Niflheim

Jotunheim was given to the giants, and Vanahamir to the Vanir, a group of wise fertility gods.

Niflheim and Muspelheim are the primordial realms which formed the cosmos.

Finally, Hel is the land to which those who die dishonourably go, to spend their afterlife.

These worlds are all connected by the great ash tree Yggdrasil.

You can go, you know, to Uru and, um, uh, Asgard.

And then you got below, you got hell down here, the Niflheim down here.

Um, uh, um, a bunch of words that I really can't pronounce, but I will try.

But anyway, um, you can see in the, there's so many cool looking different kinds of concepts up here, but essentially, all right, here's Midgard.

According to the Eddas, in the beginning there existed a great chasm called Ginnugagap.

Within this yawning void lay two worlds, Muspelheim, the world of raging fire, and Niflheim, the world of ice, fog, and stillness.

Within Niflheim lay the well...

Hervelgmir? I think.

Like I said, sorry, I don't...

and his dual nature is further shown in that he is the progenitor of both men and giants.

The giant race was descended from a man and woman brought to life from the sweat pooling in the sleeping Ymir's armpits, and from his legs came a son.

Ymir wasn't the only primal being to emerge from this cataclysmic meeting of ice and fire, where the primordial streams in Niflheim congealed, Adumla, a mighty cow, came forth.

In Norse creation mythology, the primordial void is called Ginyugapgap.

It lies between the fiery realm of Mespelheim and the icy realm of Nilfheim.

Life emerges where those opposing conditions meet.

Now think about the theory.

And yet, in Snorri's telling, the emptiness had edges.

To the north of it lay a realm of ice and frozen mist and shadow, called Niflheim, the world of fog.

It was cold there in a way that went far beyond the cold of any winter on earth, a cold with its own weight and presence.

At the heart of Niflheim was a spring called Vergelmir, the Roaring Cauldron, and from it flowed many rivers, which snorry names in a long and rolling list, and which are known together as the Elivagar, the Storm Waves, or the Ice Waves.

They were rivers of venom and frost, and as they flowed out from their source and into the void, the poison in them hardened into ice, layer upon layer, and over the ice spread a heavy rime and frozen drizzle, so that the northern part of Ginnendagap filled slowly with weight and cold and great creaking drifts.

To the south lay a realm of a very different kind, Muspelheim, a world of fire, so bright and so hot that no one who did not belong there could endure it, At its border sat a giant named Surtr, the Black One, guarding the land with a flaming sword.

And so the name of the world tree may carry a memory of the most famous of all Odin's ordeals, when he hung for nine nights on a windswept tree to win the secret of the runes, Not every scholar agrees with this reading, but it is the one most often given.

The tree has three roots, and they reach far apart.

And from the edges of that emptiness, Two things slowly crept inward toward each other.

From the north came Niflheim, a realm of ice and freezing mist and rivers of venom that had been flowing since before time had any name.

From the south came Muspelheim.

That was fire, pure and violent and ancient.

a place so hot that no being who had not been born there could survive even its outermost edges.

When the ice of Niflheim met the heat of Muspelheim at the centre of Ginnengagap, the ice began to melt.

From the water that formed, the first living things emerged, enormous, primordial, older than the gods themselves.

Out of that cold melt came the first giant, Ymir.

That matters because the Norse world began with water, emptiness, ice, and fire.

Before the earth was shaped, there was Ginnungagap, the great gap between the frozen realm of Niflheim and the fiery realm of Muspel.

Creation emerged from the meeting of those powers.

At Ragnarok, fire and water return with terrible force.

I'm pretty sure that is like historically like part of the culture.

She talks about, I'm going to Niflheim, like the frozen hell on the ends of the earth.

That's where we're headed.

And eventually, they do make it.

He was called the Midgard Serpent.

The second monster was sent to Niflheim, the home of darkness, and shut up there.

The third, a fierce wolf named Fenrir, was brought to Asgard, where Odin Hope, He might be tamed by living among the Asher and seeing their good deeds and hearing their kind words.

But he grew more and more fierce until only one of all the gods dared to fit him.

But before she could start, she must first ask Father Oden to allow her to go.

Oh, Father, I beg you give me leave to go to look for my older in every corner of the world.

the wise father replied go fair friar and may you find whom you seek then she started forth first to the midgard world the goddess of beauty went but no one in all the world had seen or heard of Down under the earth, to Niflheim, and even to Ugard, the land of giants, she wandered.

But still, no one had seen or even heard of her husband.