Encircling the inhabited world
Snorri makes Jörmungandr one of Loki and Angrboða’s three dangerous children. Odin throws the serpent into the surrounding sea, where it grows large enough to encircle the land and bite its own tail. This is a narrative description of cosmic scale, not a map coordinate or a natural-history identification.
The creature’s location makes Thor’s fishing expedition more than an unusually difficult catch. Pulling it up disturbs something associated with the world’s outer limit. Hymiskviða describes the resulting upheaval, while Gylfaginning dwells on the god’s and serpent’s terrifying exchange of looks.
Sources: The Poetic Edda (1923 translation); The Younger Edda / Prose Edda (1901 printing) · Hymiskviða 23–25; Gylfaginning, chapter IX, §34; chapter XIV, §49 in Anderson
Survival and the last fight
The fishing story’s ending is not uniform. Hymiskviða has the struck serpent sink; Snorri reports a version in which it was killed, but his narrator prefers its survival. That preference allows the later confrontation in which Thor kills it and is himself killed by its venom.
The name is often translated or paraphrased through the creature’s cosmic size, while Midgard-serpent describes its relationship to the human world. Neither label should hide the differences among episodes. A simple line marked “Thor kills serpent” needs a passage reference: it can mean the final battle, or a fishing outcome that the prose narrator specifically declines to endorse.
Sources: The Poetic Edda (1923 translation); The Younger Edda / Prose Edda (1901 printing) · Hymiskviða 24–26; Völuspá 55–56; Gylfaginning, chapters XIV and XVI, §§49, 56
- Period / witness
- Poetic Edda witnesses chiefly thirteenth century CE; Prose Edda composed c.1220 and preserved in later copies. Mythic events are undated.
- Recording context
- Medieval Icelandic textual preservation; the principal Poetic Edda manuscript, Codex Regius, dates to c.1270. Recording and copying locations do not establish the birthplace of a story.
A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.
Explore time & place →Read the sources
These references support the explanation above. Rights and edition notes are recorded individually.
The Poetic Edda (1923 translation) ↗
Anonymous Old Norse poets; translated by Henry Adams Bellows (1885–1939) · 1923 translation; medieval poems preserved principally in manuscripts of the thirteenth century
Edition & rights noteThe Younger Edda / Prose Edda (1901 printing) ↗
Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241); translated by Rasmus B. Anderson (1846–1936) · 1901 printing of Anderson’s translation (copyright 1879); medieval work composed in Iceland around the 1220s
Edition & rights note