Jörmungandr

A reading notebook on Norse myth

This is a small personal notebook. I keep notes here while reading through the Norse material — mostly the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda, with occasional detours into later folklore and into how the same figures were retold in the nineteenth century.

Nothing here is scholarship. It is a place to put things I would otherwise forget: who is related to whom, which story appears in which source, and where the versions disagree with each other. They disagree quite often.

Recent notes

• The world serpent and the fishing trip — why Thor's encounter with Jörmungandr is told three different ways.
• What we actually have — a short list of the surviving texts and what each of them is.

The serpent is not a villain in the way a later story would need one. It is simply large, and it is in the way.