Niflheim

Niflheim, the "world of mist" or "world of fog", is the realm of ice, cold, and darkness in Norse cosmology, the frozen counterpart to the fiery Muspelheim, and one of the two elemental worlds that existed before the ordered cosmos. In the Eddic account of the beginning, Niflheim's freezing fogs filled the northern reaches, and where they met the sparks and heat of Muspelheim across the void of Ginnungagap, the ice thawed into the first life, the primordial giant Ymir and the cow Audhumla, so that the world is generated from the collision of the two extremes.

At its heart lies the spring Hvergelmir, the source of the cosmic rivers, from beneath one of the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, and the sources sometimes blur Niflheim with the realm of the dead (Niflhel, the misty Hel) in the cold depths below. Niflheim represents primal, undifferentiated cold and darkness, the negative pole of the Norse cosmos, present at the origin, out of whose meeting with its opposite all warmth, life, and order arose. It is the frozen matrix at the roots of the world.

The poems use Niflhel, misty Hel, for a place low down and cold. Snorri uses Niflheim and gives it a much larger role, placing it in the north of the void before creation and making it the source of the eleven rivers that flow from the spring Hvergelmir. Modern retellings follow Snorri, because he is the only source that offers a system, and the system is very likely his.

That is worth stating whenever this cosmology is described. The Prose Edda is a thirteenth century Icelandic handbook written to teach poets the old references, by a Christian, two centuries after the conversion, and it is organised, coherent and readable in a way the poems are not. Its coherence is an achievement of composition, not a report of a doctrine, and where it is neat the poems are usually not.

What survives of Niflheim outside Snorri is a direction and a quality: down, north, cold, wet, and where the dead who are not chosen end up. Nidhogg is at its root gnawing. The rivers run from it. It has no ruler of its own, no hall, and no incident attached to it, which is unusual in a corpus that is otherwise made almost entirely of incident.

Naming it is still worth doing. A cosmology needs a cold pole as much as it needs a hot one, and the account of creation from the meeting of ice and fire does not work without both. Niflheim is a structural requirement of the story rather than a location anybody expected to visit, which is a reasonable description of quite a few places in this catalogue.