Yggdrasil · Humankind
Midgard (Miðgarðr)
The world of humankind, the “middle enclosure”.
In Thorpe’s translation
41. And of his brows the gentle powers formed Midgard for the sons of men; but of his brain the heavy clouds are all created.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Grímnismál, stanza 41 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
What the sources say
Miðgarðr is the world where people live. Grímnismál says the gods made it from the brows of the giant Ymir, and Gylfaginning says the same: with Ymir’s eyebrows the gods built Miðgarðr for the sons of men. In Gylfaginning the serpent Jörmungandr, Loki’s child, is thrown into the deep sea that surrounds the earth, grows until he circles it, and bites his own tail.
The name is often rendered “middle enclosure”.
- Grímnismál (Poetic Edda), stanza 41 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ)
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the creation passage and the passage on Loki’s children
Names and background
The word is a compound of middle and enclosure, reconstructed in Common Germanic and found in several languages: Old Norse Miðgarðr, Gothic midjungards, Old Saxon middilgard, Old High German mittilagart and Old English middangeard. Outside Norse myth it simply means the inhabited world. In the Norse sources, by contrast, Miðgarðr is the defended enclosure of humankind, while another term, Manheimr, home of men, names the human world as a whole.
The gods are said to have raised it from the giant Ymir's eyebrows as a wall against the giants, and at Ragnarök it is destroyed and later rises green again.
- Wikipedia contributors, Midgard (opens in a new tab)
Evidence beyond the Eddas
The word is older and wider than the Eddas. The Fyrby runestone (Sö 56, Södermanland, Sweden, Viking Age) uses it of the world of men, naming the brothers as the most rune-skilled in Midgard. The Gothic Bible renders the Greek oikoumenē with midjungards, and the 9th-century Old High German Muspilli uses mittilagart for the world, in a passage where it burns. The Old Saxon Heliand and Old English Beowulf also use their forms.
- Wikipedia contributors, Midgard (opens in a new tab)
Later reception
The Old English form middangeard lies behind J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Wikipedia’s article also warns against confusing the name with Midgar, the city in Final Fantasy VII.