The Nine Worlds · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours of Calm Narration

Good evening. Or perhaps good night — by the time you find this, the difference may not matter.

You've come here, I imagine, because you'd like to sleep, and you'd like a quiet story to carry you there. Tonight, we have one. Tonight we go north. Far north. To a place that lived in human imagination for a thousand years before anyone thought to write it down — and that we know now only through fragments, copied centuries late by scribes who had themselves nearly forgotten the gods their grandparents kept.

If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you to do very little. Close your eyes. Let your shoulders soften. The story does not need your attention. It will keep moving whether you follow it or not. If you drift, that is the point. If you wake briefly and find we have moved on to another chapter, that is good. The almanac is patient.

Tonight, then, is the first episode. Episode one of twelve. We are beginning at the beginning — at the shape of the world itself, as the old Norse peoples understood it. Nine worlds. A tree at the center of everything. Roots that reach down into the dark places, and branches that vanish into the stars.

In time, we will meet the gods. We will meet the giants, and the elves, and the dwarves, and the one wolf who waits at the edge of all things. We will arrive, much later, at the end of the world. But not tonight.

Tonight, we only set the stage.

And now — let us begin.

Chapter One. The North Before the Gods.

Imagine, first, a place. Not a place from one of the stories — not yet. A real place. The land of long winters, of black coastlines, of low gray skies that hang for months without changing. The fjords of what we now call Norway. The forests of what we now call Sweden. The high empty wind of the Icelandic interior. The salt-cold of the islands strung north into the dark sea.

This is the world the storytellers lived in. It is important, I think, to begin there — not with the gods, but with the people who imagined them. Because the gods of the Norse are very particular gods. They were dreamed up by people who knew that winter could kill you. By people who had buried their friends in shallow graves cut into half-frozen earth. By people who had stood, on long nights, looking up at a sky so clear and so absolute that you could believe — without difficulty — that the stars themselves were burning fires in a great hall above the world.

The Norse peoples — and that is a generous term for a loose family of cultures spread across Scandinavia and into Iceland and the Faroes and Greenland — were not, on the whole, soft people. They were farmers, mostly. They were fishermen. They were ironworkers, and shipbuilders, and weavers of wool. They were also, when the season turned poor, raiders. The image we have inherited of them — horned helmets, axes raised, longships full of howling men — that image is largely a Victorian invention, much later, and not entirely fair. But it is fair to say that they understood violence. They lived close to it. And the gods they dreamed up understood it too.

Their world was, in some sense, a working farmer's world. There were the close things — the longhouse, the byre, the field, the hearth. There were the middle things — the boundary stones, the edges of the woods, the path down to the shore. And there were the far things — the open sea, the high mountains, the unmapped forests where it was said that other peoples lived. People who were not quite people. People who were older than people. Or younger. Or made of different material entirely.

Out of this geography came their cosmology. Out of their close hearth came the idea of Miðgarðr — the Middle Enclosure, the place where mortals lived. Out of the wild edges came Útgarðr — the Outer Enclosure, the place where the giants lived. Out of the high sky came Ásgarðr — the place where the gods lived, with their golden halls and their high mead. And out of the deepest dark came Hel, with a little H — the cold gray country beneath the roots, where most of the dead went, eventually, to wait quietly for nothing in particular.

But these were only four of the nine worlds. We will get to all of them. Tonight, I want only to plant the picture in your mind — a tree, vast beyond imagining, holding the cosmos in its branches. Some worlds in its high boughs. Some worlds along its trunk. Some worlds tangled in its deepest roots.

The Norse called this tree Yggdrasill. The name is older than the stories themselves. It comes apart, if you press it, into two pieces. Drasill is a poetic word for a horse. Yggr — well, Yggr is one of the many names of Odin. The High One. The Allfather. The god who, as we will hear in due course, hung from this very tree for nine days and nine nights, in pursuit of wisdom. So the name is half-translatable: Yggr's horse. Odin's horse. The tree on which he rode himself.

But for now, we are still in the time before any of that. Before Odin. Before any of the gods you may have heard of. We are in the time before the worlds even existed.

The Norse poets — and they were poets, before anything else; the stories we have were sung long before they were written — were unusually candid about how little they knew of the beginning. In the great mythological poem the Vǫluspá, the wise woman who speaks the poem says, in the very first stanzas, that she remembers a time before the worlds were made. She remembers the void. She remembers the first beings. She remembers, she says, before Miðgarðr — before the Middle Enclosure was raised. And she remembers a sound, or perhaps the absence of a sound. A great yawning. A great gap.

Ginnungagap, she called it. The Yawning Void.

That is where we begin, in the next chapter. With nothing at all. Or with very nearly nothing — with a kind of space, a kind of absence, that the Norse mind imagined not as black emptiness but as something more like a great quiet that had not yet decided what to be.

But before we go there, I want to say a small thing about the sources.

Most of what we know about Norse mythology comes from two books, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century — long after the conversion to Christianity, long after the old gods had been pushed to the edges of memory. The first is called the Poetic Edda — a collection of older mythological poems, copied down by a scribe whose name we have lost. The second is called the Prose Edda, written by a man named Snorri Sturluson, who was himself a Christian, and who wrote his book in part as a kind of textbook — a manual to help young Icelandic poets understand the old metaphors they were still using in their verse. Snorri's Edda is more orderly, more readable, more like a story. The Poetic Edda is older, stranger, more fragmentary, and — most scholars agree — closer to the original tradition.

Where the two disagree, this almanac will tell you. Where they're ambiguous, this almanac will not pretend otherwise. The Norse worldview was a working mythology, lived for centuries, and the gods they kept were not the tidy gods of a single canonical text. They were the gods of a thousand longhouses, told a thousand ways. We will try, when we can, to keep that texture.

For now, though, let me give you only this: a picture. A great tree. Nine worlds hanging in its branches and along its trunk and around its roots. A cold sea at the edge of everything. A long-dead wisewoman, somewhere in the dark, remembering when none of it yet existed.

And a wind. The wind that always seems to be moving, in these stories. The wind that came before the gods, that will outlast them, that is, perhaps, the only thing the Norse imagined to be older than the void itself.

Listen for that wind, if you can, as you fall asleep. It runs all through the rest of this season.

And now, the void itself.

Chapter Two. Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void.

There is a phrase, at the very opening of the Vǫluspá — the Old Norse poem in which a long-dead wise woman, called a vǫlva, recounts the beginning and the end of the world — that has given translators a great deal of trouble for the better part of two centuries. The phrase is short. It is only a few words long. It runs, in the original: gap var ginnunga. The void was yawning. Or, more loosely: there was a great gap.

The phrase itself comes after a stanza that tells us, with admirable economy, that in the beginning there was nothing at all. No sand. No sea. No cold waves. No earth, no heaven above. There was only — and here the poet pauses, almost as if searching for the right word — the gap. The yawning.

Ginnungagap.

I want to spend some time with this word, because the Norse conception of the primordial nothing is, in my reading, one of the most interesting things in any old mythology. The Greeks had Chaos — but Chaos for the Greeks was a roiling, churning, primal jumble, full of pre-stuff. The Hebrews had the formless void of Genesis, but their void was traveled over by the spirit of God almost from the first sentence. The Vedic hymns of ancient India spoke of a kind of unbreathing single breath, neither being nor not-being. Each tradition reached for something different.

The Norse reached for a hush.

Ginnungagap was not black. It was not full of darkness. It was not even, strictly speaking, empty — emptiness, after all, implies a container, and there was no container yet. It was simply a kind of held space. A kind of yawning. A kind of pause before any breath. If you have ever stood, very late at night, in a place so quiet that the silence itself seems to take on a weight — that is, perhaps, the closest a modern person can come to the feeling. Ginnungagap was a presence that had not yet become anything.

Snorri Sturluson, writing in the thirteenth century in his book the Prose Edda, tries to be a little more orderly about it. He writes that Ginnungagap was a great gap, yes — but a great gap with sides. To the north of it lay a realm called Niflheimr, the Mist-Home, a place of cold and fog and frost so old it had no beginning. To the south of it lay another realm called Múspellsheimr, the Home of Fire, a place of heat and embers and sparks that flew up endlessly and went out endlessly and were replaced. And between them — in that long held space — lay Ginnungagap itself.

I should pause here to acknowledge something, because the almanac will keep its promises about being honest with you. The Vǫluspá itself does not describe Ginnungagap in this way. The Vǫluspá describes only the gap. It does not place a fire-realm to one side and a frost-realm to the other. That neat geography comes from Snorri, who was working two hundred years later, and who was almost certainly trying to make a tidy diagram of what had originally been a much stranger, much vaguer picture. Most scholars now agree that Snorri's neatness should be taken with a grain of salt. He was a Christian writing about gods who were no longer worshipped, and he was, in some sense, organizing them on a page for the first time.

So when I describe what comes next — the fire to the south, the frost to the north, the slow meeting of their breath in the middle — I want you to know that this is mostly Snorri's picture. The older poetry is messier. It hints. It does not draw a map.

Still. The picture is beautiful. And it has, over the centuries, become the standard way of imagining the Norse beginning. So I will give you Snorri's picture, gently, knowing that the truth was probably stranger.

To the south, then — far to the south, far beyond anywhere a person could walk — there was Múspellsheimr. The land of fire. We will hear more about it in the next chapter. For now, only this: imagine a place where heat had always existed, and would always exist, and where the air itself shimmered. A place no living thing could survive. A place that, in the very beginning, no living thing yet existed to attempt.

To the north — equally far, equally unreachable — there was Niflheimr. The land of mist. A place of cold so absolute it could not even be called cold; cold is something that happens to a thing, and there was no thing yet to be cold. It was simply the place where, in time, the first frost would begin to gather.

And between them, neither cold nor hot, neither bright nor dark, lay the gap. The held breath.

There is one small detail I want to add, because I love it. In the Vǫluspá, when the wisewoman lists what was not yet present in this earliest age, she names, among the absences, gras. Grass. There was no grass yet. Of all the things she might have named — no sun, no moon, no stars, no rivers, no shore — she chose, for some reason, to specifically mention grass. There was a gap. But no grass.

I think about this often. I think it tells us something about the people who first sang the Vǫluspá. To them, even grass — small, ordinary, ankle-high grass — was a kind of miracle. It belonged to the made world. It was a sign that things had been put in order. And so, at the beginning, when nothing had been put in order yet — there was no grass. The absence of grass was the absence of everything.

If you are listening in bed, I'd ask you to hold that image for a moment, before we go on. The great quiet. The yawning. The place that has not yet decided to be a place. And nowhere, in any direction — no grass. Not yet.

You can feel, can't you, that something is about to coalesce. There is no narrative reason for it to do so — the void could, in principle, go on forever, and in some other tradition perhaps it does. But the Norse poets seem to have understood something about voids that all very old traditions seem to have understood, which is that they do not, in the end, stay empty.

Something will drift into the gap. Something will drift down from the north and up from the south, and they will meet in the middle. And out of that meeting — out of the simplest possible reaction, frost meeting heat — will come the first drops of water in the cosmos. And from those drops, in time, will come the first being.

But that is the next chapter.

For now, only the gap. Only the great yawning that has not yet become anything else. Only the wind, somewhere — and yes, even here, in the void, there is wind in the old poetry; the Norse imagination could not quite conceive of a place with no wind in it at all. Only the wind, somewhere, very far off, moving against nothing, and making no sound.

And the absence of grass.

Chapter Three. The First Fire and the First Frost.

We left off, in the last chapter, with the void. With Ginnungagap. With the great held space between the fire-realm and the frost-realm. With the absence of grass. Tonight, that long stillness is going to begin, very slowly, to end.

I want to be careful, in this chapter, to honor how slowly the Norse imagined this. Most modern retellings of the creation story rush through what comes next — they give you a paragraph, perhaps, on the meeting of fire and ice, and then they hurry on to the first being. But the older poetry, when we can recover it, lingers. The image of frost slowly creeping out into a void, of heat slowly pressing against it, of the long, long, long time before anything alive happens — this is, I think, one of the most patient images in any creation myth. The Norse mind seems to have understood that the universe took a great while to put itself in order, and saw no reason to hurry.

So let us begin, then, with the frost.

To the north of Ginnungagap lay Niflheimr. The Mist-Home. Or, in some older readings, simply the Dark-Home — the syllable nifl in Old Norse carries a meaning closer to gloom than mist, and the realm may originally have been a place of darkness more than of fog. Either way, what mattered about Niflheimr is that it was old. Older than the gods. Older than the void's other edge. It had simply, somehow, always been there.

At the heart of Niflheimr there was — and this detail comes from Snorri, in the Prose Edda — a spring. A great spring of dark cold water. The name of this spring was Hvergelmir, which translates, loosely, as the Roaring Cauldron. From Hvergelmir, eleven rivers flowed. The Norse called them the Élivágar, which means something like the Ice-Waves. They poured outward, away from the heart of Niflheimr, and they ran a long way, and they froze.

This is where, in the old poetic imagination, the long process began. The rivers ran. They poured out into the void. They froze, slowly, into great walls of ice that stretched out across the empty space. They built up and built up and built up, over what must have been an unimaginable stretch of time — there is no clock in this story, and no calendar; the time before the gods is, in the deepest sense, untimed — until the cold of Niflheimr had pressed itself a long way across the void, and Ginnungagap, which had been hushed and empty and grass-less, now had, in the north of it, a great wall of slow black ice.

Meanwhile, to the south, the other thing was happening.

Múspellsheimr — the Home of Fire — was as old as Niflheimr, and just as opposite. Where Niflheimr was dark and cold and damp, Múspellsheimr was bright and hot and dry. Where Niflheimr had a spring at its heart, Múspellsheimr had — well, the sources are less clear on what exactly stood at the heart of the fire-realm. The Vǫluspá does not describe it in detail. Snorri describes it, but mostly as a place of perpetual burning. Most translators settle on something like an endless field of fire, with sparks rising and falling, and embers cooling and reigniting, in a kind of slow eternal blaze.

There is, however, one figure that all the sources do agree on. At the edge of Múspellsheimr — at the very southern boundary of the world, the place where fire met void — there stood a being. His name was Surtr. The Black One. We will hear far more of him in later episodes, because he will play a part in the ending of the world; he is the one who, in the very last days, will lead the armies of fire against the gods. But for now, in the first age, he simply stood there. Watching. Waiting. The sources do not tell us what he was waiting for. He carried a flaming sword.

I find this detail extraordinary, the more I think about it. Most creation myths begin with quiet — with darkness, with water, with breath. The Norse creation begins with a sentinel. Even at the very beginning, when there are no gods and no humans and no worlds, the Norse imagination places a figure on guard. As if the universe has been at risk, even from its first second, of something terrible.

So. We have Niflheimr to the north, with its spring and its eleven rivers and its ever-creeping walls of ice. We have Múspellsheimr to the south, with its endless burning and its silent watchman. And between them, the void, which has been getting slowly less empty.

What happens next is, in some ways, the simplest physics in any mythology. The ice from the north creeps a long way into the gap. The fire from the south sends its heat a long way into the gap. And somewhere in the middle — somewhere in the very heart of Ginnungagap, where the absolute cold of the north met the absolute heat of the south — the ice began to melt.

It happened slowly. It would have happened slowly. There is no rushing in this story. The first drops of water in the universe formed on the southern face of the great ice-walls, and they hung there for a long time, gathering weight, before they finally fell. They fell into nothing — into the void — and they did not land anywhere, because there was nothing to land on. But they were there. Drops of water. The first liquid that had ever existed.

I'd like you to hold that image, if you are still with me. The void, mostly empty. The great walls of ice. The slow sun-warm of the fire-realm pressing against them. And, beginning to form, drops of water — perfectly clear, perfectly cold, perfectly slow — hanging from the edges of the ice and then falling, one by one, into the great quiet.

In Snorri's account, what happens next is that the drops begin to take a shape. The Prose Edda is quite specific about this. The drops, as they fell, did not simply become water. They began — and here Snorri's language gets strange, almost reverent — to quicken. To stir. To become, somehow, alive.

The Norse word that is sometimes used for this is kvikna, which carries the sense of an awakening, or a quickening, the way an unborn child quickens in the womb. Something in the drops of water was beginning to live.

And from that quickening — from the slow meeting of fire and frost, in the heart of a void that had been empty since before time — there began to form, slowly, the first body.

Its name was Ymir. We will spend the next chapter with him.

But for tonight, only this: the void was not empty anymore. The ice was meeting the fire. The first drops of water were falling. And something, deep in the middle of all that meeting, was beginning to stir.

The wind was still moving. It had not stopped, in the long age between Chapter Two and Chapter Three. It had simply waited.

Now, perhaps, it was starting to bring news.

Chapter Four. Ymir, the First Being.

There is a being now. A body. A shape in the void.

I want to say his name carefully, because the Norse sources give it to us in two forms, and both are correct. In the Prose Edda — in Snorri's account — he is called Ymir. In one of the oldest mythological poems of the Poetic Edda, the Vafþrúðnismál, he is called Aurgelmir, a name whose first part is uncertain, but which most scholars translate as something like the Gravel-Yeller or the Mud-Yeller — referring, perhaps, to the wet primal slurry of melting frost and fire-warmed earth from which he was made. Most scholars now think these are two names for the same being, kept in different traditions and eventually reconciled by Snorri into a single figure. The almanac will use Ymir, because it is the more familiar name. But you may keep both, in your mind, if you prefer.

Ymir was, in the Norse imagination, the first living thing. He was older than the gods. He was older than the worlds. He was older than the first dawn. He came into being, as we said in the last chapter, from the meeting of fire and frost — from the drops of water that quickened in the heart of Ginnungagap, in the warm place where the ice-walls of Niflheimr were finally beginning to melt against the breath of Múspellsheimr.

He was not a god. The sources are very clear on this. He was something older than gods. He was a jǫtunn — a giant — though the word giant is not quite right; the Old Norse jǫtunn refers to a being of great size and great age, not necessarily evil, not necessarily hostile, but other. Older. Pre-divine. The first jǫtunn was Ymir, and from him, eventually, all the other giants of Norse mythology would descend.

Snorri describes Ymir's appearance only obliquely. He says that Ymir was very large. He says that Ymir was — in some readings — neither male nor female, or perhaps both at once; the Old Norse word used for him, hrímþurs, the frost-giant, does not specify a sex, and there is some indication in the poetic tradition that the first being was, in modern terms, intersex. From Ymir's body, in time, other giants would be born — not in the way that modern living things are born, but more strangely, more primally. The sources say that when Ymir slept, sweat formed under his arms, and from the sweat under his left arm, a man and a woman grew together, and from his two feet, a son was born. This is the way the first family of giants came into being, in the Norse imagination — not from coupling, but from the body itself, almost as if the body of Ymir was a kind of slow fountain of beings.

I should pause here, again, to acknowledge how strange this is. The Norse creation account, taken literally, is one of the strangest in any mythology. There is a body. From the body, other bodies come — not by birth, but by exudation. The first beings appear under arms and between feet. This is not metaphor, in the sources. This is what Snorri describes, and what the Vafþrúðnismál implies.

I think the strangeness is important. The Norse imagination did not begin with anything like the dignified, ordered, almost legal creations of other traditions. It began with a great body in the void, sweating new life out of itself, and a long slow process of beings emerging from the meeting of fire and ice. This is a mythology that does not flinch from the body. It does not flinch from process. It begins messy.

Now. There is one more being who comes into existence in this earliest age, and she is one of my favorite figures in any mythology, because she is so quiet, so domestic, so utterly unlike what a creation story usually contains.

Her name was Auðumbla. She is sometimes spelled Auðhumla in older sources; the spelling varies. She was a cow.

That is not a joke. The Norse creation story, as Snorri tells it, includes a cow.

Auðumbla, like Ymir, came into being from the slow meeting of fire and frost in the heart of Ginnungagap. The sources do not tell us why a cow, of all things, formed in the void. Snorri seems to take it for granted, as if of course there would be a cow — what else would feed the first being? Four rivers of milk, the sources tell us, flowed from her — one stream from each of her four teats. And from those rivers, Ymir drank, and was nourished, and grew strong.

I love this image. I love the patience of it. The first being is a giant, alone in the void. The void is mostly empty. There is no land, no sky, no other beings. And there is a cow. And the cow has milk. And the giant drinks the milk. And this goes on, for what must have been a very long time, before anything else happens at all.

But the cow also had something else to do. According to Snorri — and this detail does not appear in the Poetic Edda, only in the Prose; so it may be Snorri's invention, or it may be a tradition older than the surviving poetry — Auðumbla, in addition to feeding Ymir, was also slowly licking a great stone of salt-rime. A stone of frozen salt, formed in the meeting of fire and ice. She licked it gently, day after day, the way a cow will lick a salt-block in a barn. And as she licked, the stone began, very slowly, to reveal something.

On the first day of her licking, there appeared, in the stone, the hair of a man.

On the second day, the head emerged.

On the third day, the whole man stepped forth.

His name was Búri. And he was, the sources tell us, very tall and very beautiful. He had been, somehow, inside the stone all along, the way a sculpture is said to be inside the block of marble before the sculptor begins. The salt and the milk and the patient tongue of the cow had, over three days, revealed him.

Búri was, in some sense, the first ancestor of the gods.

Snorri says he had a son — though the source does not tell us how, since there were no women yet, only the giants and the cow. Perhaps Búri, like Ymir, simply produced his son from his own body. Perhaps the sources are silent because the storytellers themselves did not know. In any case, the son's name was Borr. And Borr eventually took a wife — a wife from among the early giants, a being called Bestla, who was the daughter of one of Ymir's descendants. And Borr and Bestla had three sons.

You may have heard of the eldest. His name was Odin.

The middle son was called Vili.

The youngest was called Vé.

These three would become, in time, the first gods of the Norse pantheon — the Æsir, the gods of Asgard, the high ones, the rulers of the world to come. But they were not yet gods, at this point in the story. They were three young men, born in the void, born among giants, born long before there was any world for them to rule. They were Borr's sons, and they were the descendants of the patient cow and her salt-stone, and that is all they were.

For now.

I would like you to hold this scene in your mind, if you are still listening, before we move on to what they did. The void. The first giant, Ymir, drinking from a cow's four rivers of milk. The cow, licking a stone, day after day, until a man emerged. The man fathering a son. The son taking a wife from among the giants. The three boys born to them, in the great quiet, with no world yet to put their feet on, and no fire to gather around, and no stars yet hung overhead to look up at.

There is one important thing the sources tell us about the three boys. They were unlike Ymir. They were unlike the giants. They were something new. And when they were grown, they would do something that the giants could not have done, and that would change the universe forever.

They would decide that the world needed to be made.

But that, again — that is the next chapter.

For now, the wind is still moving. The cow is still licking. The giant is still drinking. The three young men are still small, still gathered close to their mother, still listening to her stories of what had been before. The void is mostly quiet. And the great work — the work of making the world — has not begun yet.

Sleep, if you can.

Chapter Five. The Sons of Borr and the Slaying of Ymir.

We arrive now, in this chapter, at a moment in the Norse creation story that I have, over the years, found difficult to tell. It is not difficult because it is graphic — though it is somewhat graphic, in a slow archaic way. It is difficult because it is, on its face, a story about three brothers who killed their great-grandfather. And to tell that story in a way that does not jolt you awake — which is, after all, the purpose of this almanac — requires some care.

So I will tell it gently. I will not linger. And I will frame it the way the Norse themselves seem to have framed it, which is as a kind of necessary turning — not a tragedy, not a triumph, but the moment at which the world tilted from one age into another.

You will remember, from the last chapter, that three young men had been born to Borr and Bestla in the void: Odin, Vili, and Vé. They were the sons of a man who had himself been produced by a cow's slow licking of a salt-stone. They were the great-grandsons of Búri, the first ancestor. They were, in some sense, the first beings in the cosmos to be fully neither giant nor god — to be something new. And as they grew, in the patient quiet of those earliest ages, they came to a decision.

The world, as it was, was not yet a world. The void had a giant in it. The void had a cow. The void had three brothers and the lingering presence of older giants who had emerged, as we said, from Ymir's own body. But the void did not yet have land, or sea, or sky, or sun, or moon. It did not yet have anywhere for the three brothers to make a home. And the three brothers, in their long quiet conversations during those ageless ages, came to feel that something needed to change.

The Norse sources are not entirely clear on why they decided what they decided. The Prose Edda tells us only that they killed Ymir. The Vafþrúðnismál implies it, but does not describe it. There is no scene of confrontation. There is no quoted speech. There is only, in the texts, the matter-of-fact statement that Borr's sons slew the great giant, and that from his body the world was then made.

Some scholars have read this as a kind of necessary act of cosmic gardening — the Norse equivalent of the Indo-European pattern in which a primordial being must be sacrificed in order for the world to take shape. The Vedic tradition of ancient India has a strikingly similar story, in which a primordial figure named Purusha is sacrificed by the gods, and from his body the elements of the world are formed. The Persian tradition has Gayōmard, the first man, whose body is similarly broken open to produce the materials of the cosmos. Across the Indo-European world, this image of a primal being whose body becomes the world is so widespread that most scholars now think it must trace back to a single very ancient story, told and retold by peoples whose languages would later split and migrate across continents. The Norse account is, in this reading, one branch of a story so old that we cannot any longer trace its root.

I am drawn to this reading. It feels honest. The Norse poets, working in their cold longhouses two and three thousand years after that original story was first told, were not, in the deepest sense, inventing. They were preserving something they had inherited. And what they had inherited included the idea that the world could not begin without the death of something very large and very old.

So. The three brothers killed Ymir.

The texts tell us only that they did it. They do not tell us how. There is no weapon named, no blow described. We are simply told, as if it had always been the case, that Ymir was dead.

When he died — and here the sources do become more specific — a great quantity of blood flowed from his body. The Old Norse word used for this flowing is hreyrr, which carries something of the meaning of a torrent. And in the cosmos as it then existed, with no land yet and no sea, this great flowing of blood became a kind of flood. It rolled outward across the void. It surrounded all the other giants, who had themselves been born from Ymir's body in the earlier ages. And it drowned them.

All of them, the sources say, except one.

His name was Bergelmir. And he was, by the time of the slaying, an old giant — already a grandfather, already wise. He and his wife, whose name the sources do not give, escaped the flood. The Vafþrúðnismál tells us specifically how: they climbed onto a hollow log — a kind of mill-trough, in some translations; a kind of small boat, in others — and they rode the great flood out, the two of them clinging to the wood, while around them all the other early giants drowned. And in time, when the flood receded, Bergelmir and his wife stepped down from their boat and went on to father the second great line of giants, the line that survives into the later mythology and that will play a part, in due course, in the war between the gods and the giants at the end of the world.

But that is far off.

For tonight, I would like you to hold the moment after the slaying. The void. The great body of Ymir, no longer alive. The flood of his blood spreading outward in a slow tide. The single hollow log carrying the only two survivors. The three brothers — Odin, Vili, and Vé — standing somewhere in the middle of all that. And the silence afterward. The strange immense silence of having done a thing that could not be undone.

The Norse poets do not, as far as I can tell, ever describe what the three brothers said to each other after the killing. They do not describe regret. They do not describe pride. They describe, instead, what came next — which is that the three brothers went to work.

They had, lying before them, the great dead body of the first being. And they had a decision to make. They could leave him there, in the void, and continue to drift in the ageless quiet of pre-creation. Or they could begin, with what they now had, to build something.

They chose to build.

And the way they chose to build is one of the strangest and most arresting images in any mythology. Because what they did, in the next chapter, was take Ymir's body apart, piece by piece, and from each piece make a part of the world.

His flesh became the earth. His blood became the seas. His bones became the mountains. His teeth became the rocks. His skull became the dome of the sky. His brains became the clouds. His hair became the trees. His eyebrows — and this detail I love — his eyebrows became the wall around Miðgarðr, the middle enclosure where humans would, in time, come to live.

But I am racing ahead. I will tell you about each transformation slowly, in the next chapter, because each is worth its own quiet pause.

For now, only this: the killing has happened. The flood has receded. The three brothers are standing in the void, with the great body of their ancestor before them, and the work of making the world is about to begin.

Sleep, if you can. The hardest part of the story is behind us. What comes next is gentler — though no less strange.

Chapter Six. The Making of the World.

I want to begin this chapter with a small confession, which is that the chapter you are about to hear is, in my reading, the most difficult chapter in the entire creation story to tell well. Not because it is violent — the violence is behind us, and the slaying of Ymir, as we said, has been done. The difficulty, rather, is that what comes next is, on the page, almost laughably matter-of-fact.

The Prose Edda, when it describes the making of the world, does it in something like five sentences. Snorri lists the parts of Ymir, lists the things they became, and moves on. The Grímnismál — one of the older mythological poems of the Poetic Edda — is similarly economical. It gives us a few stanzas, almost a kind of inventory, and then proceeds. There is no narrative drama. There is no scene of construction. There is no point in either text where the three brothers stand back, sweat on their brows, and admire their work.

There is, instead, a list.

I have come to think that the list, in its strange flatness, is part of what makes the Norse creation story feel so old. There is no rhetoric. There is no celebration. There is only a body, and the body has parts, and the parts become the world.

So let me give you the list. Slowly. The way I think the old Norse storytellers would have given it — as a series of simple, almost reverent statements, each followed by a long pause for the listener to imagine.

The flesh of Ymir, the sources say, became the earth.

I would like you to think about this for a moment. Not the violence of it — the violence is over. Think about the image. The great body of the first being, no longer moving, no longer breathing. And the flesh of that body — slowly, somehow, through whatever process the gods used — becoming earth. Becoming soil. Becoming the loamy, dark, ordinary stuff that grass would, in time, grow out of. The same earth that you and I have walked on. The earth was once, in this reading, a body.

The blood of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the seas.

The Norse, of course, knew the sea well. They lived against it. They depended on it. They had thrown their dead into it, in long-ship funerals; they had fished from it; they had crossed it in great migrations to Iceland and Greenland and as far west, in time, as the eastern coast of North America. And they imagined, when they imagined the beginning of things, that the sea — that great salt restless thing — was, in some deep sense, the blood of an ancient body. The brine taste of it. The slow heave of it. They imagined that this had once been alive. That every wave was, in some measure, the slow pulse of a heart that had stopped a long time ago.

The bones of Ymir, the sources say, became the mountains.

This image, perhaps, is easier for us. The mountains do look like bones, when you have lived among them. They have that quality of jutting, of structural, of geometry-from-some-larger-body. The Norse, who lived among the dramatic mountains of Norway and the volcanic ridges of Iceland, would have seen this resemblance directly. Their mountains were, in their imagination, the skeleton of the first being, lifted up into the daylight.

The teeth of Ymir, the sources say — and the broken pieces of his bones — became the rocks. The stones. The smaller scattered things on the surface of the earth. The pebbles in a streambed. The boulders on a hillside. The hand-sized rocks a person might pick up and turn over in their palm. All of them, in the Norse imagination, were the smaller pieces of that great old body.

The hair of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the trees.

I find this one beautiful. The forest as the hair of a body. The slow growth of pine and birch and oak and fir, the long boreal forests of northern Europe, all of it imagined as a kind of slow hair — emerging from the earth that had once been flesh, blowing in the wind, growing and falling and growing again. Trees in this reading are not simply alive. They are the living growth of an older life. They are what continues, in green, after the great body has stilled.

The skull of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the dome of the sky.

This image, I think, requires the most patience. The sky as a skull, arched overhead, holding everything in. The Norse imagination did not picture the sky as we picture it — as an open atmosphere fading into the vacuum of space. They pictured it as a kind of bowl, or a kind of dome, set over the earth like a ceiling. And the dome, in their picture, was the inside of a skull. The skull of the first being.

To hold the great dome of the sky in place — because, in the Norse cosmology, even the sky needed to be held up — the gods placed four dwarves at its four corners. The names of these dwarves are given in the Prose Edda. They are called Norðri, Suðri, Austri, and Vestri. North, South, East, and West. They stand, the sources say, at the four corners of the sky, one at each corner, holding up the great curve of the dome forever. They are, in this reading, the first laborers in the cosmos — and the most patient. They have been at their work since the very beginning, and they will be at their work until the end. Each carries one corner. None of them, the sources tell us, ever sets it down.

The brains of Ymir, the sources say, became the clouds.

This detail is, in some ways, the strangest. It has, I think, more poetry than logic in it. The clouds as the brains of a body — drifting, soft, gray and white, gathering and dispersing across the sky. There is something almost humorous about the image, and yet something almost devastating about it. The Norse seem to have wanted, in this final detail, to suggest that even the thinking of the first being — even his mind — had been given over to the world. The clouds drift. The mind drifts. The body had become the world, and the mind had become the things that drift across the world.

There is one more transformation, and I want to give it to you because it is among my favorites.

The eyebrows of Ymir, the sources tell us, became the wall around Miðgarðr.

Miðgarðr — the Middle Enclosure, the realm where humans would, in time, come to live — was, in the Norse imagination, a kind of fortified middle ring of the world. A safe place. A bounded place. And the wall that surrounded it, that kept out the giants and the trolls and the older creatures of the outer dark, was, in this reading, made from the eyebrows of the first being.

I cannot fully explain why I love this detail. I think it has something to do with the smallness of eyebrows in the context of a body, and the importance of the wall in the context of a world. A small thing, in the body, became a large thing, in the cosmos. As if every part of Ymir, even the smallest and most ordinary, had a role in the world to come.

And there is one more detail, before we close this chapter. The Vǫluspá tells us that the gods, in the course of making the world, took sparks from Múspellsheimr — the realm of fire we visited two chapters ago — and used them to make the stars. The sun. The moon. The points of light in the dome of the sky.

The fire-realm, in this reading, gave the cosmos its lights. The frost-realm gave it its first being. And the body of the first being gave it everything else.

The world, after this great work, was no longer a void. It was a world. There was earth, and there was sea. There were mountains, and there were trees. There was a sky, and there were stars. There was a wall around the middle of it all, where humans had not yet appeared but would soon. There was a dome held up by four patient dwarves.

It was not yet finished. There was no Yggdrasill yet — no great tree at the center. There were no nine worlds yet, as we now know them. There were no gods other than the three brothers, and there were no humans, and there were no elves, and there were no dwarves other than the four corner-dwarves and a few others who had begun to appear from the maggots that crawled in Ymir's flesh — a detail I have left out only because it is, even by Norse standards, a little strange, and because we will get to the dwarves properly in a later chapter.

But there was a world. There was, for the first time, something to stand on.

The making of the world was, in some sense, finished. The shaping of the worlds — the nine of them, with the great tree at their center — was about to begin.

That is the next chapter. For tonight, sleep, if you can. The void is gone. The world has been made. Whatever else comes, from here forward, will be built on top of what was raised tonight.

The wind, of course, is still moving. It is now moving across the new earth. It is now lifting through the new trees. It is now pulling at the edges of the new clouds. It has, perhaps, more to do. But it does not seem to be in a hurry.

Chapter Seven. Yggdrasill, the World-tree.

There is a tree now. Or, at least, the sources tell us that there came to be a tree, somewhere in the long age after the world had been made and before the first humans walked on it. The Norse did not, as far as I can tell, ever describe the moment of the tree's appearance. There is no scene of planting. There is no description of a seed. The tree, in the surviving poetry, simply is — as if it had been there all along, or as if it had grown so slowly and so quietly that no one noticed until it was already touching the sky.

Its name was Yggdrasill. We met the name in the first chapter — Yggr's horse, Odin's horse, the tree on which the High One would one day hang. But tonight I want to spend time not with the future of the tree, but with the tree itself. As an image. As a presence.

Yggdrasill was, in the Norse imagination, an ash. The Old Norse word askr — which gives us the English word ash, the tree species — is used in the sources. Some scholars have argued that it might originally have been a different kind of tree, perhaps a yew, given certain ambiguous references; but the dominant tradition gives us an ash. A great ash tree, growing somewhere in the center of the cosmos, with its roots going downward and its branches going upward, holding the worlds in its great architecture.

The sources tell us that Yggdrasill had three roots. Only three. This is one of the details on which all the Norse sources seem to agree.

Where the three roots went is, however, a matter of some disagreement.

The Prose Edda, written by Snorri, tells us that one root went down to Asgard, where the gods lived; one root went down to Jǫtunheimr, where the giants lived; and one root went down to Niflheimr, the old frost-realm we visited many chapters ago. The Poetic Edda — specifically the poem Grímnismál — gives us a slightly different account. It says one root goes to the world of men, one root goes to the giants, and one root goes to Hel, the realm of the dead. The two accounts are similar but not identical, and most scholars now believe that the older poetic version is closer to the original tradition. Snorri, in his usual way, was probably reconciling several variant accounts into a single tidy diagram.

The almanac will tell you both. Where the sources disagree, the almanac will not pretend otherwise.

What is consistent across both accounts is that the roots of Yggdrasill go down into very different places. One root reaches into the realm of the gods or the realm of men — depending on the source. One root reaches into the realm of the giants. And one root reaches into the deep cold places, where the dead and the older powers live. The tree connects the high realms and the low realms. It holds the cosmos together.

Now. The branches of Yggdrasill — what was happening up there, in the high air, where the leaves moved?

The sources tell us a great deal about this. More, in fact, than they tell us about the roots. Yggdrasill, in the Norse imagination, was alive in a particular and beautiful way. It had inhabitants. It had visitors. It had its own ongoing private cosmic drama.

At the very top of the tree — at the highest point, where the branches reached into the open air above the dome of the sky — there sat an eagle. The eagle was nameless in most of the sources. He was simply called the eagle. He sat in the topmost branches and looked out across the worlds.

Between the eyes of the eagle, the Grímnismál tells us, there sat a hawk. His name was Veðrfǫlnir, which translates loosely as the Storm-Pale. Why a hawk would sit between the eyes of an eagle, and what the hawk did up there, the sources do not explain. He is simply there. The almanac will not invent a reason for him.

Running up and down the trunk of Yggdrasill — moving constantly between the eagle at the top and the dragon at the bottom, which we will get to in a moment — was a squirrel. His name was Ratatoskr, which translates roughly as the Drill-Tooth, or in some readings the Bore-Tooth. The Old Norse name is faintly comic; ratatoskr sounds, even to a modern ear, like a small busy creature. And he was, by all accounts, a busy creature. He spent his days running up the trunk of the great tree, bringing messages — usually insulting messages — from the dragon at the roots to the eagle at the top. And then running back down, bringing the eagle's insults to the dragon. He was, in the Norse imagination, the gossip of the cosmos.

I find this detail wonderful. The great world-tree, holding all the realms together, holding the gods and the giants and the dead all in its branches and roots — and at its center, going about its work, a small chattering squirrel, carrying messages of mutual irritation between an eagle and a dragon who could not, by reason of their stations, speak to each other directly. The Norse imagination had room for the cosmic and the petty in equal measure.

In the middle branches of the tree, the sources tell us, there were four stags. Four red deer. They are named in the Grímnismál — and the names are worth giving you, because they are quite beautiful in Old Norse. They were called Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór. Their names, very roughly translated, mean something like the Sleeper, the Unconscious One, the Thundering-in-the-Ear, and the Thriving Slumber. They moved among the branches of the tree, eating the leaves, the bark, the new shoots. The dew that gathered in their antlers, the sources tell us, became — in some readings — the rivers of the world.

I will say that last detail again, because I think it is one of the most striking images in any mythology. The dew that gathered, on cold mornings, in the antlers of four deer eating leaves in the middle branches of a cosmic tree — that dew became, when it dripped to the ground, the rivers of the world. The rivers of the world, in this reading, were the slow morning shake-off of four sleeping deer in a tree.

Now. At the roots — at the very bottom of Yggdrasill, in the dark wet places where the great tree drove down into the older realms — there was a dragon. The Norse called him Níðhǫggr, which translates roughly as the Striker of Malice, or the Tearer in the Dark. He lay coiled around one of the roots of the tree, and he did, the sources tell us, three things. He gnawed. He waited. And he occasionally surfaced, into the upper world, to feed on the corpses of the wicked dead. He was not, like a dragon in a later European story, a hoarder of gold. He was, in the Norse imagination, simply a slow dark hunger at the base of the world.

Along with him, the sources tell us, there were many other serpents. They had names, in the Grímnismál — Góinn and Móinn (the sons of an older serpent called Grafvitnir), and Grábakr, and Grafvölluðr, and Ófnir, and Sváfnir — and they gnawed at the roots alongside Níðhǫggr. The great tree, in the Norse imagination, was constantly being eaten from below. The leaves were constantly being eaten from the middle, by the four stags. The bark was constantly being scarred, in the higher branches, by Ratatoskr's claws.

And yet the tree stood.

The Norse poets do not tell us, exactly, why the tree did not die. The sources say only that the Norns — three women who lived at one of the roots, whom we will meet properly in two chapters — tended the tree. They drew water from the well at its root. They poured the water back onto the bark. They kept the tree alive against all the small daily destructions of squirrel and stag and dragon and serpent.

This image — of a tree being slowly, patiently, ceaselessly destroyed, and slowly, patiently, ceaselessly mended — is, in some readings of Norse mythology, the deepest image the tradition has. It is the image of the cosmos itself. Always being unmade. Always being remade. Held together, in the end, by the patient daily work of beings whose names we have nearly lost.

The tree holds the worlds. The worlds hang in the tree. And in the next chapter, we will walk through each of them, slowly, by name.

Sleep, if you can. The picture is now complete. The world has been made. The tree has been raised. The squirrel is still running up and down. The stags are still eating. The dragon is still gnawing. The Norns, whom we have not met yet, are still pouring water. And the wind is still moving, through the leaves, in a sound that has been going for so long, by now, that it has nearly become the sound of the universe itself.

Chapter Eight. The Nine Worlds Named.

We have come, in the slow course of this episode, to the heart of what its title promised. The Nine Worlds.

I want to be honest with you, before we name them, about a problem in the sources. The Norse sources are unanimous that there were nine worlds. The number nine recurs all through Norse mythology — Odin hung on the tree for nine nights, Heimdallr was said to have nine mothers, the messenger god Hermóðr would later ride for nine nights through dark valleys to reach the realm of the dead — and the number had, for the Norse, a kind of cosmic importance that scholars have spent two centuries trying to fully account for. So we can be quite sure that there were nine worlds. The Vǫluspá says so explicitly. The wise woman who speaks the poem remembers, she says, nine worlds.

What the sources do not give us, anywhere, is a clean numbered list of those nine worlds.

This is the problem. We have, scattered across the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda and several other sources, references to a great many worlds. We have Ásgarðr and Vanaheimr and Álfheimr and Miðgarðr and Jǫtunheimr and Niflheimr and Múspellsheimr and Svartálfaheimr and Niðavellir and Hel. That is ten names, at least. And depending on how you count, you could find one or two more in passing references.

So which nine make the canonical list?

The honest answer is that there is no canonical list. Different modern scholars have proposed different reconstructions. Most agree on the same seven or eight names; the disagreement comes around the edges. Was Svartálfaheimr the same place as Niðavellir, just under a different name? Were both real, and did the count include both? Was Hel a separate world, or was Hel merely a region of Niflheimr? On these questions, the medieval sources are silent or contradictory, and modern scholarship has had to guess.

What I will give you, tonight, is the list that most scholars now consider the most defensible reconstruction. It is not the only possible list. But it is the list that comes closest to what the surviving evidence suggests. I will walk through the nine slowly. One paragraph, more or less, per world. We will hear all of these again — in much greater detail — in later episodes of this season.

The first world is Ásgarðr. The realm of the Æsir gods. The high enclosure of the high ones. This is where Odin lives, in his great hall Valhǫll, and where his wife Frigg sits, and where Thor and Týr and Heimdall and most of the gods you have heard of make their home. Ásgarðr sits, in the Norse imagination, at the very top of the cosmos — usually pictured as a kind of high plateau or great floating realm, with golden halls and bright meadows and the high seat of the Allfather at its center. It was reached, from the world of men, by a single bridge of light. We will hear about the bridge in two chapters.

The second world is Vanaheimr. The realm of the Vanir. The Vanir were a second family of gods, older perhaps than the Æsir, or perhaps simply different from them. They were associated, in the Norse imagination, with fertility, with the seasons, with the slow growth of crops and the slow movement of animals. The Vanir included Njǫrðr, the god of the sea, and his children Freyr and Freyja, the great twin gods of love and harvest. The Vanir and the Æsir, the sources tell us, fought a great war in the very early days, and then made peace; afterwards, certain Vanir came to live in Ásgarðr, and certain Æsir went to live in Vanaheimr, as a kind of mutual hostage exchange. Most of the lore now positions Vanaheimr as a quieter, more agricultural, more pastoral realm than Ásgarðr — though the sources are spare, and we know less about it than we would like.

The third world is Álfheimr. The realm of the elves. The Old Norse álfar — which gives us our English word elf — referred to beings of light and grace, neither gods nor humans, who lived in their own separate realm. The Prose Edda specifies that Álfheimr was the home of the ljósálfar, the light elves — and goes on to imply, somewhat confusingly, that there were also dökkálfar, dark elves, who lived elsewhere. The light elves, Snorri says, were fairer than the sun to look upon. They lived their own lives in their own realm, and they appear only rarely in the surviving myths. We will return to them, in a later episode, but tonight only this: they were, in the Norse imagination, beings of a beauty that we cannot fully picture, and a realm of a brightness we cannot fully imagine.

The fourth world is Miðgarðr. The Middle Enclosure. The world of human beings — of you and me. This is where the wall of Ymir's eyebrows stands, holding off the wilder powers of the outer dark. This is where mortals plant their crops, raise their children, bury their dead. The Norse imagined Miðgarðr as a ring or a disk at the center of the cosmos — surrounded, in some accounts, by a great sea, and in that sea a great serpent called Jǫrmungandr, who lay coiled around the world with his tail in his mouth. We will meet the serpent properly in a later episode. For tonight, only this: Miðgarðr is the human realm, and it is the only one of the nine worlds where we can be quite sure that we have ever set foot.

The fifth world is Jǫtunheimr. The realm of the giants. The home of the jǫtnar — the older beings, who descended from Ymir's body and from Bergelmir's surviving line. Jǫtunheimr was, in the Norse imagination, a wild place. A place of high mountains, of deep cold forests, of long ravines and frozen rivers. The giants who lived there were not, on the whole, evil — though some were dangerous — but they were other. They belonged to an older order. They had been there before the gods came. And in the very last days of the world, as we will hear in due course, they would rise against the gods in a great final battle.

The sixth world is Niflheimr. The Mist-Home. The old frost-realm we visited many chapters ago, when we were still in the time before the world was made. Niflheimr is, in the surviving sources, the great cold pole of the cosmos. It is where the eleven rivers come from. It is where the dragon Níðhǫggr lies, gnawing at the root of Yggdrasill. It is, in some accounts, where the cold dead go — those who died of old age, of sickness, of any death that was not heroic.

The seventh world is Múspellsheimr. The Home of Fire. The other primal realm we visited long ago. Múspellsheimr is the hot pole of the cosmos. It is where Surtr, the dark sentinel, stands at the southern edge with his flaming sword. From Múspellsheimr come the sparks that became the stars. In the very last days of the world, the sources tell us, the armies of Múspellsheimr will ride out across the rainbow bridge, and the bridge itself will break beneath their weight.

The eighth world is Svartálfaheimr. The realm of the dark elves. Or, in some readings, the realm of the dwarves — the sources are unclear on whether the dark elves and the dwarves were the same beings under different names, or two different peoples sharing similar realms, or whether Svartálfaheimr and Niðavellir were two names for the same place. Most scholars now think there was a single underground or twilit realm where the smith-peoples lived — the dwarves who forged the great weapons of the gods, who made Thor's hammer and Odin's spear and the ship that could be folded up to fit in a pocket. They were craftsmen. They were patient. And they lived, in the Norse imagination, in long deep workshops where the forges never went out.

The ninth world, in most reconstructions, is Hel. The realm of the dead. Not, as in later medieval Christian imagination, a place of fire and punishment — that is a different idea, from a different tradition. The Norse Hel was a cold quiet country, a kind of long gray underworld, ruled by a goddess named Hel, who was the daughter of Loki. Most of the dead went there, eventually, to wait. There was no torment in Hel. There was simply, the sources suggest, a great quiet that went on and on. The heroes who died gloriously in battle did not go to Hel; they went, instead, to the high halls of Ásgarðr — Valhǫll, or Freyja's hall Fólkvangr. But for the ordinary dead, Hel waited.

That is the list, then. Ásgarðr. Vanaheimr. Álfheimr. Miðgarðr. Jǫtunheimr. Niflheimr. Múspellsheimr. Svartálfaheimr. Hel.

Nine worlds. Hanging in the branches and along the trunk and at the roots of the great tree. Each different. Each with its own peoples. Each, in some sense, its own private world.

The wind, by now, is moving through all of them. The wind has somehow always been moving. It does not require introduction.

In the next chapter, we will go down to the roots. We will look at the three wells beneath the great tree. We will meet the women who tend them. And we will, finally, find the place where fate itself is woven.

Sleep, if you can.

Chapter Nine. The Wells Beneath the Roots.

If you would like to know where fate itself comes from, in the Norse imagination, you have to go down. You have to leave the high branches, where the eagle sits, and the middle branches, where the stags eat, and you have to follow the slow downward run of the great tree to its base. You have to go past the trunk. You have to go past the visible roots. You have to go beneath, into the dark wet places where the tree drinks its water.

There you will find the wells.

There were three wells beneath Yggdrasill, the sources tell us. Three, the way there were three roots. The Prose Edda gives us a tidy account: one well beneath each root. The Poetic Edda is, again, less tidy — sometimes the wells overlap, sometimes the same body of water seems to wear two names. But on the number three, the sources agree. Three wells. One at each root.

The first well is called Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Urðr. The Well of Fate.

This is, perhaps, the most important place in all of Norse mythology that no one ever fully describes. The sources say it is a body of water. They say it is sacred. They say that the gods come to it, in the course of their long lives, to hold council together — the Æsir ride down from Ásgarðr, every day, in some accounts, to gather around the well and decide matters of importance. The water of Urðarbrunnr was, the sources say, so pure that anything which touched it became white. White as the inside of an eggshell. White as the membrane between yolk and white. White in a way that was not a color, exactly, but a kind of purity that had passed beyond color.

By this well lived three women. Three figures who, in many ways, are the most important figures in all of Norse cosmology — more important, even, than Odin, though Odin himself feared them. They were called the Nornir. In English, the Norns.

Their names, the sources tell us, were Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. The names themselves carry meaning. Urðr means what has been. Verðandi means what is becoming. Skuld means what must come. They were the past, the present, and the future. They were not goddesses, exactly — they did not live in Ásgarðr, they were not numbered among the Æsir or the Vanir. They were older. They were stranger. They had been there since the beginning, and they would be there at the end, and in between, they wove fate.

How they wove it, the sources tell us, varied. Some accounts speak of them carving runes on the trunk of Yggdrasill. Some accounts speak of them spinning a great thread, the way women in the longhouses of medieval Iceland would spin wool — measuring out a length of thread for each newborn child, and cutting it when the time came for that child to die. Some accounts speak of them simply tending the tree, pouring water from the well over its bark, packing white clay around its wounds, keeping the great cosmic ash alive against the slow gnawing of the serpents below.

All three accounts may be right. The Norns, in the Norse imagination, were never quite pinned down to a single image. They were what was, what is, and what must come. They were the weight of fate itself. And even the gods, the sources tell us, were subject to them.

That is a remarkable thing, and worth pausing over. In Norse mythology, the gods are not all-powerful. Odin himself does not know everything; he has to work hard, in many of the surviving stories, to learn even small pieces of what is to come. But the Norns know. The Norns have always known. They sit at the root of the tree, they pour their white water onto its bark, they keep their threads in order, and they know how everything will end.

This is the first well. Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Fate.

The second well is called Mímisbrunnr. The Well of Mímir. The Well of Wisdom — though it is also, in some readings, the Well of Memory. The Old Norse word mímir is etymologically related to the English word memory.

The sources tell us that this well lay beneath the root of Yggdrasill that reached into Jǫtunheimr, the realm of the giants. By the well lived a being called Mímir, who was sometimes counted among the giants, sometimes counted among an older order of beings, sometimes counted as something else entirely. He was, the sources are clear, very wise. The water of his well was wisdom itself, and Mímir drank from it daily, and he had been drinking from it since the beginning of things.

There is a story, which we will tell properly in a later episode, about how Odin came to this well. About what Odin gave, and what he received. The short version is that Odin wanted to drink from the well of wisdom, and Mímir would not let him drink without a price, and the price was an eye. Odin's eye. So Odin gave his eye. The Vǫluspá — the older of the two main sources — does not describe the moment in detail. It tells us only that Odin's eye lies, to this day, at the bottom of Mímir's well, given as a pledge for the wisdom he drank. The image of him physically plucking it out comes mostly through later tradition. What the older poetry tells us is simpler. The eye is in the well. The wisdom was bought.

We will return to this. For tonight, only this: there was a well of wisdom, beneath one of the roots of the great tree. A being named Mímir kept it. And the eye of the All-Father lay, the sources say, at the bottom of that well, and lies there still, looking up through the water at whoever might lean over to drink.

The third well is called Hvergelmir. The Roaring Cauldron. We have heard the name before — Hvergelmir was the spring at the heart of Niflheimr, in the old time, from which the eleven rivers flowed when the world was still being made. It was older than the tree. It was older than the gods. And when the tree finally raised itself over the cosmos, one of its three roots came down, the sources tell us, into the same dark cold water where Hvergelmir had always been.

By this well there lived no gentle being. No three women, no patient Mímir. By this well, instead, there coiled Níðhǫggr — the dragon we met two chapters ago, in our walk through the tree itself. He gnawed at the root of Yggdrasill that came down to Hvergelmir. He waited. The water around him, the sources say, was full of writhing serpents — the same serpents whose names were given in the Grímnismál, the slow tireless eaters of the deepest root. The water itself was said to be cold, and dark, and very old.

The three wells, in some readings, are three different faces of the same thing. The well of fate. The well of wisdom. The well of decay. What has been. What we have learned. What is slowly being lost. The Norse imagination put all three at the root of the same tree, and asked you to imagine that a tree that grew from such waters would be a tree of all of those things at once — a tree of fate, of memory, of slow ruin. A tree, in other words, exactly like the cosmos.

I find this image, more than almost any other in the Norse tradition, the one that lingers. The great tree. The three wells. The fates pouring white water on the bark. The eye in the dark. The dragon at the cold root. All of it underneath the worlds we live in. All of it slowly happening, every minute, even as we sleep.

Sleep, if you can. The wells are quiet down there. They have been quiet for a long time.

Chapter Ten. The Bridge of Burning Light.

There is one more piece to set in place, before we close the picture of the Norse cosmos. One more structure to name. We have the tree. We have the nine worlds. We have the three wells beneath the roots. What we do not yet have, in our picture, is the way between any of them.

How did the gods, who lived in Ásgarðr at the top of the tree, come down to Miðgarðr — to the world of men — when they wished to? They did not, in the Norse imagination, simply step down. The cosmos was not arranged so casually. The realms were genuinely separate, genuinely far apart, genuinely walled off from one another. To go between them, you needed a road. And the road, in this mythology, was a bridge.

The bridge had a name. The Norse called it Bifrǫst. In some older spellings, it appears as Bilrǫst — the spelling is debated, and most scholars now think the older form may have been Bilrǫst, with the more familiar Bifrǫst arising later. The name, in either spelling, translates roughly as the trembling road, or the swaying way. A road that was not entirely solid. A road that you could see, on a fair day, arching across the sky between worlds.

You may already have guessed what Bifrǫst was. The sources, when they describe it, describe a great arch of three colors in the sky. A great band of light, suspended between Miðgarðr and Ásgarðr, with the colors of a rainbow.

It was a rainbow.

The Norse imagined the rainbow — that occasional bright shimmering thing that appears in the sky after rain — as a bridge. A road. The visible track between the world of men and the world of the gods. When you stood, in medieval Norway or Iceland, in your wet farmer's field after a long shower, and saw a sudden arc of color over the mountains, you were looking, in the imagination of the people who told these stories, at the place where the gods walked when they came down. You were looking at infrastructure.

I find this beautiful, and a little funny, in equal measure. The Norse imagination took something we all know — a rainbow, the most ordinary heavenly sight, present in every sky on every continent — and made it the most important piece of architecture in the cosmos. Their bridge between worlds was not hidden. It was not secret. It was, in fact, the most visible thing in the sky after the sun and the moon. You could see it any time you were lucky with the rain.

The three colors of Bifrǫst, the sources tell us, had meaning. The red was fire — burning fire, the sources specifically say, the kind of fire that would consume any giant or troll who tried to climb the bridge from the lower worlds. The other two colors are less clearly identified in the sources — they may have been a kind of greenish blue and a kind of yellow gold, in some interpretations; the medieval Icelandic poets do not seem to have agreed exactly on what the rainbow's other bands were. But the fire was important. The bridge, the sources insist, was not just beautiful. It was a defense. The red band of fire was meant to burn anyone who attempted, in the slow age of the worlds, to march on Ásgarðr from below.

There was a guardian of the bridge. His name was Heimdallr. We will hear far more of him in later episodes, because Heimdallr is one of the strangest and most interesting of the Norse gods. For tonight, only this: he stood at the upper end of Bifrǫst, where the rainbow met the high walls of Ásgarðr, and he kept watch. He had, the sources tell us, extraordinary senses. He could hear, the Prose Edda says, the grass growing in the fields. He could hear the wool growing on a sheep's back. He could see for hundreds of miles in any direction, by day or by night. He needed no more sleep than a bird. He stood at his post, and he watched, and he watched, and he watched.

He watched, in particular, for the day when the giants would come. The day was prophesied. The day was, in some sense, certain. Heimdallr did not know when, exactly — even the gods, as we have said, did not know what the Norns knew — but he knew that one day, in the long fullness of time, the giants of Jǫtunheimr would rise. They would march toward Ásgarðr. They would attempt to cross Bifrǫst. And the bridge, the sources tell us, would not hold.

This is one of the most striking images in the entire Norse tradition. The bridge — the great burning road between worlds — was always meant to fail. It was never meant to last forever. It had been built to be beautiful, and to be defended, and to be, in the very end, broken under the weight of the armies who would come riding across it. The Norse poets seemed to find this neither tragic nor hopeful. It was simply how the cosmos was made. Some things hold for a long time, and then they do not. Even the rainbow.

When Heimdallr saw the giants coming, the sources tell us, he would blow his horn. The horn had a name. It was called Gjallarhorn — which means, roughly, the Yelling Horn, or the Loud Horn. He carried it at his belt. He had carried it for a very long time. He had never yet blown it. But he would, one day. And the sound of it would be so loud, the sources say, that it would be heard in every one of the nine worlds at once.

That sound — that long single blast — would be the beginning of the end. The Norse called the ending Ragnarǫk, the Fate of the Gods. We will tell that story properly in the last episode of this season. For tonight, only that the sound was waiting. The horn was at the watchman's hip. The bridge was still standing, burning at its midpoint, swaying in the wind between worlds.

I would like to leave the picture there, before we move on to a chapter of reflection. The bridge. The three colors. The fire in the middle band. The watchman at his post, on the high end, with his horn ready. The world of men below, going about its business, none of the men or women below ever quite realizing that the colors they sometimes saw in the wet sky were the same colors that had been there since the world began, holding the gods and the mortals apart and connected at once.

In some translations of the Vǫluspá, in the very last age of the world, the bridge is described breaking. Not in dramatic detail. Just a line. The bridge of the gods, the wise woman says, will fall. And after that, very quickly, everything else will fall too.

But for now — for now, in this chapter, in this episode — the bridge is still there. The watchman is still watching. The wind is still moving across the high arch of color. Nothing has yet given way.

The picture is nearly complete. There is one more chapter of reflection, and then a quiet closing. We are almost to the end of tonight.

Sleep, if you can. The bridge will hold for a long time yet.

Chapter Eleven. A Quiet Reflection on the Edda.

I would like, in this chapter, to step back from the story.

We have spent most of tonight inside the Norse cosmos — in the void, in the meeting of fire and frost, in the body of Ymir, in the slow construction of the world, in the high branches and deep roots of Yggdrasill, in the nine worlds named, in the three wells of fate, in the rainbow of Bifrǫst. We have moved, more or less, through the whole shape of the Norse imagination as it relates to the structure of things.

What I want to do now, before we say goodnight, is acknowledge something. The Norse cosmos that I have described tonight is, in some sense, my construction. And also Snorri Sturluson's construction. And also the unknown thirteenth-century scribe's construction, who first wrote down the Poetic Edda. And also the construction of the long lost generations of poets who memorized the stories in the centuries before that scribe ever lifted his pen.

What I mean is: the Norse cosmos as we now have it has passed through many hands.

Most of what we know comes, as I have said before, from two books. The Prose Edda was written by Snorri Sturluson — a man we know more about, by accident, than we know about almost any other figure in this story. Snorri lived from roughly 1179 to 1241, in Iceland. He was a wealthy chieftain. He was a politician. He was, in the very last years of his life, assassinated. The order came from the king of Norway, who had declared him a traitor for leaving the royal court without permission. The killing was carried out by men sent by Gizurr Þorvaldsson, an Icelandic chieftain who had once been Snorri's son-in-law, and who had since turned against him. They came in the night, on the twenty-third of September, twelve hundred and forty-one, to Snorri's house at Reykholt. Snorri heard them at the door. He fled, the chronicler tells us, down into his cellar. Five men followed him. His last words, the same chronicler records, were Eigi skal höggva — Do not strike. The man with the axe struck.

He was also a Christian. The Iceland in which he lived had officially converted from the old gods to Christianity in the year 1000 — more than a century and a half before he picked up his pen to write the Edda. By Snorri's day, the old religion was no longer practiced. The Norse gods were no longer worshipped. The stories were still told, in farms and in halls, but more as inheritance than as belief. Snorri wrote his Edda not because he believed in Odin or Thor, but because he wanted to preserve, for young Icelandic poets, the technical vocabulary of the old kennings — the elaborate metaphorical phrases that had been the bread and butter of Old Norse poetry for centuries. To use those metaphors, a young poet had to know who Odin was, and what he was famous for, and what kinds of phrases were associated with him. Snorri wrote the Edda as a manual.

That is, in some ways, the strangest fact about Norse mythology as we now know it. The most important single source we have for it was written by a Christian, as a poetry textbook, two centuries after the religion had died.

The Poetic Edda is, I should say, older — most of the poems in it appear to date from earlier, perhaps from as early as the ninth or tenth century, when the old religion was still being practiced. But we have those poems only in a single manuscript — the Codex Regius, which was copied down around 1270 by a scribe whose name we do not know. The manuscript was lost, for a while, after being copied. It was rediscovered, in 1643, by an Icelandic bishop named Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who found it in the personal collection of a country farmer who had it kept among other old papers in a chest. It was given, eventually, to the king of Denmark, and then — after centuries in Copenhagen, and after a long legal dispute that was finally settled by the Danish Supreme Court in March 1971 — it was returned to Iceland. It came home on the twenty-first of April, 1971, aboard a Danish naval vessel called the Vædderen. A crowd gathered at the harbor in Reykjavík to meet the ship. The manuscript came down the gangplank, in its small protective case, after more than three centuries away.

So our knowledge of Norse mythology depends, in a real way, on a few accidents of preservation. On a Christian writing in the thirteenth century. On an unknown scribe also writing in the thirteenth century. On a single farmer's chest, in seventeenth-century Iceland, which happened not to burn. On a Danish ship, in 1971, which crossed the North Atlantic in spring weather without incident.

I find this remarkable, and a little humbling. We talk about Norse mythology as though it were a tradition we have inherited intact. But what we have is a fragment. A handful of poems. A textbook by a Christian. A few names whose meanings we still argue about. Most of what was once known about these gods is gone. The longhouses in which the stories were first told are gone. The poets who first composed the kennings are gone. Even the runic memorials, scattered across Scandinavia, are mostly silent on cosmology — they tend to record names and short events, not stories.

What we do have, we have because someone cared enough to write it down.

I think about that, sometimes, when I sit with the old material. I think about how easy it would have been for all of it to vanish. How thin the chain of preservation is. How many ancient mythologies — peoples, languages, ways of understanding the world — have not, in fact, been preserved at all. The Norse story survives because of accidents. The Mayan creation story survives partly because of accidents. The Sumerian creation story survives partly because of accidents. Every old mythology we still have is, in some sense, a piece of luck.

I do not want to make this a sermon. But I do want, before we close this episode, to mark gratitude. Gratitude that someone, in the thirteenth century, in Iceland, took the trouble to copy down the Vǫluspá. Gratitude that the farmer, in the seventeenth century, did not throw out the chest. Gratitude that the airplane, in 1971, did not crash. Gratitude that the language survived. Gratitude that the names — Yggdrasill, Bifrǫst, Urðarbrunnr — still mean something, to anyone, in the year you are now listening to this.

The stories are an inheritance. They are not a perfect inheritance — they are partial, contested, sometimes contradictory. But they are an inheritance, and they have come through a long dark hallway of centuries to arrive in your room tonight, in whatever form they are arriving — in this voice, on this recording, drifting through the soft late-night air toward where you are lying.

Sleep, if you can. The chapter is almost done.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight, and the Beginning.

We have come, then, to the close.

I would like to return, at the very end, to where we began. To the cold northern shore. To the fjords and the high empty wind and the longhouses with their small warm windows lit against the dark. To the people, eleven hundred years ago, who imagined all of this — who first sat in their halls on long winter nights and told one another, in slow careful voice, about a void, about a giant, about a tree, about the nine worlds hung in its branches.

It has been a long episode. You have been very patient.

We have walked, tonight, through the beginning. We have seen the void. We have seen the meeting of fire and frost. We have seen Ymir, the first being, fed by the cow Auðumbla in the great quiet. We have seen the three brothers — Odin, Vili, Vé — and the slaying that made the world. We have walked through the parts of the body that became the parts of the world. We have stood at the trunk of Yggdrasill, where the squirrel runs up and down. We have named the nine worlds, and gone down to the three wells beneath them, and stood for a moment in the burning light of the bridge.

It is, in the Norse imagination, the picture of everything that is. A great tree. Nine worlds hanging in it. A burning bridge. Three wells of fate beneath the roots. A wind that has been moving since before the gods.

In two days' time, on Wednesday at eight in the evening Eastern, the next episode will appear in your feed. It is called Odin's Search for Wisdom. We will follow the All-Father — the highest of the gods, the wanderer, the giver of his own eye — through the long strange journey by which he came to know what the Norns knew. It is a darker story than tonight's. It has more action. But it is paced, as all the episodes will be paced, for sleep.

For now, however, you are here. In this room. In this night. With whatever else you carry into bed with you tonight — the worries, the small unresolved things, the day that has just ended. The almanac would like to offer, if it can, a small companionship. We have walked, tonight, through the entire shape of the Norse cosmos. We have visited the void. We have seen the world made. We have learned where the rivers come from, and what the dwarves are doing at the corners of the sky, and where the gods walk on rainy afternoons.

You can let all of it go now. The story has been told. The picture is complete. There is nothing left to follow.

Close your eyes, if they are not already closed. Let your shoulders settle. The wind, in the old poetry, is still moving — across the great tree, across the new earth, across the dome of the sky held up by four patient dwarves. It is moving now in the room around you, too. It has always been moving. It will go on moving long after this recording ends.

Until next time. Sleep well.

[End of script. Total approximate word count: 16,800 words ≈ 3 hours 45 minutes of narration at slow sleep pace.]

How to use this script

1. Open ElevenLabs Pro
2. Select your cloned voice
3. Set voice settings: Stability 65-75, Similarity 80, Style 5-15, Speed 0.9x
4. Paste one chapter at a time into the generation field (chapter breaks in this file are clearly marked)
5. Generate audio per chapter — produces ~12 MP3 files total
6. Save each as audio_ch00.mp3, audio_ch01.mp3, etc. in your project folder
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8. Apply slow Ken Burns to every still image
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