thurses (being alive, yet otherworldly), and the home of humanity (what we see and interact with daily). In this sense, the entire cosmos is connected, though strangely, there is no special root for the gods.

Gylfaginning instead describes the roots as marking the home of the gods, the home of the dead, and the home of the frost-thurses. This time, there is no special root for humans.

Oral traditions are, of course, prone to variation across time and space, and authors can also make mistakes, so there is no real requirement for us to unify these ideas. However, if we assume that Asgard is (as Gylf. 13 asserts) a city within Midgard, then perhaps Grímnismál’s root of mankind could also be Gylfaginning’s root of the gods. On the other hand, if Yggdrasill stands within Asgard, then perhaps Asgard doesn’t need a root at all.

We should keep in mind that the ancient Norse were an ancient people. Their worldview did not involve a multiverse or extra-spatial dimensions, or any concept that bright, celestial objects were anything other than glowing volcanic sparks set into the sky by the gods⁵. Their ancestors migrated to Scandinavia from distant lands in the south-east thousands of years earlier, and every time they set sail into the far reaches of the world, they were continually met with new discoveries: lands, creatures, and even new types of people.

Imagine yourself in a context like this. How do you draw a map of the world? As we might expect, it turns out that digging deeply into directional information in the sources results in big pile of contradictory information. Sometimes jotuns can be found in the north, sometimes the east. Sometimes the gods are in the west or somewhere up high. Sometimes Midgard is separated from the lands of the jotuns by a donut-shaped sea, and sometimes that same sea rings around the lands of the jotuns as well. To reach distant, supernatural lands, sometimes characters must venture through caves, climb mountains, dive underwater, or venture through magic portals in cliff-faces or below hearths.

Eldar Heide proposes⁶ that the various heimar (homes/realms/worlds) of Norse mythology are contained within “bubbles”. These are not actual, physical bubbles, but three-dimensional spaces wherein there is some maximum height, depth, and distance a person in ancient times could have realistically traveled by natural means. Getting from bubble to bubble therefore requires some kind of magical, supernatural means, and there is no real canonical directionality between all of these realms.

I like this idea, but I also find it a tad overly analytical, describing things in terms that I think would be difficult to keep straight when passing ideas orally from generation to generation. Fortunately, I believe this idea can be simplified even further.

In my view, the average Norse person probably thought of the world as an immeasurably large canvas of mappable territory, with most of that canvas being completely blank and uncharted by humans. Keep in mind that the first maps depicting full coastlines of continents in both hemispheres didn’t appear until the 16th century. Though mathematicians in ancient Greece had discovered that the Earth was spherical at least by the 5th century BC, this knowledge was only gradually adopted throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.

Prior to learning the size and shape of the Earth by way of calculation, experience dictated that no matter how far one ventured, the world kept expanding outward with no end in sight. Imagine yourself as a Norse person, placed in front of a blank, immeasurable canvas, and asked to draw a map of the world. What would you do?

Since you aren’t aware of the shapes of all the continents, you would probably start by drawing your home and the neighborhood around you, as well as every place you’ve ever been and whatever landmasses you know. But all of this constitutes only a small fraction of mappable space on this otherwise empty canvas.

You know that somewhere in the center of this canvas ought to be the tree Yggdrasill, so you take a few steps far away from the place on the canvas where you’ve drawn the world you know, leaving lots of empty canvas in between, and you draw a tree. You know there ought to be a well here and a hall owned by the chief of the gods so you draw those too. You draw in a few more homes of the gods here and label it Asgard.

Of course, you’ve really only guessed at where the center of this canvas is. You can’t really be sure whether Asgard should be to the east or west of your home town, but you’ve chosen a way to represent it on your map. You also have some ambiguous idea of where the home of the jotuns ought to be, so you walk back past your known world on the map, a few steps past blank canvas in the other direction, and start drawing some places you remember from mythology: Thrymheim, Geirrodagard, and various other jotun homesteads. Where should they be in relation to each other? You aren’t sure. You just know that they are somewhere way out beyond anywhere you’ve ever been and so, way out there on the canvas you draw a few little independent areas of detail.

Between all of these locations there are great swathes of empty canvas representing unknown terrain that would have to be crossed in order to reach these areas. In this sense, each detailed area of the map is somewhat similar to one of Heide’s bubbles, but there’s no reason to think they are independent realms of existence that are completely unreachable except by magical means. Instead, they are all part of the same world; it’s just reaching them that’s the problem, and you have no idea exactly where on this unknowably enormous map they should truly lie.

But in the stories you tell your children and grandchildren, gods, jotuns, and humans sometimes need to visit each others’ homes and there must be some way to get there. So what do your characters do? They cross nearly impenetrable barriers like high mountains and nearly impossible distances like vast oceans all the way to heaven’s end, or they take supernatural, rainbow bridges through the sky that could lead from here to there to anywhere. Sometimes they wander into liminal and mysterious spaces such as darkness or caves, or they get lost at sea– spaces where it’s impossible to know exactly what geography surrounds them and even how far they’ve gone, until they come out on the other side to find themselves in an otherworld of sorts. In some cases, they’ll reach these areas simply by passing through magical doorways.

As Heide and I would agree, none of this means these otherworldly locations have to be located in the sky or underground or anything of the sort. You simply need a narrative way to get your character from a known place in the world, past the unknown, empty canvas, to another known place in the world. And in that respect, it doesn’t matter exactly where these locations are in relation to each other, we can still easily say that the homes of gods, humans, and jotuns loosely surround each other in some way. More importantly, the simplest explanation here is probably that of many homes, all part of one world, all lying under one sky⁷.

Image by MHoltsmeier on DeviantArt. Creative Commons 3.0

1. See “Norse Cosmology Part I: The Nine Realms Are Wrong”

2. Pettit, E., trans., The Poetic Edda: A Dual Language Edition, (Open Book Publishers, 2023), p. 43

3. Pettit, p. 183

4. Faulkes, A., trans., Snorri Sturluson: ‘Edda’ (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf, p. 13

5. Faulkes, p. 12

6. Heide, E. “Contradictory Cosmology in Old Norse Myth and Religion - But Still a System?”. Maal Og Minne, vol. 106, nr. 1, June 2014, https://ojs.novus.no/index.php/MOM/article/view/226.

7. Faulkes, p. 17