Jörmungandr

Somewhere out past the last shore, under the whole weight of the sea, lies a serpent so large that it wraps around the entire world and holds its own tail in its mouth. This is Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, and the day it lets the world out of its coils is the day the world ends. It was not always so big. Odin threw it into the ocean as one of three dangerous children, and it never stopped growing.

The cast-out child

Jörmungandr is the middle of the three monsters that the trickster Loki fathered on the giantess Angrboða. Its brother is the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods bound, and its sister is Hel, who was given the realm of the dead. The gods dealt with each of the three in turn, and for the serpent Odin chose the sea. He cast it into the deep water that lies around all lands, hoping to be rid of it. Instead it grew, and grew, until it ringed the whole of Midgard, the world of people, and could bite down on its own tail and close the circle. Later readers have looked at that image and called it an ouroboros, the snake that swallows itself, though the word and the idea come from outside the Norse world. In the Eddas it is something simpler and larger: the boundary of the world made flesh, a living wall of serpent holding the sea in.

Thor’s three meetings

The serpent and the thunder-god Thor are set against each other, and the myths bring them together three times. The first is a fishing trip. Thor rows out with the giant Hymir, baits an enormous hook with the head of an ox, and drops it into the deep. The serpent takes the bait, the hook catches in its jaw, and Thor hauls it up hand over hand until the monster’s head breaks the surface and he lifts his hammer to strike. In Snorri’s telling the giant Hymir, frozen with terror at the sight, cuts Thor’s line, and the serpent sinks back into the sea. The older poem Hymiskviða leaves it less settled, with Thor’s blow landing on the serpent’s head and the outcome unresolved.

The second meeting is a trick, and neither knows it at the time. At the hall of the giant Útgarða-Loki, Thor is set a series of contests, and one of them is to lift a large grey cat off the floor. He strains with all his strength and manages to raise just one of the cat’s paws, which the giants treat as alarming rather than feeble. Afterward Útgarða-Loki admits why: the cat was the Midgard Serpent in disguise, and in lifting one paw Thor had pulled the world-serpent itself nearly out of the sea.

The end of both

The third meeting is the last, at Ragnarök. The serpent rises out of the ocean and comes onto the land, blowing venom until the sky and the sea are poisoned, and Thor goes to meet it. He kills it, striking it down with his hammer Mjölnir, the thing he has been trying to do since the fishing trip. But the serpent has already killed him back. Soaked in its venom, the thunder-god turns and takes nine paces away from the body of his enemy, and on the ninth step he falls dead. The two of them die together, and their mutual end is one of the rare events told in both the poem Völuspá and Snorri’s prose, the poems agreeing on the detail of the nine steps.

The popular saying that the world ends “when the serpent lets go of its tail” is a neat image, but it is later embellishment rather than anything the Eddas say. In the texts the serpent leaves the sea when the end comes.

Carved in stone

Of all the Norse myths, Thor’s fishing for the serpent was one that the Viking-age carvers loved most, which is how we know the story was alive long before anyone wrote the Eddas down. The scene appears on the Altuna runestone in Uppland in Sweden, where you can see Thor in the boat with his line and the ox-head bait and his foot driven through the hull as he braces against the pull. It is on the Ardre image stones on Gotland, on the Hørdum stone in Denmark, and on the Gosforth fishing-slab in Cumbria in northern England, where Norse settlers carved their own gods alongside Christian ones. The serpent that circles the world was being cut into rock from the Baltic to the edge of England, the same scene again and again: the god in the boat, the line going down, and the enormous coiled thing on the end of it.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• The Poetic Edda (Völuspá; Hymiskviða), trans. Henry Adams Bellows. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1936.
• Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda (Gylfaginning; Skáldskaparmál), trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916.