Across a consequential boundary
Jötunheim is a conventional English rendering of a name for the giants’ dwelling region. “Giant” itself is an imperfect shorthand for jötunn: the beings in these stories are not defined simply by exceptional height. They can be hosts, parents, rivals, possessors of precious things, and partners in bargains.
Thor travels to a giant’s household for the cauldron that makes the gods’ feast possible. Freyr’s desire reaches toward Gerðr through an embassy. Odin takes the mead from a guarded mountain. These crossings make the gods’ world dependent on encounters beyond its own enclosure.
Sources: The Poetic Edda (1923 translation); The Younger Edda / Prose Edda (1901 printing) · Hymiskviða 4–15; Skírnismál 10–39; Skáldskaparmál (Anderson’s “Brage’s Talk”), chapter IV, §§4–5 in Anderson
Kinship crosses the divide
The creation account gives Odin a giant ancestry through his mother Bestla, while Snorri locates Loki and Angrboða’s children in Jötunheim before the gods take them away. The divine and giant groups therefore cannot be represented as wholly separate biological species with no shared family history. Hostility does not cancel kinship.
Directions such as east occur in particular poems, but Jötunheim is not a modern state whose borders can be reconstructed from them. Here it is a narrative place. Iceland is a major location of the surviving record; it is not identified as the physical country through which Thor must have traveled.
Sources: The Poetic Edda (1923 translation); The Younger Edda / Prose Edda (1901 printing) · Hymiskviða 5–7; Gylfaginning, chapter IV, §6; chapter IX, §34 in Anderson
- 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