The Nine Worlds of Norse Myth

At the centre of the Norse cosmos stands Yggdrasil, a vast ash tree whose branches spread over all the worlds. In Völuspá, the great poem of creation and doom, a seeress begins by saying that she remembers “nine worlds” and the glorious tree of fate beneath the earth. Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland around 1220, describes its three roots: one reaching to the gods, beside the well of Urd where the gods hold their court; one to the frost giants, beside the well of Mímir, the source of wisdom; and one over Niflheim, the misty world, where the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws at it. An eagle sits in its crown, and a squirrel runs up and down carrying insults between the eagle and the dragon.

Around the tree lie the worlds. The gods of the Æsir live in Asgard, reached from the world of humans by Bifröst, the rainbow bridge guarded by Heimdall. Humans live in Midgard, the middle enclosure, made according to Snorri from the body of the primeval giant Ymir and fenced with his eyebrows against the giants who live in Jotunheim beyond. The Vanir, another family of gods, have their own world, as do the elves, while the dwarfs live in rocks and under the earth. To the south lies Muspelheim, a world of fire, and to the north Niflheim, a world of mist and ice.

Modern books usually count nine worlds, but the medieval sources never list them, and scholars think the number was symbolic, nine being a sacred number in Norse tradition. The vertical order shown in this page’s diagram follows Snorri’s picture of gods above, humans in the middle and the dead below. It is partly schematic: some worlds lay horizontally, to the north, south or at the edges of the earth, rather than above or below.

The Vikings left no religious books, but they left graves. Some of the dead were cremated, others buried, and the wealthy were laid in ships, wagons or chambers with weapons, jewellery, tools, horses, dogs and food. In 834 two women were buried with a magnificent ship at Oseberg in Norway, together with a cart, sledges and household goods. Such graves suggest that the dead were thought to travel, or to need their possessions in a new life, though they cannot tell us exactly where they believed the dead were going.

A rare outside witness is Ibn Fadlan, an envoy of the caliph of Baghdad, who in 922 watched the funeral of a Rus chieftain on the Volga. The chieftain was laid in a ship with rich goods and burned. When Ibn Fadlan’s interpreter spoke with one of the Rus, the man said that the Arabs were foolish to bury their dead in the earth, since fire carried the dead at once to paradise.

The Icelandic texts describe roads to the realm of the dead. After the death of the god Baldr, Snorri tells, the god Hermóðr rode Odin’s horse for nine nights through dark, deep valleys until he reached the river Gjöll and its bridge roofed with gold. The maiden who guarded it, Móðguðr, told him that five troops of dead men had crossed it the day before, and that the road to Hel lay downwards and northwards. Hermóðr leapt the gate of Hel on horseback to plead for Baldr’s return.

The poems name several destinations. Valhalla, the “hall of the slain”, belonged to Odin. According to the poem Grímnismál it had 540 doors, and its rafters were spears and its roof shields. In Snorri’s account Odin’s chosen warriors, the einherjar, fought each day and were healed each evening, feasting on the meat of a boar that was cooked and came back to life, and drinking mead that flowed from the udder of a goat. They were preparing for Ragnarök, when they would fight beside the gods. The valkyries, “choosers of the slain”, brought them from the battlefield. Yet Grímnismál also says that Freyja chose half the slain each day for her field, Fólkvangr, while Odin took the other half.

Most of the dead, Snorri says, went to Hel: those who died of sickness or old age. The realm took its name from its ruler, Hel, a daughter of the trickster Loki, whose face was half dark and half flesh-coloured. Snorri describes her hall as damp and cheerless, and the poem Vafþrúðnismál speaks of dead men going down from Hel to Niflhel, the misty depths below. Völuspá adds a hall on Náströnd, the Shore of Corpses, woven of serpents, where oath-breakers and murderers wade through poisonous streams. Many scholars suspect that this picture of punishment owes something to Christian ideas of hell.

Other sources point to further homes for the dead. Poems and sagas speak of the drowned going to the sea goddess Rán, who caught sailors in her net. The Eyrbyggja saga tells of a family who believed they would pass into the holy mountain Helgafell, where a shepherd once saw the drowned head of the family welcomed to a feast inside the opened rock. Other stories tell of the dead living on in their burial mounds, sometimes rising as restless draugar.

Almost everything we know about the Norse cosmos comes from Iceland in the thirteenth century, two hundred years and more after the island’s conversion to Christianity around 1000. Snorri Sturluson wrote his Edda partly as a handbook for poets, explaining the old myths so that the images of skaldic verse could still be understood. The mythological poems of the Poetic Edda survive mainly in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, written around 1270. Both are precious, but both are late, and scholars debate how much they reflect the varied beliefs of the Viking Age and how much the learned, sometimes Christian, ordering of their authors.

What the sources do suggest is that Norse ideas about death were never a single doctrine. Different places, families and periods may have imagined the dead in mountains, mounds, halls or the realm of Hel, and the grand system that links them all on one tree is in part the work of later writers. The story ends at Ragnarök, when the wolf swallows the sun, gods and giants fall, and a green earth rises again from the sea for the survivors.

The Norse worlds have had a rich modern life. Wagner’s Ring cycle, completed at Bayreuth in 1876, ends with Valhalla in flames, and the nine worlds now appear in novels, comics, films and video games. A modern revival of Norse religion, practised in Iceland and elsewhere as Ásatrú or Heathenry, draws on the same sources in its own way.