Norse Mythology: Viking Gods, Ragnarok, and Valhalla

Summary: Norse Mythology

So you don't have to read the whole scroll.

📜 Quick sources to cite ▾

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

The Poetic Edda. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, 2020.

Full bibliography ↓

Norse mythology is the body of stories, gods, cosmology, and ritual practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and the Viking diaspora that reached from Newfoundland to the Black Sea. Most of what survives was written down in 13th-century Christian Iceland, two hundred years after the last public pagans had been outlawed. At the centre of the tradition are two pantheons of gods who know they are going to lose, a world tree that holds nine realms in its roots, and a prophesied apocalypse called Ragnarok.

What the Vikings actually believed

The religion was dying when the first person wrote it down.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, 2020.

2. Abram, Christopher. Myths of the Pagan North. Continuum, 2011.

3. DuBois, Thomas A. Nordic Religions in the Viking Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Full bibliography ↓

Every mythology tells you how its gods began. Only one tells you how they end.

Somewhere around 1220, in a sod-roofed hall in western Iceland, a Christian scholar named Snorri Sturluson sat down to write what the pagan gods of his ancestors had believed about themselves. What he produced, the Prose Edda, is unlike anything else in ancient Europe. Snorri's gods are not eternal. Snorri's gods lose.

Norse mythology is the body of stories, beliefs, cosmology, and ritual practice of the North Germanic peoples before Christianity arrived in Scandinavia, a process that rolled through Denmark and Norway between the 9th and 11th centuries and ended officially in Iceland in the year 1000. The people who practised it are the ones Western history usually calls the Vikings, though the religion was far older and far wider than the Viking Age itself. Germanic versions of the same gods were already being described by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania around 98 AD.

Snorri Sturluson transcribes the pagan gods of his ancestors, Reykholt, c. 1225.

The strange fact at the centre of the subject is this: the men and women who believed in these gods did not leave a written record. Old Norse has an alphabet, the runes, carved on memorial stones and weapons. But the Vikings did not use runes to write books. The canonical texts of the religion were composed after it had already been outlawed, in vellum, by people who had been christened. The bulk of what survives was set down by one man, Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, lawyer, and poet, working two centuries after his own island converted.

Snorri wrote two books that matter for mythology. The Prose Edda (around 1220) is a handbook for young poets explaining the old pagan imagery their grandfathers had used. Heimskringla (around 1230) is a history of the Norwegian kings that begins in legendary time with Odin arriving in Scandinavia as a mortal king. A separate, anonymous collection called the Poetic Edda, containing older mythological poems composed probably between the 9th and 12th centuries, was preserved in a single 13th-century manuscript called the Codex Regius. Everything else comes from sagas, skaldic verse embedded in other texts, Latin summaries by writers like Saxo Grammaticus, the brief remarks of Tacitus, and archaeology.

Most of the sources for Norse mythology were written by Christians. Snorri explicitly frames the old gods as humans who were worshipped as divine after their deaths, a technique called euhemerism that let medieval scholars discuss paganism without endorsing it. Whether Snorri himself believed any of it is still argued. Scholars generally conclude that he loved the poetry more than the theology. The accident of that love is why anyone knows this body of stories at all.

The result is a religion seen almost entirely through the hands of people who no longer practised it. What emerges, even so, is a remarkably coherent world with its own internal logic. It has two families of gods who fought a war and then merged. It has a cosmology of nine realms strung along the branches and roots of a single tree. It has monsters that the gods raised in their own halls knowing those monsters would eventually kill them.

And it has an ending, a complete prophetic description of the day the gods would die, which the gods themselves had been told about and had accepted. Greek mythology has nothing like it. Egyptian religion has nothing like it. In the ancient European record, Ragnarok is singular.

Fire, Ice, and the Corpse of a Giant

The Norse universe didn't begin with a word. It began with a murder.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 4-9. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

2. The Poetic Edda, Voluspa and Vafthrudnismal. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

3. Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Boydell and Brewer, 1993.

Full bibliography ↓

The Greek cosmos is born when Chaos gives birth. The Hebrew cosmos is spoken into existence. The Norse cosmos is licked into existence by a cow, and then carved out of the corpse of the first thing to be born.

The source for this is Snorri's Prose Edda, which draws on older Eddic poems that survived elsewhere. The story is deliberate, violent, and specific.

From Ginnungagap: the void, the giant, the ice-cow

Before anything, there was Ginnungagap, a vast empty space between two realms that already existed. To the north lay Niflheim, a world of mist, cold, and the eleven rivers of Elivagar, all of which ran cold enough to freeze anything they touched. To the south lay Muspelheim, a world of fire where the flame-giant Surtr had been sitting since before time, waiting. Where the warm winds of Muspelheim met the frozen rivers of Niflheim, the ice melted into droplets. The droplets took shape.

Ginnungagap: where fire met ice, and the first drops of existence formed.

The first shape was Ymir. He was a giant, but he was also, in a sense, the first person. He was hermaphroditic, sweating later giants from his armpits and breeding a six-headed son by rubbing his feet together. He was enormous. He was hungry.

In the same melting came a second shape: Audhumbla, the primordial cow, from whose udders flowed four rivers of milk. Ymir drank. Audhumbla fed herself by licking a block of salt-rimed ice. On the first day of licking, she revealed a man's hair in the ice. On the second day, she revealed a man's face. On the third day, she revealed the man's whole body, and he stood up, and his name was Buri. The cosmos had two inhabitants: a giant fed by a cow, and a god licked free of ice. Then the god had a son, and the son had three sons, and one of those sons was Odin.

Odin and his brothers build the world from Ymir's body. Sky from skull, sea from blood, mountains from bone.

Odin and his two brothers, Vili and Ve, killed Ymir. The blood that poured from the giant drowned almost every other giant in the world. Only two survived, and from them descended all the later giants the gods would spend eternity fighting. Then the three brothers set to work. Ymir's skull became the dome of the sky, held up at four corners by four dwarves named for the cardinal points. Ymir's brains were scattered into clouds. His blood became the seas. His bones became the mountains. His flesh became the middle-ground where humans would eventually live. Out of his decomposing flesh, maggots crawled, and these the gods transformed into dwarves.

It is worth pausing on how different this is from neighbouring creation myths. Most ancient cosmogonies present the world as a gift, spoken, formed, or grown. The Norse cosmos is a butchering job. Every feature of the landscape is a piece of somebody. The sky is a skull. The sea is a corpse's blood. This is not a world the gods were given. It is a world they carved out of violence, and they will never entirely get away from that fact.

Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms

At the centre of everything stands Yggdrasil, the world tree. It is an ash. Its trunk rises through all creation. Its branches hold the upper worlds. Its three great roots drink at three wells in three separate realms. It is not a metaphor. In the Norse imagination, it is the physical architecture of reality, and one of the strangest things in it is a severed head that talks.

Yggdrasil: the cosmos as a single tree, its roots drinking at three wells.

The realms are nine, although the sources do not always agree which nine. The canonical list from Gylfaginning and the Poetic Edda gives:

• Asgard: the fortified sky-realm of the Aesir gods, connected to the human world by the rainbow bridge Bifrost.
• Vanaheim: home of the Vanir, the older fertility gods, somewhere distant from Asgard.
• Alfheim: the light elves' realm, ruled by Freyr.
• Midgard: the middle world, where humans live, surrounded by an ocean and by the coiled body of the serpent Jormungandr.
• Jotunheim: the land of the giants, rocky and cold.
• Svartalfheim (sometimes Nidavellir): the underground realm of the dwarves and dark elves, full of forges.
• Niflheim: the frozen realm of mist, where one of Yggdrasil's roots drinks at the well Hvergelmir.
• Muspelheim: the fire realm in the south, still holding the flame-giant Surtr.
• Helheim: the realm of the dishonoured and ordinary dead, ruled by the goddess Hel, Loki's daughter.

The three roots drink at three separate wells. Urdarbrunnr, the Well of Fate, sits in Asgard and is tended by the three Norns, the female figures who weave the fates of gods and mortals alike. Hvergelmir, the Roaring Kettle, sits in Niflheim. Mimisbrunnr, the Well of Mimir, sits at the boundary of the giants' territory and holds wisdom. This last is the well where, by the time of Ragnarok, the severed head of the hostage Mimir will be installed as a consultant.

Four stags crop the young shoots in the canopy. A squirrel named Ratatoskr runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between the eagle at the top of the tree and the dragon Nidhogg at the bottom. Nidhogg, endlessly chewing at the root, is the single most unpleasant detail in Norse cosmology. He is not evil in the Christian sense, merely busy. The tree is constantly being eaten. The tree is constantly regrowing. This is the state of the universe.

The Aesir: Odin's Family

The Allfather was a one-eyed wanderer who paid for wisdom.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. Turville-Petre, E. O. G. Myth and Religion of the North. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.

2. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 20-34. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

3. The Poetic Edda, Havamal and Grimnismal. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

Full bibliography ↓

The Aesir are the ruling gods of Asgard. There are traditionally twelve of them with varying membership in different sources, and they are the family most people mean when they say "Norse gods" or "Viking gods." The canonical core is Odin, Thor, Tyr, Baldur, Heimdall, Bragi, Forseti, Hodr, Vidar, Vali, Ullr, and Njord (who comes to the Aesir by way of a hostage exchange with the Vanir). Alongside them, the Aesir's wives, sisters, and mothers form a parallel group: Frigg, Sif, Idun, Sigyn, Nanna. The household is large, the politics are complicated, and the king of it all is not quite who the tourist expects.

Odin: the wanderer who hanged himself for the runes

Strip away the horned helmet, the throne, and the golden hall, and what is left of Odin is a one-eyed old man in a grey cloak, walking. He is a god of poetry, ecstasy, war-frenzy, wisdom, and the dead. He is not a god of justice, not principally a god of kingship, and not, in the sources, especially handsome. He is obsessively curious and almost pathologically willing to mutilate himself in pursuit of knowledge.

Odin travels as a one-eyed wanderer, testing the hospitality of strangers.

The missing eye is the first debt. At the well of Mimir, where wisdom was drunk by the mouthful, Odin asked to drink. Mimir required an eye in payment. Odin left it in the water. In the Poetic Edda, the seeress who narrates the Voluspa tells the audience that she knows where Odin's eye lies, "in the famous well of Mimir." It is still there. The Allfather looks out on Ragnarok with one eye less than everyone else.

The second debt is larger. To learn the runes, Odin hanged himself for nine nights from the branches of Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear. The Havamal, a collection of Odinic wisdom poetry, preserves the account in his own voice: "I know that I hung on a wind-swept tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself." On the ninth night, exhausted and close to death, he saw the runes rising from the Well of Urd below his feet, and he seized them, and the magical alphabet of the north was his. This is not the self-image of a majestic king. This is the self-image of a god who will torture himself to know things.

Nine nights on the world tree. The price of the runes.

Odin travels constantly. When he appears to mortals, he wears a broad-brimmed hat pulled low over his missing eye and carries the spear Gungnir, which never misses. Two ravens, Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory), fly out across the world every morning and return at evening to whisper in his ear what they have seen. Two wolves, Geri and Freki, sit at his feet. He rides an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, whose mother was Loki. (Loki turned into a mare and seduced a giant's stallion. The resulting foal was given to Odin.)

He is the god of scholars, poets, warriors, and people on the verge of giving up. He is also, reliably, dishonest. The Allfather lies in almost every story he appears in. What he wants, more than honesty or justice, is knowledge of his own coming death.

Thor: the protector the farmers actually prayed to

If Odin was the god scholars and jarls cared about, Thor was the god the farmers actually kept on the shelf. Archaeological finds of miniature hammer amulets, worn around the necks of men and women from Sweden to Iceland, outnumber every other pagan devotional object from the late Viking Age. When an anonymous peasant in 10th-century Denmark was worried about the winter storms, about the giants out beyond the horse-paddock, about the raiders across the bay, about the lightning that might burn the hay, the god that worried peasant prayed to was Thor.

Thor in the mountains, doing the job that keeps the crops safe.

He was red-bearded, red-faced, and immensely strong. His hammer, Mjolnir, was forged by the dwarves of Svartalfheim and had a curiously short haft, the result of Loki interrupting the smiths at work. The haft was short enough that Thor required iron gauntlets to swing it and a belt of strength (Megingjord) to bear its weight.

He had a cart pulled by two goats who could be slaughtered, eaten, and resurrected each night as long as their bones were kept intact. He had a patient wife, Sif, whose golden hair Loki once sheared off as a prank. He was not subtle. He was not cunning. He was not wise. What he was was there, constantly, and that was enough for the people who needed him.

Thor's job, at its core, is killing giants. In the Prose Edda's account of his travels in Jotunheim, he does it with the same methodical energy with which a farmer kills wolves around a sheepfold. He is mocked by the giants repeatedly. In one famous episode, the giant king Utgarda-Loki fools him with a series of illusions, including a contest of drinking in which Thor's opponent is, unknown to him, the sea itself. Thor drinks until the tides move. It is not enough. He fails the test, angrily. Then he goes back to work.

When the sky flashes in a thunderstorm over a Norwegian valley, the sources agree on what the flash is. Mjolnir has struck something. A giant has died. One more winter of safety for the farm down the fjord. The farmers who buried their children wearing hammer amulets understood him completely.

Tyr, Baldur, Heimdall, and the rest

The minor Aesir are more than background decoration. Almost all of them have already paid for something by the time the stories reach them. Tyr is the god of single combat, sworn oaths, and law-speaking. He has one hand, because when the Aesir needed to bind the wolf Fenrir with the magical fetter Gleipnir, and the wolf refused to be tied unless a god put his hand in Fenrir's mouth as a pledge of good faith, Tyr was the only one willing to do it. The wolf was bound. The hand was bitten off. Tyr's face in the sources is never one of surprise. It is the face of a man who kept his word.

Tyr keeps his side of the bargain. The wolf keeps his.

Baldur is beautiful, radiant, the beloved of the Aesir. In the Gylfaginning, his mother Frigg, after a troubling dream, travels the world and extracts an oath from every living thing not to harm her son. She forgets only the mistletoe, because it seemed too small and soft to hurt anyone.

At a feast in Asgard in which the gods take turns throwing objects at Baldur for sport (because nothing can harm him), Loki, disguised as an old woman, learns about the mistletoe and carves a dart of it. He places the dart in the hand of Baldur's blind brother Hodr and guides the throw. Baldur dies. Norse mythology's bright summer god is murdered because of a loophole.

The story is not about the dart. It is about what follows: the gods send a messenger to ask Hel to release him, and she agrees only if every living thing weeps for him. Every living thing does. Except one old giantess in a cave, who refuses. That giantess was probably Loki in disguise. Baldur stays dead until after Ragnarok.

Heimdall is the watchman of the gods. He lives at the base of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asgard, sleeps less than a bird, sees in the dark, and hears the wool growing on sheep. He holds the Gjallarhorn, which he will sound once and only once: at the beginning of Ragnarok. In the Eddic poem Rigsthula, he is also identified with Rig, a travelling god who wanders into three human households in succession and fathers the three social classes of medieval Scandinavia. The one god who works at the front gate is, in a quiet way, the ancestor of everybody.

Beyond these, the Aesir number skalds (Bragi, the god of poetry), judges (Forseti), hunters (Ullr), and avengers held in reserve: Vidar, the silent son of Odin who will tear Fenrir's jaws apart at Ragnarok, and Vali, the son born specifically to avenge Baldur and who grew to full size in a single night to do it. Each of these gods is defined by one act, forthcoming or remembered. The Aesir are not a pantheon of generalists. They are a pantheon of specialists, each with a single, terrible thing they will do.

The Vanir: The Older Gods

Before Odin's family arrived, other gods were already here.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. DuBois, Thomas A. Nordic Religions in the Viking Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

2. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 23-25. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

3. The Poetic Edda, Voluspa 21-24. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

Full bibliography ↓

The second pantheon in Norse mythology is smaller, older, and, for the ordinary Viking-age farmer, probably more important than the first. The Vanir are gods of fertility, agriculture, wealth, and the sea. There are only three named figures of real importance, and one of them is probably the most underrated deity in the Norse corpus.

Freyja, Freyr, and the fertility pantheon

Freyja is the goddess of love, fertility, beauty, gold, and, quietly, death. She is tall, blonde, and wears a cloak of falcon feathers that allows her (or anyone she lends it to) to fly. She owns a boar called Hildisvini and drives a chariot pulled by two large grey cats. Her most famous possession is the Brisingamen, a golden necklace that later Icelandic tradition (in the 14th-century Sorla thattr) says she acquired from four dwarves by sleeping with each of them in turn. She is not a goddess Victorian scholars found easy to deal with.

Freyja and her cats. The most underrated god in the Norse corpus.

What gets forgotten about Freyja, because most popular retellings do not mention it, is what happens to the honoured dead. The Grimnismal of the Poetic Edda is explicit: Freyja owns a hall called Folkvangr, "Field of the Host," and half of everyone who dies in battle goes there first. Odin gets the other half. The valkyries who fly across battlefields selecting the slain are, in some sources, serving Freyja. The notion, popularised by Wagner, that every noble warrior goes straight to Odin's Valhalla is wrong. Odin's hall is the runner-up prize. Freyja had first pick.

Her brother Freyr is the god of peace, good weather, and good harvests, and one of the most important figures in the wider Norse pantheon. He was especially worshipped in Sweden, where the temple at Uppsala held a large statue of him alongside Odin and Thor. The Prose Edda relates that he gave away his magical sword, which could fight on its own, in exchange for the hand of the giantess Gerd, whom he had seen and fallen in love with from a distance. At Ragnarok, when the fire giant Surtr advances, Freyr will face him. Without the sword. He will die.

The third major Vanir is Njord, the father of Freyja and Freyr. Njord is the god of the sea, of fishing, of coastal trade. He lives at Noatun ("Ship-enclosure") and is the god sailors prayed to before a voyage. His marriage to the giantess Skadi is the subject of one of the strangest comedies in the Eddic corpus: she chose him as her husband by looking only at the feet of the assembled gods (he had the most beautiful feet), and then found she could not live in his salt-sprayed sea-hall, while he could not live in her cold mountain hall. They divided their time. Eventually they separated amicably.

The Aesir-Vanir War

Before the two pantheons shared Asgard, they fought. The first war in the Norse universe was a war between gods. The cause, according to Voluspa, was a figure called Gullveig, probably a Vanir goddess associated with gold, whom the Aesir tortured and burned three times. Each time she was reborn. The insult precipitated open war between the two divine families.

Mimir, beheaded by the Vanir, still answers questions.

The war ran long and inconclusive. Eventually the two pantheons settled on an exchange of hostages. The Aesir sent Hoenir, a tall and handsome god of limited imagination, and Mimir, a god of great wisdom. The Vanir sent Njord, Freyr, and Freyja, and this is how the Vanir gods came to live in Asgard. The Vanir quickly realised that without Mimir whispering advice into Hoenir's ear, Hoenir was useless. They took this as an insult, beheaded Mimir, and sent his head back to Asgard as an answer.

Odin, rather than being offended, embalmed the head with herbs and chanted runic charms over it. The head began to speak again. For the rest of Norse mythological history, Mimir's severed head lives at the well of Mimir and advises Odin personally. This is how the first war in Norse mythology ends: with a hostage exchange, a decapitation, and a severed head installed as a consultant. Nobody in Norse mythology dies quite as completely as their killer hopes.

Giants, Wolves, and the Trickster

The gods raised the monsters that would kill them.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press, 2002.

2. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 34, 49-50. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

3. The Poetic Edda, Lokasenna, Thrymskvida, and Voluspa 30-35. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

Full bibliography ↓

The enemies of the gods in Norse mythology are not demons in the Christian sense. They are, in most cases, older than the gods, and they are frequently related to them by blood. The category of "Norse mythology creatures" is a category drawn from within the family tree.

Loki: the god who was not a god

Loki is not an Aesir. He is a giant. His father was a giant named Farbauti ("Cruel-striker"), and his mother either a giantess or, in some versions, a goddess of the Aesir. At some point early in the Norse mythological timeline, Odin swore a blood-brotherhood with Loki. Why Odin did this is never satisfactorily explained. The sources simply note that Loki had a permanent place in Asgard as a result, and that the Aesir were obliged to treat him as one of their own.

Loki under the earth. His wife Sigyn holds the bowl that keeps the venom off his face.

Loki is clever in the way none of the Aesir are clever. He is a shapeshifter: in the course of the myths, he becomes a mare, a salmon, a fly, an old woman, a seal. He is responsible for most of the Aesir's greatest possessions (Mjolnir, Sif's replacement hair, Odin's ring Draupnir) and most of their greatest catastrophes (Baldur's death, the kidnapping of Idun, the engineered contract with the giant builder that almost cost Asgard its walls). He is a comic figure for two-thirds of the Norse corpus. Then he becomes a tragic one.

The line is Baldur's death. After Loki's role in it is discovered, the Aesir hunt him down. They capture him, chain him to three upright slabs of rock using the intestines of his own son Narfi, and place a venomous serpent on a stalactite above his face. (The gods had turned Loki's other son, Vali, into a wolf. It was the wolf that killed Narfi, and the entrails that bound the father came from one son through the teeth of the other.)

The venom drips. His wife Sigyn sits beside him holding a wooden bowl to catch the drops. When the bowl fills and she has to turn aside to empty it, the venom falls directly on his face, and Loki's writhing, the Prose Edda says, causes earthquakes. He will remain there until Ragnarok, when he will break free and sail to the final battle in a ship made from the uncut fingernails of the dead.

Loki's story is not the story of a villain. It is the story of a relationship that went wrong. Every major Aesir at one time or another has laughed at one of Loki's tricks, has benefited from one of his schemes, has sat beside him at feast. Loki, in the Lokasenna, reminds Odin that he once swore never to drink mead unless it was offered to Loki as well. The gods raised their own destroyer, not by accident, but deliberately, swearing blood-brotherhood with him when he was young. By the time they chain him under the earth, they are chaining a member of their own household.

Loki's children: three weapons raised in Asgard

Loki's marriage to the Aesir goddess Sigyn produced two sons: Narfi and Vali (not to be confused with Odin's avenging son), both of whom died in the binding described above. Loki's liaison with the giantess Angrboda ("She Who Brings Grief"), conducted in the forest of Ironwood, produced three children, and these three are the enemies waiting at the end of the world.

Fenrir pulls against Gleipnir. A wolf who cannot die, chained with something that is not a chain.

The first is Fenrir, the wolf. When Odin's scholarly advisers told him what Angrboda's litter would eventually do, the Aesir collected all three children. Fenrir was brought to Asgard and raised there. Only Tyr was brave enough to feed him. He grew. Soon he was too large to be allowed to roam.

The Aesir attempted to bind him with iron chains named Laedingr and Dromi, both of which he broke playfully. Finally they commissioned the dwarves to fashion Gleipnir, a fetter as thin as a silken ribbon and unbreakable, made of the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird.

Fenrir, suspecting a trap, would let himself be bound by it only if one of the gods placed a hand in his mouth. Tyr did. The wolf was bound. The hand was taken. Fenrir will remain on his island, a sword propping his jaws open, until Ragnarok. At Ragnarok, Gleipnir will break. He will swallow Odin whole.

Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent. The horizon that is not a horizon.

The second is Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent. Odin threw him into the sea. He grew so large that he encircled the entire human world, biting his own tail. Viking sailors in bad weather could claim, without technically breaking the rules of their religion, that the serpent had stirred. At Ragnarok, the serpent will come ashore. Thor will meet him. Thor will kill him. Thor will take nine steps from the body and fall dead of the venom.

The third is Hel, half-living and half-corpse, who was given the realm of the ordinary dead, below the roots of Yggdrasil. She will release her prisoners for the final battle. She will sail to Asgard on the ship Naglfar, crewed by the dishonoured dead, with her father Loki at the tiller.

Every child of Loki and Angrboda would kill a god at Ragnarok. The Aesir knew this from the beginning. They raised them in their own household anyway. The implication, consistent throughout the Norse corpus, is that the gods could not avoid it. Their fate was not a mystery to them. They were not betrayed by events. They walked toward the thing that would kill them, in full sight of it, for centuries.

Jotnar, Surtr, and the enemies beyond Asgard

Beyond Loki's children, the old enemies of the gods are the jotnar, the giants. "Giant" is misleading. The word translates better as "devourer" or "eater." The jotnar are human-sized or larger, often beautiful, often wise, and only sometimes actively hostile. Many of the major gods (Odin, Thor, Freyr, Njord) have giantess mothers or wives. The giants are not the opposite of the gods. They are the older generation.

There are, however, giants the gods genuinely fear. Hrungnir, the strongest of them, was killed by Thor. Thjazi (Old Norse: Þjazi), who stole the apples of Idun, was killed by the Aesir and his eyes set into the sky as stars. Thrymr, who once stole Mjolnir and demanded Freyja as his bride in exchange, was killed when Thor, disguised as Freyja, beat him to death with the returned hammer at the wedding feast.

The last giant, the one who matters, is Surtr. He has been sitting in Muspelheim with a flaming sword since before creation. The sources say almost nothing else about him. He does not appear in any of the playful stories. He does not negotiate. He does not visit. He is simply the giant at the end, and when the time comes, he will ride out, and the world will burn.

Valhalla, Hel, and Where the Dead Went

Valhalla was not heaven. It was a recruitment hall.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, 2020.

2. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 38-41. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

3. Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad. Mission to the Volga. In Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone. Penguin, 2012.

Full bibliography ↓

The afterlife in Norse mythology is not one destination but several, and the allocation has nothing to do with goodness. It has to do with what you did and how you died. Christians arriving in Scandinavia in the 10th century found this among the most confusing things about the old religion. Their God judged the dead on virtue. The Norse gods judged the dead on usefulness at the end of the world.

Valhalla and Folkvangr: the warrior dead

Valhalla, Odin's hall, is large. In the Grimnismal, Odin tells Agnar that the hall has 540 doors, and that 800 warriors will march out of each door side by side when Ragnarok calls them to battle. The arithmetic is deliberate. The total force is 432,000. The hall is not described primarily as a hall of reward. It is described as a staging ground. The einherjar, the chosen slain, are there because Odin is building an army for the last fight.

Valhalla at feast. The einherjar drink at night. They fight each other at dawn.

The daily routine of the einherjar is specific. At dawn, they march out to fight each other in the fields outside the hall. By midday, most of them are dead and the rest are wounded. By evening, all of them are restored to life and health and seated at feast.

The mead comes from the udders of the goat Heidrun, which stands on the roof of Valhalla and grazes on the leaves of a tree called Laerad. The meat comes from the boar Saehrimnir, slaughtered every morning by the cook Andhrimnir, boiled in the cauldron Eldhrimnir, and whole again before the next sunrise. Everything in Valhalla is on a cycle because the one thing the army cannot do is actually die. They have to be ready for Ragnarok.

What is often missed in popular accounts: not all of the battle-dead went to Valhalla. In Grimnismal 14, Odin explains that Freyja, in her hall Folkvangr ("Field of the Host"), "chooses half the slain each day, and Odin has the other half." The valkyries, the "choosers of the slain" who carry warriors from the battlefield to the upper realms, were in some sources serving Freyja, not Odin. The hall at Folkvangr is less described than Valhalla. But it is larger than most readers realise, and Freyja has first pick of the dead.

Helheim: where almost everyone actually went

Valhalla and Folkvangr, combined, are for the exceptional dead. The rest of the population, which is most of it, went to Hel.

The gate of Helheim. Most of the dead came this way.

Hel is not hell. The Old Norse word is the root of the English one, but the concept is different. Hel (the place) was ruled by Hel (the goddess, daughter of Loki), and was never a realm of punishment. It was a realm of absence. The river Gjoll, which runs with weapons, marks its boundary. The dog Garm stands guard. The dead travel a long road downward through cold mist, cross the bridge Gjallarbru, present themselves at the gate, and then pass through into a grey, quiet country that is by all accounts very cold and very dull. There is no fire. There is no torment. There is also no feasting, no music, no glory, and no hope.

People who died of old age went to Hel. People who died of disease went to Hel. People who drowned in storms, who fell off ladders, who were trampled by horses, who were simply unlucky, went to Hel. The population of Hel, at any given moment, was enormous. The great majority of everyone who had ever lived ended up there. In the Gylfaginning, when the messenger Hermod travels there to try to ransom Baldur, he rides for nine days and nights through valleys so dark he cannot see his horse. On arrival he finds Baldur already installed at the high table. The Norse religion's brightest god has taken his place in the hall of the ordinary dead.

A third destination existed for drowned sailors, who were said to be claimed by Ran, the sea goddess whose net captured those who perished at sea. Primary sources describe the drowned as "going to Ran," and skaldic poetry refers to the ocean itself as her domain, without naming a specific hall. The afterlife was negotiated, case by case. The sources occasionally mention a fourth possibility: that certain dead went simply back to the family grave-mound and continued, in some reduced form, to advise their descendants. Viking-age funeral practice included cremation, inhumation, ship-burial, and combinations of all three. The dead were sent off, not filed away.

Ragnarok: The End the Gods Knew Was Coming

They knew who would kill them. They went anyway.

📜 Academic sources for this section ▾

1. The Poetic Edda, Voluspa 42-66. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World's Classics, 2014.

2. Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 51-53. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman, 1995.

3. Abram, Christopher. Myths of the Pagan North. Continuum, 2011.

Full bibliography ↓

The defining fact of Norse religion, the thing that makes Viking mythology structurally different from every other ancient European belief system, is this: the gods know they are going to die. They have been told. They do not avert the prophecy. They do not rebel against it. They make preparations, and then they walk into it.

The fullest account is in the Voluspa, the "Prophecy of the Seeress," the first and greatest poem of the Poetic Edda. In it, Odin summons a dead seeress from her grave and asks her to tell him the future. She does. Most of what follows is the end of the world.

Fimbulwinter and the signs

Ragnarok does not begin in fire. It begins in cold. Fimbulwinter, the Great Winter, will last three years without a summer between them. Snow will fall from every direction. The rivers will freeze. Crops will fail. The Voluspa lists the sign almost dryly: "Vindöld, vargöld, áðr veröld steypist." An age of wind, an age of wolves, before the world collapses.

The third winter. The wolves no longer run from people.

Before the winter there will be other signs. Three cocks will crow to wake the three halls. Social collapse will precede cosmic collapse. In one of the most chilling stanzas of the Voluspa, the seeress describes "brothers will fight and kill each other; sisters' children will defile kinship. It is harsh in the world, whoredom rife. An axe age, a sword age; shields are riven. A wind age, a wolf age, before the world goes headlong." The end of the world, in Norse mythology, is foreshadowed by the breakdown of family. The cosmos dies because people stop honouring their obligations to each other.

Then the restraints begin to give. The wolves Skoll and Hati, who have been chasing the sun and moon across the sky since the first day, will finally catch them. The chains holding Loki will snap. Gleipnir, which has bound Fenrir for ages, will break. The giant Hrym will sail a ship of the dead from the east. Loki will sail the ship Naglfar, made of the uncut fingernails of the dead, from the west. Surtr will ride out of Muspelheim with his sword of flame and set the sky on fire.

Heimdall, at the gate of Bifrost, will sound the Gjallarhorn. It will be the only time he sounds it. Everyone in the Nine Realms will hear it.

The battle and the deaths

The gods ride out on the plain of Vigrid, a hundred and twenty leagues across each way. Odin rides at the head of the einherjar. Each god, in the final battle, meets the enemy who has always been fated to kill him.

Odin meets Fenrir. The wolf swallows the Allfather whole. The father of the gods, who has been preparing for this moment across uncounted ages of knowledge and self-sacrifice, is eaten. His silent son Vidar steps forward, places one foot on Fenrir's lower jaw (his boot is made from every piece of leather ever trimmed off a shoe since the beginning of time, accumulating specifically for this purpose), grasps the upper jaw, and rips the wolf apart.

Thor kills the serpent. He will take nine steps before falling.

Thor meets Jormungandr. The two have fought before. Early in the mythology, Thor once went fishing with the giant Hymir, baited a massive hook with a bull's head, and hauled the serpent to the surface. Hymir, terrified, cut the line, and Thor never forgave him. This time the line will not be cut. Thor kills the serpent with Mjolnir. Then he takes nine steps away from the body. The venom reaches his heart. He falls.

Freyr meets Surtr. Freyr does not have his sword. He gave it away in the Skirnismal as part of the bride-price for Gerd. The sources do not name the weapon he carries in its place, only that he loses.

Heimdall and Loki kill each other. Tyr and the hound Garm kill each other. Vidar, Vali, Modi, Magni, Baldur (returned from Hel), and Hodr survive. Six gods walk off the battlefield. Everyone else is dead.

Surtr then scatters fire across the world. Yggdrasil burns. The nine realms burn. The earth sinks into the sea.

After the end: the world that rises again

And then, in the last handful of stanzas of the Voluspa, the earth rises again. It rises green.

The world that rises again. New shoots on a black beach.

"Upp koma öðru sinni jörð ór ægi, iðjagræna," the seeress says. "A second time the earth comes up out of the sea, ever green." The surviving gods gather on the plain of Idavoll, where Asgard once stood, and find in the grass the golden game-pieces their predecessors used to play with. They remember. They recognise. They begin again.

Two humans survive the fire by hiding in the wood of Hoddmimir. Their names are Lif and Lifthrasir ("Life" and "Stubborn-life"). They eat the morning dew. Their descendants will repopulate the world.

Baldur returns from Hel. His blind brother Hodr, who killed him under Loki's guidance, returns with him. The hall of Gimle stands on the new earth, golden-roofed, for the souls of the honourable dead. A new sun, daughter of the old one, travels the same track her mother travelled.

Whether this ending was part of the original pagan tradition or a Christian addition by Snorri or his predecessors is still argued. The green earth and the surviving couple and the returning god look suspicious. They echo the Christian apocalypse and the new Jerusalem. But the Eddic poetry on which Snorri drew is older than Snorri, and the survival of Lif and Lifthrasir in a grove of wood is not quite a resurrection in the Christian sense. It is a continuation. The cosmos does not end in judgment. It ends in winter, and then there is another spring.

The Norse were the only people in ancient Europe who told their children that the gods were going to die. They told the story anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions people ask. Answered from the sources.

⚔️ Is Norse mythology the same as Viking mythology?

Effectively, yes, but with caveats. "Norse mythology" is the scholarly term for the pre-Christian religious tradition of the North Germanic peoples, including the Vikings of the 8th to 11th centuries but also their ancestors and relatives across Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. "Viking mythology" is a more popular term, sometimes narrower (referring specifically to the beliefs of the Viking Age, 793-1066 AD) and sometimes used interchangeably. The gods, stories, and cosmology are the same. The terminology reflects whether the speaker is thinking about the religion or about the people who practised it.

👑 Who is the chief Norse god?

Odin, called Allfather in many of the sources. He is the ruler of Asgard, the father of most of the major male gods, and the god who receives the honoured dead into Valhalla. But "chief" is complicated: Thor was more popular among common people, Freyja had first pick of half the battle-dead, and Frigg, Odin's wife, possessed a wisdom Odin frequently relied on. Odin rules. He does not always dominate.

🔥 Is Loki a god or a giant?

Both, and that is the point. Loki's father Farbauti was a giant (jotunn), and Loki himself is therefore genealogically a giant. But he was sworn into the household of the Aesir by a blood-brotherhood with Odin early in the mythology. He lives in Asgard, participates in the councils of the gods, and is treated as one of them. He is one of the few figures in any ancient mythology who sits on both sides of the line between the divine and the monstrous.

🌋 What is Ragnarok?

Ragnarok (Old Norse Ragnarok, "fate of the gods") is the prophesied end of the Norse mythological world. It begins with the Fimbulwinter, a three-year winter without summer. It proceeds through social collapse, the breaking of cosmic bindings, and a final battle on the plain of Vigrid. It ends with the death of most of the gods, the burning of the world by the fire-giant Surtr, and the sinking of the earth into the sea. A new earth rises afterward, green, inhabited by two human survivors and a smaller pantheon of surviving gods.

🛡️ Did the Vikings actually believe all this literally?

Probably not always the way modern fundamentalists believe scripture. The Vikings left almost no theological writing, so direct evidence is thin, but archaeology, the sagas, and Arab observer accounts (notably Ibn Fadlan) suggest a religion that was closer to practice than to doctrine. Farmers wore hammer amulets for protection. Warriors swore oaths by the gods. Priests (godar) officiated at sacrifices. What mattered was the relationship, not the precise truth of the stories. Ragnarok was probably regarded as true in the same way a long-range weather forecast is true: correct in outline, negotiable in detail.

👁️ Why did Odin sacrifice his eye?

For wisdom. At the well of Mimir, where drinking granted knowledge, Odin was required to give up one eye in payment. He did. The eye remains in the well. The trade reflects the deepest theme in his character: Odin will pay almost anything for knowledge, and he pays in pieces of himself.

🌳 What is Yggdrasil?

Yggdrasil is the world tree of Norse cosmology, a vast ash (sometimes described as an evergreen) whose trunk, branches, and three great roots hold together the nine realms of the Norse universe. Its roots drink at three wells (Urdarbrunnr, Hvergelmir, and Mimisbrunnr), and the cosmos depends on its continued life. A squirrel runs up and down it carrying insults, four stags eat its canopy, and a dragon gnaws endlessly at its deepest root. It survives Ragnarok.

Bibliography

Ancient voices and modern discussion. The full reading list.

📋 Cite this article ▾

Chicago: Rankin, Dan. "Norse Mythology: The Only Religion in Europe Whose Gods Were Going to Die." AD/BC, 2026. https://adbchistory.com/blogs/library/norse-mythology

MLA: Rankin, Dan. "Norse Mythology: The Only Religion in Europe Whose Gods Were Going to Die." AD/BC, 2026, adbchistory.com/blogs/library/norse-mythology.

APA: Rankin, D. (2026). Norse mythology: The only religion in Europe whose gods were going to die. AD/BC. https://adbchistory.com/blogs/library/norse-mythology

Primary Sources

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. London: Everyman, 1995. The single most important narrative source for Norse mythology, composed in Iceland around 1220. Contains Gylfaginning, the systematic account of the gods and cosmology that structures most modern retellings. Faulkes's translation is the scholarly standard. Read more →

The Poetic Edda. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2014. A collection of mythological and heroic poems preserved in the 13th-century Codex Regius but composed much earlier, some as early as the 9th or 10th centuries. Includes the Voluspa (the prophecy of Ragnarok), Havamal (Odin's wisdom verses), and Lokasenna (Loki's insult flyting). Larrington's translation balances accessibility and fidelity. Read more →

Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. Translated by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. 3 vols. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2011-16. Snorri's historical work on the kings of Norway, which opens in legendary time with Ynglinga saga, presenting Odin as a mortal king who migrated into Scandinavia. A key text for understanding how medieval Icelanders euhemerised their own pagan past. Read more →

Tacitus. Germania. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (Latin text with English). Written around 98 AD. The earliest external description of Germanic religion, recording practices among the continental Germanic peoples nine hundred years before the Eddas. Tacitus identifies gods the Romans understood as Mercury, Hercules, and Mars (almost certainly Odin, Thor, and Tyr in earlier forms). Read more →

Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes. Edited and translated by Peter Fisher. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015. Composed in Latin around 1200 by a Danish cleric, Books 1-9 preserve a parallel tradition of Norse mythology that sometimes agrees with and sometimes contradicts Snorri. Saxo's Baldur is notably less sympathetic than Snorri's. Read more →

Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad. Mission to the Volga. In Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone. London: Penguin, 2012. The eyewitness account of a chieftain's funeral among the Rus Vikings on the Volga in 922 AD. The only detailed description of a pagan Viking funeral by someone who was actually there. Includes the slave-girl sacrifice and ship-burning that archaeology had long hinted at. Read more →

Academic Sources

Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. The standard one-volume encyclopaedic reference in English, organised alphabetically by figure with an extensive topical introduction. Lindow is conservative, source-focused, and scrupulous about distinguishing what the Eddas actually say from what popular retellings have added. The first book to reach for on any specific question. Read more →

Turville-Petre, E. O. G. Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. The mid-20th-century scholarly synthesis that set the terms for most subsequent work. Some of its comparative conclusions have been modified by later research, but Turville-Petre's command of the Old Norse textual evidence is still unsurpassed, and the book remains a standard reference. Read more →

Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993. The most thorough single-volume dictionary of Norse and Germanic mythological terms, figures, and concepts. Simek is cautious with conjecture and clear about where the evidence stops. Indispensable for identifying obscure names and places mentioned in the primary sources. Read more →

Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. New York: Basic Books, 2020. A reassessment of Viking-age religion, society, and cosmology by the leading contemporary archaeologist of Viking religion. Price synthesises decades of new fieldwork with careful readings of the textual sources and is especially good on the material culture of belief: amulets, burials, and the archaeology of the afterlife. Read more →

Abram, Christopher. Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen. London: Continuum, 2011. A shorter, more interpretive study than Lindow or Simek. Abram is especially strong on the problem of reading the Eddas as both Christian documents and repositories of pre-Christian tradition. Particularly useful for the question of whether the renewal at the end of Ragnarok is pagan or Christian in origin. Read more →

DuBois, Thomas A. Nordic Religions in the Viking Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. A comparative study that places Norse religion in the wider context of Sámi, Finnic, and other northern European religious traditions. DuBois argues that Viking-age religion was syncretic and plural in ways that Snorri's tidy account obscures. Read more →

Gaimster, Márit. "Viking Religion and Sacred Space." In The Viking World, edited by Stefan Brink and Neil Price. London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 57-63. A short but important chapter on the physical spaces of Viking-age ritual: outdoor shrines, temple halls, and the relationship between landscape and cult. Part of the single best reference volume on the Viking world overall. Read more →

Web Sources

Heimskringla.no. An open-access online archive of Old Norse primary texts, including the full Prose Edda, Poetic Edda, Heimskringla, and most of the major sagas in their original language. Maintained by Scandinavian scholars since 2005. Essential for checking the Old Norse of any quoted passage. Read more →

Voluspa: Old Norse and English Diglot (voluspa.org). A study-oriented site presenting the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda with parallel Old Norse and English translations, with notes and commentary. Especially useful for comparing different translators' renderings of specific passages. Read more →

Viking Society for Northern Research: Web Publications. The scholarly body dedicated to Old Norse studies (based at University College London) has placed a substantial number of its scholarly editions online for free, including Faulkes's editions of the Prose Edda. A reliable first port of call for academic texts on Norse mythology. Read more →

British Museum: Vikings Collection. The British Museum's online catalogue of Viking-age material culture, including Thor's hammer amulets, runestones, and the Lewis chessmen, with scholarly captions and provenance information. Invaluable for the archaeology of Norse religious practice. Read more →

Internet Sacred Text Archive: The Prose Edda. A public-domain online edition of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur's 1916 translation of the Prose Edda. Brodeur is superseded by Faulkes for scholarly use, but freely accessible and serviceable for a first reading. Read more →