Muspelheim

Muspelheim is the realm of fire in Norse cosmology, one of the two primordial worlds present at the very beginning of things, and it plays a role at both the creation and the destruction of the cosmos. In the Eddic account of origins, before the gods and before the ordered worlds, there existed only the fiery, glowing region of Muspelheim in the south and the frozen, misty Niflheim in the north, separated by the yawning void of Ginnungagap. Where the heat of the one met the ice of the other, the ice melted and quickened into the first living being, the giant Ymir, from whose body the world would be made, so that all creation begins from the meeting of fire and cold.

Muspelheim is guarded at its border by the fire-giant Surtr, sword in hand, and it is home to the "sons of Muspell," fiery beings who play no part in the ordinary dealings of gods and men but are held in reserve for the end. At Ragnarok they will ride out, Bifrost will shatter beneath them, and Surtr will fling fire across the nine worlds and burn them. Muspelheim thus frames the Norse cosmos: the fire whose warmth helped kindle the first life is the same fire that is destined, at the last, to consume the world.

Muspelheim exists before anything else except its opposite. The account begins with Ginnungagap, the yawning void, with ice and mist to the north and fire to the south, and creation happens where the two meet and the ice begins to drip. Nothing made it and nobody rules it except Surtr, who stands at its border with a flaming sword and who will come at the end to burn the world.

The word itself is the puzzle. Muspell appears in Old High German and Old Saxon Christian poetry before it appears in Norse, in contexts about the end of the world by fire, and the ninth century German poem called Muspilli takes its modern name from the term. Whether Norse borrowed a Christian apocalyptic word for its own fire realm, or whether both drew on something older, is argued and unresolved. It is one of the clearest cases where the Norse material can be shown to be in contact with Christian writing rather than sealed off from it.

The structural point is that this cosmology is not a creation from nothing. It begins with a polarity and a gap, and everything else is what happens when the two sides touch. Fire is not evil in it. It is one of the two conditions the world requires, and it is also the condition that will end it.