What is a Jotun?
On the nature of Norse mythology's so-called "giants"
There are no giants in Norse mythology.
Actually, that’s not true.
There are at least two very prominent humanoid giants in Norse mythology: Mokkurkalfi who is nine rests1 tall and Skrymir whose glove is so large it can be confused for a multi-chambered building. But what Norse mythology does not have (or at least does not clearly portray) is a class of consistently gigantic individuals.
The word “giant” is a poor English translation designed to unify a few disparate Old Norse terms, most specifically jǫtunn, þurs, and risi. For instance, the creatures so often termed “frost giants” are called in Old Norse hrimþursar, whereas the word for “mountain giants” is bergrisar – two very different words condensed into a single English word with a very particular meaning. But why?
There are two main avenues that brought us here, the first of which is Christianization.
To oversimplify a complex period in history, Scandinavia’s adoption of Christianity did not result in the stamping out of every extant pagan memory. Rather, it brought with it a desire to reframe ancient stories within a narrative that felt more acceptable in a Christian religious context.
To understand that context, we can look at what the Bible has to say about the world in days of yore (KJV, Genesis 6:4):
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
To be fair, there is a lot of Biblical analysis we could do regarding the ancient language this came from, the texts that were used, and the true intended meaning of the passage. But that is all beside the point here, which is simply to illustrate that medieval Christians had come to believe that “there were giants in the earth in those days.” To them, this constituted historical reality. Thus, being in the habit of reinterpreting their ancestors’ pagan mythology in a way that fit with the new, Christian understanding of history, they began to think of old, mythological beings in more biblical terms.
The second avenue that brings us to the idea of giants is the word risi. As it turns out, this is the word that becomes the preferred Icelandic term for an abnormally large individual in the post-conversion era. For instance, in Velents þáttr smiðs2, which is a very obvious later medieval text, Volund’s father Vadi is called a risi and is described as being large enough to carry Volund on his shoulders across a body of water approximately 9-12 ft. deep3. This word has been compared to the Old Saxon word wrisilîk, which seems to mean “giant-like”4, and has sometimes been assumed to be derived from the same root as risi (though this may not necessarily be correct5).
Regardless of where these words came from, it is interesting that Icelandic and West-Germanic material both ultimately converged on terms for gigantism that look and sound remarkably similar. While trends in West-Germanic vocabulary have been known to influence Old Norse on occasion, it is also not impossible that risi may have always been a word that denoted some kind of gigantism. So in order to get to the bottom of this, we’ll have to look at how this word is used in our sources.
Risses
Fascinatingly, the word risi and its variants such as bergrisi (mountain “giant”) are not found in Eddic poetry apart from one exception6, which is the poem Grottasǫngr. This poem tells the story of a legendary king named Frodi who purchases two enslaved bergrisar girls and forces them to produce riches for him by grinding them out of a magic mill. In the end, this mill becomes the origin of salt in the ocean.
Grottasǫngr is interesting because it does not appear in either the Codex Regius or Hauksbók manuscripts from which modern Poetic Edda compilations are derived. Instead, it is found in a few manuscripts containing Skáldskaparmál (part of the Prose Edda). In all cases, the poem shows signs of corruption, at least indicating several stages of transmission between 1200-1300 CE7. This does not mean that the story relayed by the poem is a post-conversion invention, however. After all, it deals with Migration-Era characters, variants can be found in both modern Norwegian and Shetlandic/Orcadian folklore, and it provides an origin for the 10th-century skaldic phrase “Frodi’s flour” as a kenning for gold.
Rudolf Simek believes that—
The short lay of 24 stanzas does not belong to the mythological poetry proper, but rather presents a mixture of mythical with legendary and fairytale material; in particular the latter aspect is emphasized by Snorri.8
It is likely that the poem is late (i.e., from the post-conversion period, and perhaps later than the Poetic Edda’s manuscripts since it was not included in them), even if the story it recounts may be earlier. In any case, it is striking that there is no other pagan-era poetry employing the use of the word bergrisi to describe the supernatural inhabitants of the outwilds. The word is found exclusively in post-conversion material.
It is clear that the author of Grottasǫngr did not intend bergrisar to be thought of as categorically distinct from jǫtnar, given instances such as stanza 23’s description of them as meyjar í jǫtunmóði (maidens in a jotun-rage). But it is not clear whether the author wanted the audience to think of these beings as gigantic. Skáldskaparmál’s prose contextualization of the poem refers to the maidens as miklar ok sterkar (large and strong), but these same words are also frequently used to describe big, strong humans. The poem itself describes them only as máttkar (mighty), which is an expected attribute of a supernaturally powerful being regardless of size. It also explains in stanza 8 that Frodi did not know about their ætterni (ancestry, descent, pedigree, family, kindred) when he purchased them. This could mean that he did not realize they came from a famous jotun/ris family, or it could mean he did not realize that they were of the race of risses. If the latter, we would have to infer that these risses were indistinguishable from humans.
This raises another interesting problem with the word “giant”, which is that there is no clear threshold for how large an individual must be in order to be called a giant. Whereas modern media has given many of us a conception of the average giant as being perhaps fifty feet tall or larger, the overly-large risses we find in medieval Norse material are typically described more like Volund’s father Vadi: just a few feet too tall.
Though a ris may wade a 9 ft. river, he may also be found riding a horse, as the huge (stóra) men from “Risaland” do in another late text, Þórsteins þáttr bæjarmagns9. In this context, we are told that the human Thorstein is so tall that he has trouble fitting through most doorways, yet he is later confronted by risses even larger than himself who chide him for looking like a child (barn). Even so, he does not look like an insect to them, and they are not so large that we are meant to think of them as unable to interact with the world as humans do.
Skaldic poetry and scattered “loose verses” (lausavísur) reinforce this notion as well, wherein the root ris- appears in stanzas from only four works: Ǫrvar-Odds saga10, the Buslubœn curse included within Bósa saga11, a lausavísa from Landnamabók12, and the 10th-century poem Þórsdrápa13. The relevant poetry from the sagas is undoubtedly late as it directly references Christian concepts in both cases14. The lausavísa is also generally accepted as having been a late composition. This leaves us with only one confirmed pre-Christian reference to risses and, in this case, the word as written in all original manuscripts is actually “res”. It has been amended by modern analysts to “risa” because the person being described is a jotun, the line as written is lacking a syllable required for the meter, and the word res otherwise makes no sense.
These are convincing-enough reasons to accept the emendation, though the fact that the only pre-Christian attestation of risses is also considered a scribal error is cause to raise an eyebrow. More importantly, none of these instances imply gigantism in their contexts. The pre-Christian attestation in Þórsdrápa is especially interesting because it is used to describe a character who is presently hiding under Thor’s chair – not exactly a choice that makes sense for a giant.
It is clear that post-conversion Norse literature employed a concept of big (but not too big) beings called risar, sometimes equating them with jotuns, and that this term is nearly absent from pre-Christian material. It appears in only one old poem, assumed to be misspelled in all manuscripts, in a context where an implication of gigantism is unlikely.
Even if risses did have an original association with gigantism, we should note that poets of the pagan era were typically not referring to the gods’ antagonists as risar. For some mysterious reason (perhaps influence from Low German ballads?) the term underwent a surge in popularity after the conversion, somewhere around the 1100s. It is only at this point that an association with large size becomes clear and an association with jotuns becomes common. The notion of risses as gigantic jotuns in the Christian medieval period therefore cannot be projected onto the beliefs of the earlier pagan period.
Jotuns in Myth
Side note: Because the sources tend to treat the words jǫtunn and þurs interchangeably, I will not be drawing a hard distinction between them going forward. Be aware that some of the characters I will be filing into the category of jotuns are technically named as thurses in their respective narratives. However, the points I will be making about this category of beings are applicable across the board.
When truly gigantic beings appear in mythological narratives, their size matters to the story and we are told about it. These instances illustrate that gigantism is uncommon among jotun traits and that the gods themselves are also not typically viewed as gigantic.
To illustrate, we may turn to the story of Thor’s visit to Utgard-Loki’s house. In this story, Thor and his companions (Loki, Thjalfi, and Roskva) come across a large building in the woods wherein they seek shelter for the night. Throughout the night they are beset by earthquakes and loud noises, causing Thor’s companions to become afraid and hide themselves in a certain room while Thor positions himself as guardian in the doorway. In the morning, Thor leaves the building to investigate these disturbances and discovers the enormous Skrymir sleeping nearby, whose snoring had been the cause of all the previous commotion. When Skrymir stands to introduce himself, Thor is so shocked by Skrymir’s size that he does not immediately strike with the hammer15. Subsequently we learn that the building wherein the party had sought shelter was actually Skrymir’s enormous glove. The elements of gigantism in this part of the story are confirmed by Hárbarðsljóð 26 and Lokasenna 60 which both mention the detail of Thor hiding in the glove.
We should note here that Thor, who battles jotuns on a daily basis, does not recognize the glove for what it is, does not recognize the cause of the earthquakes, and is quite explicitly shocked by Skrymir’s size. These details suggest that Thor does not normally encounter beings this large, and that he (a large god) is quite small by comparison. Of course, we discover at the end of the story that everything unusual Thor encounters on this journey is the result of Utgard-Loki’s illusory magic (e.g., Skrymir’s head was actually a mountain at one point, a cat was actually the World Serpent, etc). It is debatable whether Skrymir was truly gigantic by nature or whether this detail itself was just another illusion designed to make Thor feel small and weak.
The other humanoid giant in our myths is Mokkurkalfi: a Frankenstein’s monster made from clay by other jotuns, whose size we are given as “nine rests high” (níu rasta hár). His enormity is built-in by design as he is supposed to serve as the mighty Hrungnir’s backup in a duel against Thor. Unfortunately, jotuns can never do things the proper way, and Mokkurkalfi is given a mare’s heart, thus making him cowardly and weak despite his enormity, and he is quickly dispatched by the much smaller Thjalfi.
As I mentioned, Skrymir and Mokkurkalfi are outliers. In the average case, jotuns in mythological tales are described as interacting with the world in normal-sized ways. I have already mentioned Geirrod’s daughters who hide (together!) beneath Thor’s chair. Moreover, Hrungnir rides a horse in a race against Odin before striding into Valhalla and drinking from Thor’s personal goblet without any trouble. In the origin of the Mead of Poetry, two murderous dwarves invite a jotun couple to visit them, and the husband is able to fit quite nicely into the dwarves’ row boat while his wife has no trouble passing through the entrance to the their home. The builder who erects the wall around Asgard is unrecognizable as a jotun until he becomes angry. The human hero Volsung marries and has children with a jotun woman (dóttur Hrímnis jǫtuns). At Baldr’s funeral, the jotun woman Hyrrokkin16 rides a wolf and uses two snakes for reigns. The sources are rife with such things – jotuns comfortably fitting into their natural surroundings as relatively normal-sized humans would.
Reproductive compatibility is another strong point. One wonders why the wall-builder would want to have Freyja, why Thjazi would kidnap Idunn, or why Hrungnir would threaten to take Freyja and Sif for himself if not for a sexual motivation, although to act on such a motivation would be impossible if jotun men are comparatively gigantic. Apart from these instances, Freyr and Njord both marry jotun women (respectively Gerd and Skadi), Loki’s mother Laufey is often speculated to be a goddess although his father is a jotun, and Odin himself is the son of a jotun mother (technically a “rime-thurs”) and a proto-Æsir17 father.
This brings us to our most important point, which is that jotuns and gods were never separate species to begin with.
In the only surviving narrative detailing the origins of gods and jotuns, two men come into existence when they emerge from the ice coming out of Niflheim: Ymir, progenitor of jotun-kind, and Buri, progenitor of the gods. The ice, of course, is not restricted to producing only one type of being, as the men are also joined by a cow. On that note, it appears that Ymir is different from Buri in some way, given that he is prone to asexual reproduction whereas we are given no reason to believe that Buri possesses the same power.
There is not much use in debating the inferred similarities and differences between these men, however, because Buri, Ymir, and Ymir’s children are the only beings we’ve been told exist in the universe at the moment when Buri (presumably18) takes a wife and sires Borr. Borr then takes a wife who we are explicitly told is a descendant of Ymir, and it is this union that produces Odin and his two brothers.
Apart from perhaps Buri, there appears to be no such thing as a pure-blooded, biological áss (singular of æsir). Beyond Odin’s parentage, we are told that Thor’s mother is descended from jotuns19, Loki’s father is a jotun20, Tyr’s father is a jotun21, and Vali’s mother is (almost certainly22) a jotun. To be clear, we do not have transparent lineages for every member of the group, but whenever lineages are explained with any detail, they always feature jotuns. To reiterate, gods and jotuns both trace their origins back to men born from Niflheim’s ice and they have been interbreeding since those very origins. If jotuns were gigantic in general we should expect the gods to be gigantic as well, yet as we have already seen, the gods are small when compared to an outlier like Skrymir.
Additionally, it turns out that an individual can begin life among the jotuns and later become a god or goddess through marriage, or by becoming the consort of a god. Gerd, Skadi, and Jord are three such examples. What becomes abundantly clear in this light is that the difference between a jotun and a god is merely a matter of clan association; it is not a matter of race or species. In the cosmos, there exists a species of powerful, supernatural entities, equipped to influence the natural order of things in positive or negative ways. Among this species, there exists a high-status clan, the Æsir, who are motivated to create and preserve the world and the inhabitants of Midgard.
Outside of the Æsir clan, we find substantial physical variation among members of the species. This notion fits quite well with the Norse stereotype of ugliness being a trait correlated with low status23 and evil. Thus it is not surprising that Gerd, whose father is a rich and famous jotun, and who later joins the Æsir clan by marriage to Frey, is among the most beautiful of women, whereas Tyr’s unnamed, “loathsome” (leiða) grandmother has nine hundred heads, and Fenrir, who is fated to participate in destroying the world, is a literal wolf. But in the same way we would not assume every jotun has nine hundred heads or is as beautiful as Gerd, there is no reason to assume every jotun is meant to be gigantic either.
With that said, even if the jotuns are not normally treated as a gigantic class of beings, this does not mean they are canonically human-sized either. Physical size is often simply not an important aspect of a story.
Supernatural beings can do amazing things that might require a human to be gigantic in order to accomplish them (such as Thor eating several oxen in a single sitting). In cases like this, it does not hurt to imagine narrative characters as gigantic, but it is also not strictly necessary. The jotun Hymir, for example, owns a special cauldron that is “a rest deep” (rastar djúpan). On the one hand we might assume that a man in possession of such an item must be gigantic, especially if the cauldron fits inside his house. On the other hand, we might assume the cauldron is simply “bigger on the inside” in a magical sense. Such things are not uncommon in Norse mythology. A rest is a distance of several miles, after all. Notions of relative size between objects and individuals in Hymiskviða start to become difficult to reason about if we take the deepness of the cauldron as a literal indication of its owner’s outward size. More likely, the author of the poem simply did not deliberately set out to tell us anything about Hymir’s size.
Another example of this concept is the primordial being Ymir. On the one hand we might assume that, since the entire world was built from his body parts, he must have been unimaginably huge. On the other hand, we may remember that Jesus Christ once fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. There is no reason why Odin and his brothers could not have likewise created a very large world out of very little material. Again, supernatural beings can do supernatural things. Perhaps Ymir was gigantic, but also, perhaps not. The story itself may not have the intention of telling us anything about his size.
When we say that the so-called “giants” of Norse mythology are not really giants, what we mean to say is that jotuns are not a distinct class of beings wherein the distinction is based on their size. Whether or not we choose to think of gods or jotuns as gigantic from story to story is probably not that important. Thor may be much smaller than Skrymir, for instance, but he may also carry around a bag of sand whose contents can form a large hill when emptied24. Does it matter if we choose to think of Thor as a gigantic man carrying a gigantic bag in this context? The fact that this idea may conflict with some other story does not really matter, given that our surviving myths (much less more recent folklore!) were not all written at the same time by a single author intending to tell a cohesive story.
The more important takeaway is that we have not inherited a corpus of myths resembling the modern media interpretation wherein jotuns are a class of consistently gigantic, outlandish-looking creatures. “Mountain giants” are usually25 not made of rocks. “Frost giants” are not blue and covered in icicles. “Fire giants” are not even a category of jotuns mentioned in the sources. Those ideas are unsupported, modern nonsense.
When a rare gigantic jotun does appear, it happens because size is an important aspect of the story. Of course, any time a monstrous creature is required for a narrative it will be a product of the out-group, but we should not forget that this out-group can also produce individuals who are marriage-material for the gods and are as beautiful as the gods as well.
“Rest” here is a direct translation of Old Norse rǫst which is a measure of distance one might travel over land between resting points. Cleasby and Vigfusson note that this is not a standardized measure but an estimated one, with the notion of traveling six rests in a single night being a remarkable accomplishment. (“Old Norse Dictionary - Röst.” Cleasby & Vigfusson - Old Norse Dictionary, cleasby-vigfusson-dictionary.vercel.app/word/rost. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.)
“Velents þáttr smiðs.” Heimskringla.no, https://heimskringla.no/wiki/Þiðreks_saga_af_Bern_-_Velents_þáttr_smiðs. Accessed 1 Sept. 2024.
The phrase in the text is níu álna djúpt (nine “ǫlns” deep). The measure of an ǫln here is the distance from the elbow to the fingertips. English contains an archaic cognate for Old Norse ǫln with a similar meaning, which is “ell”.
The Old Saxon Heliand is a poetic retelling of the Christian gospels. It contains a scene wherein Jesus advises his disciples that ni mugun iuwa werk mikil beholan werthan […] than mêr the thiu burg ni mag, […] wrisilîk giwerk “Nor may your great works remain hidden […], no more than that castle may […], a giant-like work.” Similar phrasing is found in Beowulf when the poet describes an enormous, ring-hilted sword as giganta geweorc “a work of giants”.
Philippa, Marlies, Debrabandere, Frans, Quak, Arend, Schoonheim, Tanneke, van der Sijs, Nicoline (2003–2009) “reus”, in Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands (in Dutch), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Tolley, Clive. Grottasǫngr. Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 2008. p. 50.
Tolley, p. 1.
Simek, R., Dictionary of Northern Mythology, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). p. 120.
“Þórsteins þáttr bæjarmagns.” Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2003.02.0035. Accessed 7 Sept. 2024.
“Ǫrvar-Odds saga.” Heimskringla.no. https://heimskringla.no/wiki/Örvar-Odds_saga. Accessed 7 Sept. 2024.
“Bósa saga — Bós.” Skaldic Project. https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=46&v=intro Accessed 8 Sept. 2024.
“Anon (Ldn) 2IV.” Skaldic Project. https://onp.ku.dk/gefin/q.php?p=skp/skalds/stanza/1296. Accessed 9 Sept. 2024.
“Þórsdrápa.” Skaldic Project. https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=1170. Accessed 7 Sept. 2024.
In Ǫrvar, the speaker discusses his own conversion. In Buslubœn, the curse concludes with the notion of a soul (sál) sinking into punishment (víti) and includes various other late terminology.
The line in Old Norse is Ok í því bili vaknar sá maðr ok stóð skjótt upp, en þá er sagt, Þór varð bilt einu sinni at slá hann með hamrinum ok spurði hann at nafni “And in that moment, that person (Skrymir) awakened and quickly stood up, and then they say, for the first time Thor became astonished out of striking him with the hammer and asked him his name.”
Gylfaginning 49 describes Hyrrokkin as a gýgr “troll-woman” from jǫtunheima “jotun-homes”.
It is unclear exactly where in the genealogical record the group termed Æsir acquires its name. Is Odin the first áss or can the term be applied to his father and grandfather as well?
Snorri explains that Buri gat son þann, er Borr hét, “got that son, who is called Borr” but does not explicitly say where Borr came from.
Jord’s ancestry is given in Gylfaginning 10: Nǫrfi eða Narfi hét jǫtunn, er byggði í Jǫtunheimum. Hann átti dóttur, er Nótt hét. […] Var hon gift þeim, er Ánarr hét. Jǫrð hét þeira dóttir. “Norfi or Narfi was the name of a jotun who lived in Jotun-Homes. He had a daughter who was called Nott. […] She was given to he who was called Anarr. Their daughter was called Jord.”
From Gylfaginning 33: Sá er nefndr Loki eða Loftr, sonr Fárbauta jǫtuns “He who is named Loki or Loftr, son of the jotun Farbauti.”
Hymiskviða 17 describes Tyr’s father Hymir as ballr jǫtunn “stubborn jotun”.
This inference comes from the fact that Odin must seek out and manipulate Rind via seid magic in order to have his way with her. The only detailed narrative we have of this story comes to us by way of Saxo’s euhemerism wherein we are led to believe that Rind is the daughter of an important lord. Among the Æsir, the only lord is Odin, whereas many different characters are described as jotun lords or thurs lords in surviving material. This behavior also correlates with Odin’s manipulation of other jotun women (e.g., Gunnlod who guards the Mead of Poetry) in order to achieve his goals.
The poem Rígsþula, for instance, provides an origin for each socio-economic class of human society. It describes a gradient of beauty among these classes wherein the members of the lowest class are ugliest and members of the highest class as the most beautiful.
Valdemar Bennike (1842-1923), teacher at Vallekilde Folkehøjskole, to folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen in 1895: “Tornved Hill near Jyderup is a very odd hill, whose sides rise steeply from the plain. It is said about its origin, that Thor had once filled a bag with sand at Tissø - it's not told for what purpose - but when he came to this place, the bag ripped and everything fell out and formed Tornved Hill. This knoll has now and then been seen raised on glowing poles, while the trolls danced and amused themselves beneath.”
Funny enough, Hrungnir does have a head and heart made of stone.
This all seems quite consistent with the Old English material. Grendel in Beowulf is described as an 'eoten' related by descent to the Biblical giants, yet is not too big to fit inside a hall and have his arm ripped off by a (relatively large) human being. Yet elsewhere we are told that he carried off thirty men, and that his severed head had to be carried by four strong men on spear-shafts. One imagines that customary epic exaggeration has made it that much harder to visualize his proper size.
Then there is the giantess Harthgrepa in Saxo Grammaticus, who is described as being able to shapeshift from a huge size to one capable of sexual intercourse with a normal man. This could be an attempt to rationalize away the inconsistencies in later stories, but could also be a traditional attribute of these supernatural creatures (cf. the story of Skrymir).
This is an extremely well-researched essay on a formerly confusing topic - thank you!