Legends Summarized: The Nine(?) Realms

Pst! If you liked the realm illustrations in this video, some of them are available as posters on crowdmade.com/osp ! ❤ -R

While not a scholar, I did grow up with tales of the nine realms, and some of these question-marks clear up at least a bit when you have some linguistic and cultural context for them. For starters, the norse terms for 'realm', 'city' or 'region' are all used rather interchangably, making it hard to tell which is what, so you're basically supposed to just 'get it' from context - 'heim' ultimately just translates as 'home', which makes sense since it's an english word with norse roots... hence why it can refer to anything from a single house and up to an entire world. A second, more specific detail is that the norse word for 'through' doesn't imply that you came out the other side, just that you're at least somewhere in the middle. That's only relevant to ONE place, but every little bit helps. So, clearing up a couple of things: Niflheim, Helheim and Niflhel are almost certainly all the same place, with the two later monikers becoming relevant after Hel turned Niflheim into her new home, and by extension made it into the Underworld. The bit about her having dominion over nine realms just means that her reach extends beyond her new home, to ALL of the nine realms - after all, even the Gods aren't beyond the reach of death, as Baldr found out the hard way. 'Utgard', meanwhile, is almost certainly a location within Jotunheim, specifically the city/fortress of Utgards-Loki... in other words, 'Loki of Utgard', to distinguish him from Loki of Asgard. Guess it was a popular name among the Jotnar! Now, this one is a bit more vague, but my understanding has always been that the Ljosalfar/Svartalfar divide was of the same nature as in Celtic myths - as in, the Summer and Winter Fae. As the bit about Glæsisvellir illustrates, there was a certain amount of cross-pollination happening between the Norse and the Celts back then. As such, rather than referring to specific creatures, the 'elves' were basically all manner of fey creatures, of which Norse myths contain MANY - and they are sorted into two different classes based on whether they're beautiful and like taking in the rays, or ugly and prefer to hide from the sun. Both kinds, crucially, could be equally dangerous to humans - just because some of them are PRETTY, doesn't mean that they're NICE. Dwarves would generally be sorted into the later category - which, again, doesn't mean that they're evil or dangerous, but just that they prefer to dwell underground. This suggests that Nidavellir was the dwarven city/settlement within Svartalfheim, which indeed seems to have been some kind of subterranean world of caves and tunnels. However, it's also quite clear that the elves weren't constrained to these realms, and roamed out beyond them, even making settlements or colonies elsewhere. This, likely, is why one of the Eddas suggests that Alfheim and Svartalfheim are in Asgard - it just means that there are enclaves of both kinds of elves living within Asgard's territory. This is backed up by at least a couple of myths that implied that the Aesir had Dwarven smiths living and working quite close to home, hence why Freya could just stumble on a bunch of them finishing up the Brissingamen while taking a stroll somewhere near her hall. Meanwhile, quite a few of the 'maybe realms' were likely just references to liminal spaces outside the borders of the established realms - stuff like the Well of Urd and the Well of Mimir, and the place where Nidhogg dwells, are mystical locations that people always journey to, or actively try to avoid. Located, presumably, somewhere among the roots of Yggdrasil... again, remember that these Realms aren't just floating in space, they're located on, in or around Yggdrasil, the World-Tree, so there's plenty of extra tree to go around. Honestly, a lot of the confusion just comes from the fact that the norse didn't really use names for places - just *descriptions*. Like, I'm from Denmark - a country literally just named 'The field where Danes live'. The 'names' we're trying to attach to the Nine Realms are just descriptions, like "The really hot place" or "The cold place with all the dead people" or "Where the not-so-pretty fairies live". And of course, any realm can be more than one thing...

“The psychology of ‘I fits, I sits’” you succinctly summarized the phenomenon I’ve been trying to verbally express for years in the funniest way possible thank you

I personally love the idea of some guy in a Norse-Mythology-inspired fantasy novel being like "okay, here's a list of the Nine Realms" and then rattling off like 28 realms

This reminds me of how there was at one point a dictionary with the entry "Horse: everyone knows what a horse is" if horses had gone extinct I'm sure this would drive a few researchers insane in much the same way. Also, it made my day seeing Miracle of Sound used for the credits song.

I'm guessing Hel's "power over nine worlds" refers to her domain over the dead. If she can claim the souls of every being in all nine realms, she kind of has power over all of them.

The idea of 9 just representing "a lot" seems fairly plausible to me. As a Christian, 40 pops up on a regular basis in the Bible: the Jews wandered for 40 years, Christ fasted for 40 days, etc. At this point, I've come to take it to mean "a long time." And there's nothing wrong with that. We similarly use "a million" in modern society to the same effect.

Imagine if in a millennium from now, people just see all of our text referring to a "dozen" and take it as literally twelve. That would be hilarious.

18:18 Idea: Everyone wants to go to Valhalla when they die, but that's because no one knows about the rocking undersea rager you get to go to if you drown. The ocean god's wife was in charge of inviting people, but she's really socially awkward, so her strategy is "grab anyone that passes by and drag them to the party".

I actually really like the idea Niflheim was just an endless world of primordial cold, but turned into a Land of the dead following Hel “gaining power over it.”

The claim of Hel becoming the "ruler of nine worlds" after being cast into Niflheim strikes me as poetic language that as the ruler of the dead, her shadow hangs over all of those living in the Nine Realms. Think of it like how everyone is destined to become a subject of Hades in Greek myth.

“If the information is gone, it’s gone” man that line hits hard, especially in our day and age of information never disappearing thanks to the internet. So the idea of entire parts of culture, religion, and history just disappearing beyond our reach, lost from our collective consciousness forever, is deeply disturbing to me.

Honestly, "nine doesn't mean 9, it means lots" is probably the most satisfying answer possible for "what are the nine realms" outside of a fully enumerated list. As you said, people like rules, and that's a nice and succinct rule that explains all the evidence. As a tangent, this video reminded me that there are a lot of weird parallels between Norse and Mesoamerican mythologies. In both the world was created from the corpse of a primordial monster (Ymir and Tlaltecuhtli), both commonly frame the world as a tree, both have chief gods of magic and kingship who are untrustworthy tricksters who famously sacrificed a body part (Tezcatlipoca and Odin, I weirded out my Norse mythology professor by pointing that one out), in both the dead are divvied up amongst the gods based on how they died, especially drowning and warfare. I have no idea why there are these parallels, whether it's coincidence or reflective of some deep-history common human mythology or if Norse invaders/traders picked it up from the West like they also did Celtic fairy lands, or what, as I said it's weird, even weirder than the parallels Mesoamerica has with Sino-Asia (e.g.: seeing a rabbit in the moon, dragon-serpents associated with water) because that at least lines up with reasonably attested migration patterns. I always love these videos.

"Darling, How many daughters do we have?" "ENOUGH." That's both hilarious and adorable thanks to the art of our happy couple and their kids.

Can we just- take a moment to appreciate how good Red’s art has gotten? I’m both listening to her talk about the Nine Realms and going ‘oooo’ at the pretty backgrounds.

I think the “dominion over 9 realms” thing may be that she has power over the dead and everything can die so she has the potential to have power over everything

So as a wee lass living in Norway, I was actually taught of only three realms, and the nine realms felt like a total invention when I first heard of them. I was told the norse world was shaped like a flat disc, with each realm arranged like circles in a tree; In the center of the tree you had Asgard, along the bark you have Utgard, and between them is Midgard

The more I follow this channel the more I realize the study of cultures and mythology is less a bunch of wise old men getting together for tea on Sundays to discuss their findings, and more a never ending drunken fist fight where everyone is trying to murder each other because they cited a source they don't like.

"And if you think ANY of that was a pre-Christian concept, I got a Bifrost to sell ya." Damn I love this channel.

You're right. Humans really do LOVE to classify, organise, and label things. I think it's a kind of satisfaction we get from creating order from chaos because we are so hyper-optimised for pattern matching that we can find patterns even in things that aren't, like recognising a sequence of prime numbers or the entire phenomenon of pareidolia.