Sorry in advance for a long post :)

Recently I made a post explaining how the phrase “nine realms” has led to some big misconceptions in modern times. It was my opinion that ancient Norse people may have never actually had a concrete list of nine special realms. But whether or not that’s true, it certainly is true that the body of surviving Norse myths does reference a lot of different locations (realms, if you will), and some of those do seem otherworldly.

So where are the realms of the Norse cosmos?

It may surprise you to learn that the image I uploaded alongside this post is about as far from source-accurate as we can get, portraying a giant tree with little worlds or universes situated throughout its branches. While it’s true that the Norse cosmos is centered on a very large and important tree (called Yggdrasill), there is absolutely nothing in our mythological source material associating any specific locations with its branches or tiers on its trunk or anything like that.

Rather, we have two descriptions of the entire cosmos being associated with its roots, of which there are only three. The first comes from Grímnismál 31 in the Poetic Edda (Pettit transl.):

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

Three roots extend in three directions from under the ash of Yggdrasill; Hel lives under one, frost-giants [under] another, human beings [under] a third.

This is in contrast with what we find in Gylfaginning 15 of the Prose Edda (Faulkes transl.):

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.

Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Æsir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. […] The third root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root is a well which is very holy, called Weird’s well. There the gods have their court. Every day the Æsir ride there up over Bifrost.

One of the interesting quirks 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 Asgard as being “in heaven”. We can see in this quote how that notion has led to a rather strange idea of the third tree root which, in order to preside over both the underworld and Asgard, must make weird, right-angled turn up into the sky, completely uncharacteristic of a tree root. This is also potentially in contradiction with what is stated two sections earlier in Gylfaginning 13, that the gods “made themselves a city in the middle of the world which is known as Asgard.”

The other, less obvious thing to be cautions of here is the word “under” (O.N. undir), because it does not always have to mean “physically beneath” in Old Norse. 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 Ask, the woman Embla, and from them were produced the mankind to whom the dwelling-place under Midgard was given.

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

In any case, Grímnismál describes the roots as marking the realm of the dead, the realm of the frost-giants (being alive, yet otherworldly), and the realm of humans (what we commonly see and interact with). In this sense, the entire cosmos is connected, though there is no special root for the gods.

Gylfaginning instead has the roots marking the realm of the gods, the realm of the dead, and the realm of the frost-giants. In this case, 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 some sources suggest) a city within Midgard, then perhaps Grímnismál’s root of mankind could be considered the same as Gylfaginning’s root of the gods. On the other hand, if Yggdrasill stands within Asgard (as plenty of sources also suggest), then perhaps it doesn’t need its own root at all.

The last point I’ll make about this is that the only description in our sources of how Yggdrasill’s branches are associated with the shape of the cosmos comes just before the discussion of the roots in Gylfaginning 15:

Askrinn er allra trjá mestr ok beztr. Limar hans dreifast um heim allan ok standa yfir himni.

The ash is of all trees the biggest and best. Its branches spread out over all the world and extend across the sky.

Plural branches over a singular world (heim), across a singular sky.

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 gods (Gylfaginning 8). Their ancestors migrated to Scandinavia from forgotten lands in the 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 the jotnar (giants) are in the north, sometimes the east. Sometimes the gods are in the west or somewhere up high. Sometimes Midgard is separated from the land of the giants by a donut-shaped sea, and sometimes that sea rings around the land of the giants 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 wrote a fantastic paper about this called "Contradictory cosmology in Old Norse myth and religion – but still a system? (2014). In it, he proposes that the various realms of Norse mythology are contained within “bubbles”. These are not physical bubbles, mind you, but 3D areas 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 think this is a great idea, but in my opinion, it’s also a bit overly analytical and describes things in a way that I think would be difficult to keep straight when passing ideas orally from generation to generation. To me, I think we can simplify things even further.

In my view, the average Norse person probably thought of the world as a potentially infinite canvas of mappable territory, with most of that canvas being completely blank and unmapped. After all, no matter how far their society ventured, the world just kept going and going with no end in sight. Imagine yourself as a Norse person, placed in front of a blank, infinite canvas, and asked to draw a map of the world. What would you do?

Well, 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. 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 world ought to be the tree Yggdrasill, but you also know that it’s in a place that “no one knows from where its roots run” (Hávamál 138), 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 realm of the jotnar ought to be (on this singular world, under a singular sky), 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: Þrymheimr, Geirroðagarðr, 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 getting to them that’s the problem, since they’re beyond your natural reach and you have no idea exactly where on this potentially infinite map they should be.

But in the stories you tell your children and grandchildren, gods, jotnar, and humans sometimes need to visit each others’ worlds and we’ve got to have 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. Or 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 is around them and even how far they’ve gone, until they come out on the other side and 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 realms of gods, humans, and jotnar loosely surround each other in some way. More importantly, the simplest explanation here is probably just many realms, on one world, under one sky.