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Chapter 6. The Sky 157
to the Gods or providing the Gods and Einherjar with sustenance which are too
numerous to be listed here, but Snorri describes many of them in the Gylfaginning.
It is also not clear where the Halls of the Giants and Giantesses of time such as
Delling (Dawn), Svásuðr(Father of Summer), Nótt (Giantess-Night), etc. live. All
the literature seems to indicate is that all these beings live outside the realm of the
living.
Over the centuries, scholars have attempted many different illustrations of what
the sky realm must look like, but all fall short. In Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe,
Davidson remarks that “those who have tried to produce a convincing diagram of
the Scandinavian cosmos from what we are told in the sources have only added to
the confusion .” Some have tried to assign the twelve Halls of the Gods as described
by Snorri to the twelve houses of the zodiac, and others have tried to actually
create a map of Asgard, but the depictions never really work out. According to the
descriptions in the eddaic and the sagaic literature, the high number of paradoxes,
which were acceptable to the ancient Germanic peoples, indicate that humans while
residing inside the physical limitations of their bodies were completely incapable of
understanding the make-up of either the sky realm or the Underworld, but that by
slipping outside their bodies either during sleep or during the soul-journey of the
noaide, the imagery of these realms became quite comprehensible. Pictures of such
a world can never be drawn, only experienced.
The Halls of the Gods seem to have been thought of as lying to the North or
the West in the general directions also reserved for the Hel-journey of souls. The
direction of East is where the giants lived, many of whom changed their allegiance
from Jötunheim, the Land of the Giants, to Ásaheim, the Land of the Gods. Thus,
in the “Gylfaginning” and in the “Ynglingasaga,” Snorri implies that the Æsir came
from east of the Don River (Danube) and that the original home of the Vanir was
around the mouth of the Danube which empties into the Black Sea. The original
city founded by and home to the Æsir, Asgard, lay to the east of the Vanir (185).
After a lengthy period of time, after the Great War between the Æsir and the Vanir,
there was an overall migration of the Gods to the North and West:
“And because Odhin [sic] had the gift of prophecy and was skilled in
magic, he knew that his offspring would inhabit the northern part of the
world. Then he set his brothers, Ve and Vili over Asgarth, but he himself and
all diar (chiefs), and many other people, departed. First, he journeyed west
to Garthariki Russia, and then south, to Saxland Northwestern Germany. He
had many sons. He took possession of lands far and wide in Saxland and set
his sons to defend these lands. Then he journeyed north to the sea and fixed
his abode on an island. That place is now called Othinsey Odhin’s Island,
on the island of Funen.” (186)