Out of these few drops of water came the first living being – the jötunn Ymir. At the time, even these two were just lifeless elemental planes with nothing of significance happening in either of them.Īll that changed when the flames of Muspelheim happened to melt some of the ice shards coming out of Niflheim.

Seven out of the nine realms didn’t even exist yet, with the only two exceptions being the fire realm Muspelheim and the ice realm Niflheim. In the beginning, the world tree Yggdrasil stood alone in the cosmic void Ginnungagap. Some myths depicted them as entirely separate worlds while in many other myths as well as in many cases throughout history, the Nordic people seem to have thought that the other realms could be found across the ocean if you just sailed far enough. The Nordic people also didn’t have a consistent concept of how big the nine realms themselves were. In a sense, the Yggdrasil tree is the universe. In either case, the tree was considered a cosmic constant – something that predated the nine realms and that would exist for as long as the universe itself existed. This view of Yggdrasil and the nine realms, however, seems to have been formed later and thanks to the influences of Christian writers. In some myths, the nine realms were spread throughout the crown of the tree like fruits and in others, they were arranged across the height of the tree one on top of the other, with the “good” realms closer to the top and the “evil” realms closer to the bottom. How are the Nine Realms Arranged in The Cosmos / on Yggdrasil? Source Regardless, however, these nine Norse realms housed all life in the universe with each realm being the home of a specific race of people. The exact dimensions and size of the tree varied as the Norse people didn’t really have a concept of how huge the universe was. What Are the Nine Norse Realms? SourceĪccording to the Nordic people of Scandinavia, Iceland, and parts of Northern Europe, the entire cosmos was comprised of nine worlds or realms arranged on or around the world tree Yggdrasil. In this comprehensive article, let’s go over the nine Norse realms, what they are, and what they represent. We know for a fact that these authors considerably altered the oral tradition they were recording – so much so that they even changed the nine Norse realms. Many of the written sources we have of Nordic cosmology and the nine Norse realms today are actually from Christian writers.

Norse realms riordam