Jörð

Summary

Jörð is the Earth in the Scandinavian myths. Her name is the ordinary word for earth in their language, used of the world people live in, of the ground underfoot, and of an estate a man owns. In the stories she is a woman, the wife of Odin and mother of his son Thor. Snorri says in Gylfaginning that Odin is called Allfather because he is father of the gods, of men and of all that was accomplished by his power, and then: "Earth was his daughter and his wife. By her he had the first son, that is Ása-Þórr; strength and might went with him, and thereby he overcomes all living creatures." Gylfaginning 9; Cleasby–Vigfusson, jörð.

In the next chapter Snorri gives her parentage. A giant called Nörfi lived in the land of the giants; he had a daughter called Nótt, Night, black and dark as her race. She was married first to a man called Naglfari and bore him Auðr; next to one called Ánarr, and their daughter was Jörð; last Dellingr, who was of the Æsir, had her, and their son was Dagr, Day, bright and fair after his father. Allfather took Night and her son Day, gave them two horses and two chariots, and sent them up into the sky to ride around the earth each day and night. So Jörð is Day's half-sister by their mother, and her mother's father is a giant.

The poems give her other names and mostly mention her in her son's lineage. In Völuspá Thor kills the world-serpent, walks nine paces and falls, and the poem calls him in that same stanza "offspring of Hlóðyn" and "Fjörgyn's son". In Hárbarðsljóð Hárbarðr tells Thor that if he keeps to the left-hand way his mother Fjörgyn will meet him and show him the kinsmen's roads to Odin's lands. Loki calls him "son of Jörð" in Lokasenna as he enters the hall, and so does Þrymskviða when he wakes and misses his hammer.

The idea her stories turn on is that the earth is a thing and a woman at the same time. She is the earth Borr's sons made from the flesh of Ymir, the daughter Night bore, and the wife who bore Odin the strongest of his sons. The poets gather all of this into one line when they name the earth, as Snorri records in Skáldskaparmál: Ymir's flesh, mother of Thor, daughter of Ónarr, bride of Odin, co-wife of Frigg, Rindr and Gunnlöð, mother-in-law of Sif, floor and bottom of the hall of the winds, sea of the beasts, daughter of Night, sister of Auðr and Day. So Thor, enemy of the giants, is the son of an earth made from a giant's body, and his grandmother Night is a giant's daughter. Neither poem nor prose tells a story in which Jörð does anything: she stays present in her son's name.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Jǫrð has no ending to remove: the ð belongs to the word and stays in the genitive jarðar. The j and the rounded vowel at its start grew in Norse out of an older vowel, as its sister words show: Gothic airþa, Old English eorþe, Old High German erda. So the old letters are a vowel, r, and th. The project's Norse essay puts this very word in its table of words it traces to a common origin: English earth and Arabic arḍ. In Lane, al-arḍ is "that whereon are mankind", feminine, and aruḍat al-arḍ is said when "the land became thriving, or productive". The correspondence is regular: the glottal stop becomes a vowel, r is r, and ḍ answers th. So Jörð is the earth in sound, sense and gender, which is what the story makes her: the earth itself, named Ymir's flesh, bearing Odin his son.

Linguistic Root

Jörð and arḍ

Cleasby–Vigfusson gives jörð first as the earth as a whole, citing the Völuspá line "earth and the sky above"; then notes that "as a mythical goddess, the Earth was daughter of Ónar and Nótt (the night), and sister of Day on the mother's side", and that "Thor was the Earth's son"; then the surface of the earth, the ground; then "land, an estate, very freq. in Icel." Orel gives the Germanic word as *erþō, with Gothic airþa, Old English eorþe and Old High German erda. Faulkes's index makes Jörð daughter of Night in one place and mother of Thor in another, and says Fjörgyn is a name for Thor's mother in Hárbarðsljóð and Völuspá and a word for earth in skaldic verse.

Lane, under ʾ-r-ḍ: al-arḍ is "that whereon are mankind", earth as opposed to heaven, and "it is fem."; aruḍat al-arḍ, "the land became thriving, or productive", and arḍ arīḍa, land that is fruitful and of good growth. Brown–Driver–Briggs gives Hebrew ʾereṣ, "earth, land", mostly feminine as well, beside Phoenician, Moabite, Assyrian irṣitu, Arabic arḍ and Aramaic ʾăraʿ.

The ḍ of this word shows a different face in each branch of the tongue: ṣ in Hebrew and Akkadian, ʿ in Aramaic, and ḍ in Arabic alone. The project's table of sound laws sets Semitic arḍ beside earth and Erde, with the glottal stop dropping and ṣ becoming th. So the Germanic th is one more face of a letter that does not keep a single form even among Arabic's sisters.

Key Mythic Narratives

The earth as the ruler's bride

In court poetry, taking a land becomes a marriage to Jörð. Snorri quotes verses of Hallfreðr in Skáldskaparmál: the king's wise confidant came to possess "Ónarr's only daughter, grown with trees", and the warrior drew to himself "the broad-faced bride of Báleygr", Odin, with the mighty speech of swords. The land a prince conquers is, in these verses, a woman he takes, and she is the same woman who is Odin's wife in the myth.

Two fathers

Snorri does not reconcile his two statements. In chapter 9 the earth is Odin's daughter and wife, since he is father of all; in chapter 10 she is the daughter of Night and Ánarr. Faulkes notes that the manuscripts give the name as Annarr, Ánarr or Ónarr, and that it was probably heard as the ordinal annarr, "second", since he was Night's second husband.

Fjörgynn and Fjörgyn

Snorri says that Odin's wife Frigg is the daughter of Fjörgynn, a masculine name. Faulkes thinks he took this from Lokasenna 26, where Loki calls Frigg Fjörgyns mær, and mær there may mean wife rather than daughter, so that Fjörgynn would be a name of Odin himself. In the feminine, Fjörgyn is a name for Thor's mother. So the two co-wives, Frigg and Jörð, are joined in the poems by one name in its two genders.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse rereading essay reads the making of the earth from Ymir's flesh as a description of northern geography: the flesh is the soil, the bones the mountains, the blood the seas and rivers, and the Scandinavian, it says, explains his land by likening it to a giant's body. The poets go one step further in Jörð's names: the earth made from the body becomes a woman who marries and bears children, and taking a land becomes a marriage to her. What the texts themselves show is that the earth is named in Thor's lineage more often than in any story.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Gaia in Hesiod is the Earth and mother of most of the first gods; she bore the Sky, Ouranos, and then bore children to him, so that like Jörð she is earth and mother at once. But Gaia plans and speaks, makes the sickle for her son, hides Zeus and counsels the gods, while Jörð does nothing in any story. In Sumer Ki is the Earth and in some genealogies the female counterpart of An, heaven, from whom she is then separated. In Egypt the earth is male, Geb, and the sky female, Nut; the North, Greece and Sumer make the earth a woman, and Egypt does not.

Making the earth Ymir's flesh places her in the cosmic-body pattern, and her marriage to Odin, with the land becoming a prince's bride in the poems, places her in the sacred marriage.