Nine Realmsᛟ

The nine realms are the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, all bound to the branches and roots of Yggdrasil: Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Midgard, Jotunheim, Muspelheim, Niflheim, Svartalfheim, and Helheim. Together they hold gods, humans, giants, elves, dwarves, and the dead.

The count comes chiefly from the second stanza of Voluspa, in which a seeress says she remembers nine worlds and nine giantesses beneath the earth, before the world's beginning. The Prose Edda draws on this and other poems to fill in most of the nine by name.

The medieval sources treat them as real locations reached by real journeys, along Bifrost or through Yggdrasil's roots, yet each realm also carries a plain symbolic role: fire and ice as origin, Midgard as the human middle, Helheim as the cold country of the ordinary dead.

Broadly, the sources set Asgard, Vanaheim, and Alfheim in the upper world, Midgard and Jotunheim at the middle, and Muspelheim, Niflheim, Svartalfheim, and Helheim in the lower reaches near Yggdrasil's three roots, though the poems are not perfectly systematic about it.

No. [Valhalla](/blog/cosmology/valhalla/) is Odin's hall within Asgard, not a realm of its own, and it is not counted among the nine. The same goes for Ginnungagap, the void that came before any of the nine realms existed.

Start with [Yggdrasil](/blog/cosmology/yggdrasil/), the tree that holds every realm together, then move outward to [Asgard](/blog/cosmology/asgard/) and [Midgard](/blog/cosmology/midgard/), the two realms most gods and readers begin with, before working toward the realms of fire, ice, and the dead.

Voluspa describes Ragnarok as the moment nearly every realm is touched by war and ruin: Bifrost breaks, fire spreads from Muspelheim, the sea rises over the land, and most of the gods and monsters die in single combats. Afterward a new, green world rises from the water to be resettled.