The Jotnar

Old Norse has several words in this area and uses them loosely: jotunn, thurs, risi and troll all appear, sometimes of the same figure in the same poem. Giant is the standard English rendering of the first and it imports a meaning the sources do not emphasise. Size is occasionally mentioned and is almost never what a story turns on.

Three things do the work instead. The first is age and priority: the jotnar were there before the gods, Ymir is the material the world is made from, and their claim on things is older. The second is knowledge. Odin's pursuit of wisdom takes him repeatedly to that side, to Mimir's well, where he leaves an eye, and to a riddle contest with Vafthrudnir that he wins only by asking a question nobody else could answer. The third is possession. The mead of poetry is held by Suttungr and has to be stolen. Idunn and her apples are taken and recovered. Thor's hammer is taken by Thrymr, who names a bride price. A cauldron large enough for the gods' ale is in Hymir's hall.

That last pattern is the most consistent thing about them. The gods want something, a jotunn already has it, and the gods obtain it by theft, disguise or force. Read without the assumption that one side is good, a large part of Norse myth is a record of the Aesir acquiring by trickery what the older family held.

The etymology of jotunn is generally connected with eating, which fits a class of beings characterised by appetite and by having what others want.

The genealogy makes a simple opposition impossible. Odin's mother Bestla is a jotunn, so the chief of the Aesir is half of that family himself. Loki, who lives among the gods and is counted with them, is the son of a jotunn father. Freyr sends a servant to win Gerd, a jotunn woman, and marries her. Skadi, whose father the gods have killed, arrives armed to demand compensation, and the settlement is that she may choose a husband from among them by looking only at their feet, plus the requirement that they make her laugh.

Against that, Thor is a specialist. His function in poem after poem is to go east and kill them, and the sources keep a running total in his own boasts.

At Ragnarok the jotnar come with the other forces arrayed against the gods, and one detail is worth keeping straight. Surtr and the sons of Muspell come from Muspellsheim, a realm of fire, which is not Jotunheim; Hrym leads a separate force by sea. The final battle gathers several distinct kinds of power that later summary tends to flatten into one enemy.

Modern scholarship is cautious about how much of the moral opposition is native and how much belongs to the recording. The Norse myths were written down in Christian Iceland by authors with a vocabulary of demons available to them, and the sharp division of gods against giants may be firmer on the page than it was in belief. What survives in the poems themselves is a rivalry between two related families over knowledge, marriage, property and precedence.