Legends Summarized: The Nine(?) Realms
Vložit
- čas přidán 18. 05. 2023
- From the high halls of Asgard, we bring you NEW PINS! THOR & ODIN are here for a limited time at crowdmade.com/osp
Everyone's heard of the nine realms of Norse Mythology! Today let's talk about them in a nice youtube-friendly numbered list! Right? …Right?
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
PATREON: / osp
PODCAST: overlysarcasticpodcast.transi...
DISCORD: / discord
MERCH: overlysarcastic.shop/
OUR WEBSITE: www.OverlySarcasticProduction...
Find us on Twitter / ospyoutube
Find us on Reddit / osp
Want this video in another language? Check out our guide to contributing translated captions: www.overlysarcasticproduction...
Pst! If you liked the realm illustrations in this video, some of them are available as posters on crowdmade.com/osp !
❤ -R
Yoooooo, I just bought the Thor and Odin pins, defo gonna look at the posters too :3
I really hope Jackson Crawford made it here.
Red, why was the first 1 1/2 mins of this video nonsensical rambling about how categorization is bad?
Thanks for the info. Also I enjoyed the little bit of music at the end
Is it possible that the word "nine" is a mistranslation?
(huh, okay, you cover this later in the video.)
“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 feel like it’s almost a genetic thing. People like to think we’re above animal instincts but if you pay attention we’re not. Humans are social animals and even introverts like some degree of interaction with others. We’re very tribal even all this time later so is clinging to labels and groups just makes sense. As one CZcamsr comedically put it all of human conflict amounts to “ugh, you’re not me!”
It's just one human thing that you can't explain by yourself without a professional
you might want to look into "schema's" :)
That phrase could also be used in Egyptian mythology 😂 (Osiris and Set)
@@laneptrsn set making a coffin trap for osiris is a Greek invention iirc
"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.
Red truly has a knack for making the most insane and horrifying pairings in history absolutely adorable. I think my favorite is still that one picture of Typhon & Echidna.
*has a bunch of kids*
"I have 9 kids."
"We clearly see at least 15"
"Yeah, exactly. So, like, 9"
@@stuarthutzler6670 same
Also I love how, in one frame, she managed to give each daughter a unique feel and personality
Funfact, at least in old Türk cultures, When people no longer wanted another son/daughter/child they'd named their last born kid "Enough". Like if the couple wanted to have a son but they kept having daughters they would name their newborn daughter "Enough" so that they could finally get a son.
It is just so fucked up and hilarious to me haha...
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
when you've completed your worldbuilding but got a new great idea you just have to add.
Tale as old as time. You try to make a map of your world, a continent with countries, but you just HAVE to add more as the story grows. "Uhm... well, let's say this new part of the continent was hidden behind magic mist for a few millennia, and this one is actually underground!" I think all the Norse realms are supposed to be part of Earth (or above/below), but with extra steps where necessary. OR, this may have been the vision of later Christian scholars, since in their mythology it's very much the same.
@@vinx.9099 I feel very called out 😅
@@mind_crystals i called out myself all the same. best way i have of avoiding it is not even trying to complete the world. easier to do as i just do it for a dnd campaign.
It's the Ben10 effect
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.
The first Polish attempt at an encyclopedia has the phrase 'koń jaki jest każdy widzi' (lit. 'everyone sees for themselves what a horse is'). It's a meme to this day, thanks to history and Polish classed immortalising it as part of the curriculum.
until 5 minutes ago everyone knew what a woman is, how things change...
@@zuu.hed.2533Actually, the open-ended definition for a woman has always existed. There's numerous ancient cultures who understood that.
@@godofthecripples1237 I can't tell if I like your comment more than I like your username
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Both are great, just a by-product of being me 👉😎👉
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...
Very interesting.
Deeply underrated comment. Thank you for this write-up. I think that last bit is extremely important: we very badly want Proper Nouns to slap onto things, but that's not really what they were. Like, Midgard is just... the one in the middle. And differently, we like to think today of political boundaries that are hard and absolute, but the fact that there are land surveyors who walk around and keep track of those boundaries kinda puts a lie to that. They didn't do that back then! There's no Four Corners, USA where you can jump back and forth between Asgard and Alfheim and Svartflheim and whatever. You'd just walk for a while and it gets really chilly and someone decides you're in Jotunheim now.
Boosting this comment because it is super interesting and informative.
Excellent explanation 👍🏻👍🏻
This is a great attempt to make sense of things. Unfortunately, I have some bad news, and it is that I am the reason there is an "um, actually" joke in the script.
1) I'm generally with you that "given control over nine realms" is intended as "given command of death in all places." However, Vafþrúðnismál stanza 43 does refer to "níu ... heima fyr Niflhel neðan" [English: Nine worlds down beneath Niflhel]. Since Snorri definitely knew Vafþrúðnismál, it's possible that this line is referring to that stanza, and a SECOND set of Nine Realms that is otherwise unnamed and unknown. Also, y'know.... how does a generic "power over death" gel with Óðinn, Freyja, and Rán also selecting various sorts of dead people, including in poems like Sonatorrek where Egill Skallagrimsson says that his sons (who 1) died of illness and 2) drowned) traveled to Óðinn's hall, but Hel stands on the headland waiting for the suicidal Egill......
Basically, the afterlives are a mess and the limits of Hel's power leave plenty of room for alternative explanations that impact how we read the Prose Edda.
2) on Útgarðr - I'm... not sold on your read. Let's pull the Icelandic: "Lét hann þar eftir hafra ok byrjaði ferðina austr í Jötunheima ok allt til hafsins, ok þá fór hann út yfir hafit þat it djúpa." "He left there the goats and undertook the journey east in Giant-lands and [traveled] all the way to the sea, and then he went out over that which had the deep." While "fór út" is fairly standard for travel "out" (i.e. from Norway to Iceland), it does also strongly suggest that the fortress known as Útgarðr is..... not really transparently part of Jotunheim. It's not... not part of Jotunheim, because there are jotnar living there, but it once again defies the easy categorization you give it!
3) on Elves - Armann Jakobsson has argued quite persuasively that yes, "alfr" is a catch-all term for sub-deific venerated folkloric beings in Norse religion (hence the *alfablot* in Austrfararvisur, a poem from c. 1000 AD). *However*, there is no evidence from religious practice of the period that the categories of "light elf" and "dark elf" are actually substantive. There just.... isn't a single mention, despite there being multiple "lords of elves" between Freyr in Grimnismal and Völundr in Völundarkviða, of there being dark elves in Norse traditions prior to the Prose Edda. As far as it being a Celtic borrowing in the later Viking Age or post-Viking period...... possible, but I prodded a Celticist friend and the Seelie/Unseelie courts that create a strong binary of spirits is.... drumroll please..... probably a 20th century development. So it cannot plausibly be the source of Snorri's Svartalfar.
In general, here, I think there's a lot in your answer that is drawing on later traditions. We are not the first to be frustrated by the lack of clarity, and both academic and popular literature has "solved" it in various ways. To name a few...
- You blend late stories that are clearly weird reflections of the material (the creation of the Brisingamen is only found in Sörla þáttr, which explicitly calls Freyja an immortal demon-witch from Asia) with older material.
- You frame "lack of constraint" as something interesting and significant, when in fact it is the norm. Beings (human and otherwise) walk between realms all the time! The idea of an "essential characteristic" of a realm that constrains people is very Westphalian nation-state-y, and it's a framework that just doesn't easily fit with medieval writings.
- Your account of Niðavellir is beautiful, coherent, believable, and isn't based on an iota of evidence from the medieval material. The stanza says "In the north, in niðavellir, there is a golden hall for the folk of Sindri's kingroup; and a second, Brimir's beer-hall, stood in Okolnir". That's it. That is the sum total of our evidence. It never appears in a single other source. Svartalfheim appears nowhere in the medieval corpus outside of the Prose Edda. This "Svartalfheim appears to be caves or tunnels" thing is, unfortunately, not a thing in the oldest sources!!!
4) on Urdarbrunnr, etc. - the Nornir live there? and Mimir lives at Mimisbrunnr? like, these aren't uninhabited spaces! While I agree with your read that they're liminal spaces, I disagree with your logic as to why.
So, if we're trying to limit ourselves towards our oldest evidence, and avoid constructing realms based on vibes or assumptions.... things end up much messier than you portray them.
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.
I agree, we can look to Red's own video on Hades for a pretty similar idea that is presented: Hades, as the eldest god, was to rule the world by birthright. While Zeus would end up taking that position, Hades did become the god of the dead, meaning that anyone ruled by Zeus eventually and likely eternally is ruled by Hades, in a way making him still rule the world.
@@justinalicea1590 "As first born son of Chronos, the world *was* his by birthright. And even if there's a bit of delay, everyone becomes his subject eventually."
@@t40xd I _adore_ that line. It's so chilling, while not crossing over into menacing territory. Much like the god in question.
@@bluesbest1 Yeah, that is an amazing line
@@justinalicea1590
The New Testament describes Satan in similar terms, calling him “[the] god of the world” in reference to his' being able to traverse the globe and tempt men to sin against the Big Man Upstairs?
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.
I remember a person being really surprised that "a couple" didn't literally mean two in english ^^
@@krankarvolund7771 But... It *does* literally mean two in English. That's why it's so frustrating that in colloquial usage "couple" is used to mean *a bunch*.
I remember arguing about that as a kid- I felt that “a couple of things” was a few or a handful, but someone else said it was exactly two
@@kated442I have this exact memory as well. My uncle told me a couple meant 2 and a few meant three or four. I'm glad to know it isn't so black and white after all.
Or decide that "a few" has an exact numerical value
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".
Think about it: there's a high likelihood that any Norse person who died at sea was either a sailor, fisherman, or a pirate, and all of those would be down to party hard.
@@CrownofMischief or vikings
@@itscznben8728that's included via the pirate he mentioned
@@chadam917 aren't pirates more seafaring and vikings more of a coastal raiding party?
@NihongoWakannai Vikings are more known for that than they are stealing from other ships, but pirates were also known to raid coastal settlements if they could get away with it. So, Vikings, being a type of seaborne violent robber, are essentially pirates.
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.”
Perhaps Hel gaining power over nine realms has to do with every realm having to answer to death?
You have to give Loki this, he know when to make primordial chaos into something.
@@alexanderharoldsen4178 We can look to the Greeks for a pretty good example of this: Hermes describes Hades as the one who was meant to rule by birthright, but his placement as god of the dead means that everyone does eventually come under his rule.
So Hel becoming goddess of the dead WOULD mean a similar thing, even more so because the Norse Gods can also die and so no one is safe from her reach. So with all of those in the nine realms being within reach of death, Hel, in a way, has power over all nine realms.
This can discount the immortal place as its own realm, though.
Maybe, but I remember reading somewhere (shaky source I know) that helheim was just hel's house. She was condemned by Odin to share what she had and care for the dead within her warm hall.
So its also possible Helheim is a tiny part of this bigger, less controlled realm of niflheim
I think it doesn't even need to be all of Niflheim that turns into Helheim. In my mind Niflheim is just a cold area on that side of the world. It's essentially the Arctic. Saying that all of Helheim is the Arctic is like saying Scandinavia includes the entire Arctic.
I think Helheim and Niflheim overlap in some places and not in others
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.
Yes.
oooo
And let's not forget the editing
Me watching a red video:"I like you illustrations magic woman "
her singing is always damn good too
“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.
Every fucking day man. Every day.
The sacking by the Latin Crusaders of Constantinople in 1204. 😭
In a century of so, how much of the internet will we have?
Information vanishes from the internet all the time.
Information is actually less permanently recorded than ever. Tablets break, paper burns or degrades, but modern information technology requires precise inputs of electricity, encoding in non-human languages and protocols, and even then, having the right hard drive storing the report on the Battle of Fallujah, rather than Tweets about breakfast, bad jokes, or weird growths. There was a large effort to preserve Flash games and animations before Adobe shut it down, but I **KNOW** we didn't get all of them.
If something were to happen to the Internet, we might be considered to be living in a Dark Age in 1000 years. Remember, historical Dark Ages often come with a decrease in the quality of life(which is decreasing atm), but not necessarily. It's typically more because rooting around in that timeframe is like working in the dark.
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.
What I like to think is that people heard one, two, or 5 base stories and that set off a chain reaction for many different religions.
The Nine Worlds, surrounded by the Seven Seas(which are similarly undetermined and that is from our world!).
you'll find world trees and 'many realms of supernatural dwellers' are very common motifs in multiple mythologies worldwide. This isn't really a case of cultural cross pollination between Scandinavians and Mesoamericans.
its like how in ancient china, three means lots
Nine is the mythological dozen
"And if you think ANY of that was a pre-Christian concept, I got a Bifrost to sell ya."
Damn I love this channel.
However, having a bi-frost *would* be fun :D
how much?
@@JulianDanzerHAL9001 Like, 40.
@@CoralCopperHead its liek a reverse pascals wager
getting a bifrost would be so cool that if the risk of getting scammed is huge and the chance of getitng on is tiny it might still be worth it
@coralcopperhead685 40 what?
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.
I wonder if they'll have to invent a new numerical domination our pals from the 24 1/2th century.
Hel we use a "couple" to describe a "small amount of people," not strictly just to refer to 2.
@@cyberhikikomori5326 yup, and "dozens" doesn't necessarily mean a multiple of 12
Alif lam meem ( the Arabic letters for a,l, and m) show up a lot for unspecified reasons in the Quran.
Moses' live is neatly split into 3 sets of 40 (he returned to Egypt to kick off Operation Wreck Kemet at age 80 after running away at age 40, he and the others members of his generation were condemned to pass away b4 Israel could enter Canaan with Moses dying at age 120), David and his son Solomon are both said to have reigned for 40 years, the Hebrews/Judahites lived in exile in Babylon for nearly 40 years, from 587 to 539 BC. (the last one *is* indeed historical and _could_ be coincidence, I'll have to look back and see if say, Ezekiel, prophesied (in fancy poetic script) that “the land will be made barren and Israel will not see Zion and her walls stand for 40 years.”
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
I think that's the best explanation
That also means that one maybe-realm thing where people can’t die can’t be one of the nine realms, either that or it’s the classic case of mythology not making sense.
Either that or it's a reference to the 9 circles of Hell (put there by the christian monks who translated this stuff)
7:05 “…dark elves are actually dwarves, which is a completely different can of worms” 😂😂😂
When Red doesn’t even stop at punchlines
I've heard dwarves be called "deep elves"
The term I saw in my research was svartalfar, or "black elves". They're not to be confused with dokkalfar, or "dark elves", who if the ljosalfar ("light elves") are angels, are probably just demons. Basically, this s&>/ is confusing.
@@daviddaugherty2816 it also doesn't help that the qualities attributed to dwarves aren't always the same from story to story. For example, in most poems dwarves can just chill outside. But then there's one random dwarf named Alviss that turns to stone with the sunrise. So was he a troll? Who knows!
Sure, because they are all descended from the Aldmer. One was worshipping Daedra and the other was rushing the tech tree.
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.
It could mean that the party hall and the drowned are counties in the Realm that Hel went to / rules over. Great parties in a mead hall in the land of the dead does fit the vibe of the Norse.
That's exactly what it is, and most scholarship treats it as such. I love Red's vids, but I do sometimes have to just grimace and move on when she gets something fairly wrong because, well, she's not a scholar.
@@Geoffery_of_Monmouth On the other hand, a big point of the video is "It's hard to know for sure what is literal or figurative, we probably can't truly know, anymore, and chunks of the stuff that feels solid is more a matter of people agreeing with each other than directly evidenced."
@@kalef2 Sure, but there's also more evidence in the actual texts themselves, and more scholarship talking about these things, that she misses. I don't disagree with the broad strokes of the claim, but the devil is always in the details. And as for the final assertion about 9 simply meaning a great number, Red presents that as if it's some great uncovered conspiracy when it absolutely is not--the general critical consensus is that 9 is the most important gematria in northern Germanic and Norse myth.
Like I said, I enjoy her videos, but she isn't a scholar, and so she often misses things.
@@Geoffery_of_MonmouthsHe'S nOt A sChOlAr
Imagine gatekeeping...having an opinion...?
What does "not a scholar" even mean here? Does it mean she doesn't do research? She obviously does, so does it mean she doesn't have a degree? Degrees don't mean anything anymore except on scholarly papers, and even then, not having a degree doesn't preclude you from writing a scholarly paper, nor from opining on a given subject.
Does it mean that her opinions don't conform to the accepted consensus of people who DO have degrees? Because that's appeal to authority, rather than an assessment of the actual logical and evidentiary merits of her argument.
So what exactly are you saying disqualifies her opinion from consideration, or even diminishes its value?
Every time Red mentions scholars yelling at each other, I just imagine a ton of scholars in some giant hall screaming at each other and I laugh quietly to myself.
So, in the olden times, the Catholic Church would convene "Councils" where scholars would come and debate theology and agree on whatever the agenda was. This is the context in which Saint Nicholas allegedly punched now-considered-a-heretic Arius in the face.
I mean that’s basically what the fields of science is: a bunch of people yelling at each other trying to prove everyone else wrong 😂
koff- diogenes and plato- koff- featherless biped incident- KAFF KAFF
I just picture Reddit but it’s just scholars
Well, _technically,_ when doing science you're supposed to try and _prove _*_yourself_*_ wrong._
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.
Well prime numbers are a pattern.
@@hedgehog3180 That's just it: they're really not a pattern. That we're able to recognise them as such is more of a quirk of our heuristic intuition than anythng. It's the sort of edge case resolution that's somewhere between a bug and misfeature.
Well, okay, on the prime numbers thing. There objectively, indisputably, are real patterns in the look of prime numbers when written in a given base. The most obvious one in base 10 is that, except for the single digits, they all end in 1, 3, 7, or 9. But even more generally, anyone who does a lot of factoring (which will include almost anyone studying primes, but also polynomials and just fairly sharing discrete resources), will begin to pick up on patterns that show up in numbers that are multiples of other numbers. Some are easy to describe, like multiples of 5 ending in 5 or 0, but some less so. Ask an experienced programmer whether they think various large integers are powers of two or not, and they'll do a lot better than chance, because powers of two have certain patterns that manifest in their decimal representation. When we look at a number, if we fail to notice any patterns that suggest a factor, then it feels "primey" to us, and this is because of very real patterns we actually can observe.
@@Howtheheckarehandleswit I mean, this sort of starts to get into issues of "what is a pattern actually", which turns out to be weird to define in any concrete sense. (To the extent that I'm pretty sure Category Theory exists entirely to answer this question?)
From a *very* strict formalist standpoint, you _can_ technically say the sequence of primes can be modelled by a function (there are several approaches to this, even) and is therefore a pattern, but in the context of "things a human can be expected to reconcile", I think anything that starts with an _n!_ term and then progresses into computational infeasibility from there is probably asking a bit too much of the ol' brainmeats, haha.
If you relax your definition, there are attributes that correlate to primality. And people who work with them a lot will recognise them correctly more often than just jumping at every number ending in {1, 3, 7, 9} and checking for twins and such, yes, just as I recognise many powers of 2 and multiples thereof because I deal with them a lot. But that, to me, is more of a further calibration of the heuristic than truly recognising e.g. some kind of simple pattern in prime gaps that you can express in an easily digestible way or anything like finding what what the 7011th prime is from a bit of quick mental calculation. I certainly don't recognise 16,777,216 is 2²⁴ because I _do the math!_ But it's a topic of open debate. More saliently to the topic at hand, IMO, is a rule that is always followed equivalent to a pattern in the context of the human experience? I don't think that follows, but we're into the territory of gut feeling sorta no matter what.
My experience is the only things people can really come up with when presented e.g. the sequence {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13} is either a blank stare or "they're all prime", which, while _true,_ doesn't come from them having actually attempted factorisation of each member, but sort of as a brute fact of memory and experience. So I maintain they're not a pattern in the sense that "humans cannot be expected to model this under normal conditions and the recognition is pure retrieval" even if it's not technically true once you get deep into the weeds.
@@WillowEpp Though i see what youre getting at, id have to disagree with your last paragraph. While memorization may be the method many use to distinguish this as a set of primes, such a thing does not invalidate the identification of a pattern. Patterns emerge through shared qualities of the elements within a set, and its our memorization of those qualities that allows for better pattern recognition. Retrieval of information is merely an optimization method for pattern recognition.
Okay, that line about it being "completely imaginary and the poem it was namedropped in was a forgery written by the ghost of Tacitus" is the greatest line I have ever heard
It’s at times like these I’m convinced anthropologists are utterly insane to put themselves through this
That's true of basically every profession that gives us something valuable.
As someone currently getting my degree in this, YES😂
@Sekhmet Reverence as someone who just got my BA in anthropology/archaeology can confirm we are insane
@zapfire-jq1lm exactly! I was doing research the other day and I got the weird look when I shouted in joy! .....granted I shouted "thank God the skeleton shows syphilis" but still!
@@SekhmetReverence I want to know why you were excited the skeleton had signs syphilis
"And if yoy believe that's a pre-christain concept, i got a bifrost to sell you" made my day lmfaoooo. Thanks again for the wonderful content red!
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
im danish and this is what we learned too!
Where does Hel fit into this model? Is it part of Utgard or is it its own thing?
So… you were taught about a…
Discworld?
An important thing to note when it comes to legends referencing realms is that while in modern writing it tends to mean a seperate dimension, historically it refers to any kind of domain. So when you encounter something referred to as a realm in mythology, it could be anything from a parallel universe to some tiny county somewhere. Basically, the nine realms really could be literally anything.
I agree with this. I like the theory that the 9 Realms are not 9 separate dimensions, but rather the 9 Major Regions of the world.
Please correct my memory, but in regards to Yggdrasil, it roots extended through the realms, not that the realms sat on its branches, like popular depicted.
Within this framework, Red's comment about 9 being ambiguous would make sense, since like the 7 Seas, there can be disagreement about what might count as a major realm
Is no one gonna talk about how beautifully Red drew the “realms”, especially the Norns? Seriously, I could never 😭
i was hoping so much for a merch announcement at the end with like prints of the realm images
The Norns are a BANGER in this one
Beep bop... I'm the Philosophy Bot. Here, have a quote:
"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking"
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
@@sheevpalpatine1105 there are actually posters up on their crowdmade site if you haven't seen it yet :D
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.
Accurate depiction of most of academia to be honest - even the most strict of scientific fields decends into professors passive aggressively dissing each other in academic papers when discussing a detailed enough topic
Tbf all science is like that 😂 but anthropological studies tend to have the biggest fireworks
As said, this has been every interaction between two PhDs in the same field I've ever seen. Including Mathematicians.
"But What About the Orangutan?" I say to the Edgar Allen Poe scholars.
@@TheNaldiin this will never not be entertaining/hilarious to me 🤣 we’d love to think that an exact science would just speak for itself, but nope, humans will get very, very personal about maths too.
The significance of nine is also interesting in the context of Dante. Nine circles of hell, nine levels of purgatory, nine heavenly spheres. I wonder if he was influenced by pre-existing nines in literature, or if there's just something about the number which makes it appealing for this type of worldbuilding. It's worth noting that he at least goes on to name each of his realms though so maybe the context here is different.
I think in Dante's case it comes from 3 being important in Christianity, and 3x3=9
@@frankorious534to say nothing of the fact that Dante is one dude, writing his own poem, in contrast with a centuries long mythology and culture being told by hundreds, if not thousands of different storytellers.
Hey Red, side note, I just found out that in ancient Egypt people with disabilities were seen as a gift from the gods. There’s probably a bunch more there and as someone who is physically disabled I was so surprised I’d never heard about it. Would love you to do a video looking into disability as either a gift or curse from the gods in different ancient mythologies.
Zeus: "My children, I have been notified that a foreign God from the northern kingdoms has infiltrated our ranks. With that said, I announce to all of you that the intruder shall be found soon and punished with the direst consequences!"
Loki wearing a laurel wreath: "Damn, I wonder who that beautiful bastard could be..."
BRB, off to write an AU fanfic about Atreus pulling a reverse-Kratos on ancient Greece.
Loki: *points at Pan* I think it’s him he looks different from us.
Pan: Wh…
Zeus: SMITE
~later~
Tell them that the great god Pan is dead
@@Thought_Processing_ loki:If I had a nickel for everly death of a god that was caused by a my pranks I would have 2 nickels
It's not much but it's weird that it happend twice
I'd love to read a story showing how Loki messes with The Olympians.
@@Thought_Processing_ There's a heck of a plot twist.
A minute in and I'm already laughing at Red saying "Hogwarts Houses" but showing the Egyptian God Cards from YuGiOh.
There's three bcuz, let's be honest...
*whispers conspiratorially* _no one cares for Hufflepuff._
Same XD
Which could also reference the GX houses.
@@Boss_Isaac You have fallen right into their trap, for the truly devious make sure to get sorted into Hufflepuff where nobody will take notice of their evil plotting.
Either that, or Hufflepuff is the control group for a long running experiment on generational magic contamination.
@@righteouself9928 that does sound right, there's only 3 dorm tiers in GX
I remember hearing one theory about some of the realms being used for the Norse to help them understand geography. In this case, designating Norse lands in Scandinavia as "Midgard", Nifflheim was north because it got colder the further north you went, Muspellheim was south because it'd be warmer the further south you went, Jotunheim was east because that would lead toward the mountains of the Ural mountain range (something about the echoing sounds in the mountains implying the notion of "giants" living there), and Vanaheim was west because that would lead to the ocean (something following a notion about life coming from the sea). The other half of the nine realms in that theory had Alfheim and Asgard above and Svartgelheim and Helheim below, implying that this whole arrangement came after the arrival of Christianity.
If it's accurate or not, I sorta doubt it, but I always thought it was an interesting take.
There is a mountain range in Norway called "Jotunheimen", but sadly it was named as such in 1862... Either way, the theory you posted is interesting.
I think it's more likely to be a reflection of their understanding of the world than a way to understand it. Though I don't think there's anything to indicate that they literally believed these things, more they applied their understanding of the world to their mythology. Though I kinda doubt they would have known about the Ural mountains, you actually have to travel pretty far to reach them and the Norse never went anywhere rivers couldn't take them. Plus they had no incentive to go there since there wasn't anything interesting in that direction.
@@hedgehog3180 They could still see mountains in that general direction though, and while that is true about them not opting for mountainous terrain, the logic behind that part of the theory was that how large they were and the sounds that usually come from such mountains (like avalanches) implied that large things lived there. Whether or not that was true, I don't know, but it would fall in line with their aversion toward going eastward.
@@hedgehog3180 you don't need to go to the mountains yourself to know about them, you can hear about them from others, but when you hear about mountains for others: hills that rise into the sky, with perpetual snow when it's further south than you'd expect that where the snow will sometimes kill you in an avellane, etc. you have an even stronger for a mythical jotunheim then if they went there themselves.
to be clear this is based of nothing but thinking about it. just thought it made sense.
@@raarsi-dar The Urals are 1500 km east of St Petersborg. You'd have to travel well over a thousand km inland before you could even see them, let alone hear anything from them. Like they're as far away from the Gulf of Finland as the Black Sea coast is.
I think the problem with the 'Nine' realms is the same problem that the Greeks had when trying to nail down the stories of their own gods. Each area had their own beliefs that were subtly different than others. It's more than likely that a coastal Norse village would totally say that the sea was a realm all its own, and as such one of the nine, but a mountain village further inland with no real dealings with the sea might never consider it a realm, and instead perhaps give that slot to another realm that they believed in.
I toyed with the idea of creating my own version of the nine realms to set a dnd campaign in. A few days on Wikipedia convinced me to just use the marvel equivalent rather than using the actual myths, and when 60 years of comic book history is the less contradictory or confusing version, that's saying something
I thing the original version is way cooler! Imagine a intire world of Wolves that can eat stars or a heaven with several levels with the higher ones being a mistery with possíble gigagods and many others worlds, this thing his a amazing potential
I like to think of the Nine Realms being a fluid arrangement that equates to bureaucratic zoning law so if you want to assimilate or split away into your own realm you gotta get an Asgardian lawyer
The upper senate is constitutionally locked at nine seats, no matter what the actual territories are.
Better call Sigurðr!
this says a lot about congressional districts
I really wanna know what an Asgardian lawyer and an Asgardian court session would look like
@@crimsonstrykr Probably at least one death.
The whole thing about norse mythology scholarship perfectly sums up my undergrad experience, I got f'ed over in an essay because a translation i used was apparently considered by everyone else to be nonsense but no one wrote that down, it was meant to be common knowledge. Trying to study it absolutely felt like academics angrily subtweeting each other on decades old threads.
As someone who’s genuinely into taxonomy (the science of scientific names) you summed up the “why we like making categories when they don’t really work” issue perfectly and with an accurate conclusion, good job!
Let’s just take a moment and appreciate how much research Red put into this episode
What I don't appreciate is YOU, Primal Aspid!! Do you know how hard it was to pass through Kingdom's Edge??!!
it doesnt have the same "i hate my life why oh why?" as the Loki video when it came to research
I’m so glad you sung “Valhalla Calling” at the end. Miracle of Sounds doesn’t get as much recognition as he should.
Agreed. I was coming to the comments to say the same thing
It felt so surreal to hear it in Red's voice. I always viewed MoS as entirely too obscure to get that sort of recognition, and yet... here it is!
@@TehAsianator Same. Just imagine Miracle of Sound made music for a Norse themed Movie.
This make me so happy
And she killed it too, i want a full version!!
I am so in love with red’s presentation style. I raise that we clone her so we can have a never-ending stream of glorious, educational content
Once we learn how to clone memories? I second that.
So you wanna make Red the Link of historical and mythological findings??
18:32 - The daughters of Aegir and Ran are drawn so cutely and with such obvious personalities that they wouldn't look out of place in a magical girl anime or something. We have a gentle older sister, a quirky-yet-wise girl, a very curious girl, a super-sweetheart, a friendly extrovert, a quiet intelligent one, a tough girl who's probably a bit of a tsundere, two perky mischievous young ones, and a shy girl. :D
The “9 just means a lot of things” theory actually makes a lot of sense given how the number is used to mean almost exactly that in Slavic and Celtic mythology. Whenever Slavic tales wanna say something is really far away they’ll say it’s “in the thrice ninth land and the thrice ninth kingdom”, and in Celtic mythology when they wanna say there’s an impressive amount of something they’ll say “nine times nine”, like how Bicriu of the Bitter Tongue’s house has “nine times nine doors and nine times nine windows” or sometimes they’ll say “thrice nine” for the same effect. 9 was a very special number because 3 was a special number, and 9 is 3 3’s.
Also reminiscent of the 12 tribes of Israel, which aren't consistent. Jacob has 12 sons, but Joseph is basically never counted, rather his lot is usually split into 2 tribes of Ephraim and Mannasseh, to get around the tribe of Levi bring set apart as priests and not counting for a lot of land division stuff.
"Weary seven nights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine."
-
"Thrice to thine and thrice to mine,
And thrice again to make up nine."
-
Macbeth, the Weird Sisters/Witches in A1S3, not mythology per se but definitely drawing on English or Celtic folklore of the time, so interesting to see the presence of that there.
@@camzoman Actually, I thought it was because one of the other brothers lost his inheritance. Thus, Joseph's sons were split up to being the number back up to twelve.
I believe that 40 is also just biblical slang for "a shit ton."
@@LuckySketches Oh, for sure. Moses was said to be a prince for 40 years, a shepherd for 40 years, then a prophet for 40 years; when the Israelites were barred from entering the holy land at first, they wandered for 40 years before Joshua finally led them in. Jesus fasted in the wilderness for 40 days, and when he was arrested, he was whipped 39 times (as it was traditionally believed that the 40th stroke would kill).
I would watch an hour-long video with Red breaking down the psychology of "If I Fits, I Sits".
I honestly like the idea of the number nine as just being a culturally significant number for "quite a few." As mentioned, seven is a notable number in certain aspects of Christendom. Not only the Seven Seas, but also the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Holy Virtues, the number of days in a week (which I'm honestly kinda amazed that I've never heard of a culture that doesn't have seven days in a week though I guess that might be moon phase related?).
Christianity also used 40 a lot to mean uncountably high, like 40-days/nights of the flood or Moses getting lost for 40 years
seven days a week is a ancient roman concept isn't it?
@@sigurd_7613 It's also true in Japan, which probably means it's true in most of the East Asian cultures that have ancient Chinese influences. I don't know my ancient cultures well enough to know if anyone else (who doesn't at least have some logical ties to Rome or China) uses the concept of a week at all, 7 days or otherwise.
Red really outdid herself with the art in this video. It was equal parts enchanting and terrifying!
Honesty, Nifelheim and Muspleheim, if you really think about it geographically, kinda sound like a dramatized version of the Artic and the Sahara.
I can see Nifelheim be the mythologize version of the North Pole, however I can musplehiem be lava fields/volcanic areas, but then the Norse were good sailors and we do have evidence of going as far as America and the eastern Mediterranea, so who knows.
I’d argue that Nieflheim may be Greenland ( cold and icy) and Muspellheim is likely Iceland (lots of geothermal stuff)
@@merrillsunderland8662 maybe, but it seems like a stretch to say that Midgard is between Iceland and Greenland
@@starmaker75 I would guess that when the myths were being formed, they did have some knowledge of the Sahara (likely through traders sent there or from stories told by their southern neighbors), and interpolated that it must be hotter further south you go, hence a fire plane.
since the south of scandanavia is full of mountains and possibly volcanos
"When Thor's hammer is stolen, it is said that if they fail to retrieve it, the giants will come live in Asgard and take their jobs and stuff"
...I'm beginning to understand now why a lot of modern works inspired by Norse Mythology depict giants as a marginalized minority group, because that sounded eerily similar to the many justifications used for xenophobia in the real world.
That's not to count the fact that the jobs we are supposedly stealing are jobs that nobody wants to do.
I could be misremembering, but I think I read once that the Aesir hired the giants to actually build Asgard for them, and then cheated the giants out of payment for the job. Which also fits unfortunately well.
Nah, it's just because people want to talk about marginalized minority groups right now.
The stanza red is referring to here isn't threatening that you're gonna have Giants immigrating to Asgard. It's talking about invasion. It's much more comparable to when old boomers talk about "oH wElL iF wE dIdN't WiN tHe SeCoNd WoRlD wAr yOu'D aLl Be SpEaKiNg GeRmaN rIgHt NoW"
@@moritamikamikara3879 to be fair, people often talk about immigrants in terms of invasion (not contradicting you, being pedantic)
I believe the bit you are referring to is the one about Svadilfari, who rebuilt the wall of Asgard after the war between the Aesir and the Vanir. Svadilfari wanted Freya, the Sun, and the Moon. The Aesir agreed with a time limit. Then Loki was used as a distraction to stop Svadilfari and his horse. Then Svadilfari got mad and was struck down by Thor. And according to some versions of the myths, this is why the giants hate the Aesir so much and why they fought in Ragnarok.
Out of all of the interesting things in this video, Red singing a Miracle of Sound song was what floored me.
Going through all 9 realms in Ragnarok was so fun
It was
I wish there was more to Niflheim, I wanted to explore dammit
what is ragnarok?
@@tasse0599theyre talking about God of War Ragnarok
@@tasse0599 God of war Ragnarok
could Muspelheim, the hot land to the south, be an extension of how the Norse people would've noticed the world getting hotter the further south they go, I.E. the Sahara and Africa? Niflheim could therefore just represent the arctic and the Ginnungagap could literally just be 'where (we) humans live', I.E. where the Norse just lived. Maybe 'nine realms' is literally just one realm, earth, and how the Norse divided it in nine supposed regions.
Surtr name iirc literally mean "the black one", wich made me think a simillar thing.
That’s a cool idea and all, but we’ll literally never know
I thought the same
Also if Midgard was the bulwark made from the eyebrows, it could just refer to the Scandinavian Peninsula by itself. Norway and Sweden are vaguely shaped like an eyebrow. I doubt that was what the Norse were thinking, but it may have been what the author was referring to.
@@taylororion7604the sands of time are certainly cruel.
So much about the past in unknowable, not because we haven't found the evidence but because it nolonger exists to be found.
And due to our limited lifespans we will never live to see how the future turns out.
The mystery of what the Nine Realms are feels like the anthropological equivalent of figuring out how the three seashells work in "Demolition Man".
17:07 I’ve heard that the story of the Tuatha coming to Ireland is, from the Norse perspective, about some Vanir either fleeing the war with the Aesir or leaving after the treaty because they couldn’t stand the Aesir and didn’t want to break the peace.
Man, I actually love this so much. The fact that there probably isn't a definitive answer, and nine was just used to represent the *possibilty* of many worlds, leading to there being infinite potentiality for the storytellers to make up a world to suit the story, is just so darn cool.
At this point, I am starting to think that if Red ever got a time machine, she would use it to go find Snorri Sturluson and beat him over the head.
I don't think she'd be the only one! 😂 But they'd have to wait in line for all the people wanting to both beat up & thank the invading Christian monks & missionaries, first...? For both writing down what bits we do get of Old Norse mythology, and for being the reason it dead-ended as a belief system in the first place 🤦🏻♀️
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 They shouldn’t have invaded England then
I think she would go and save celtic and Norse mythology then go and hit him
I remember being absolutely blown away when I learned that many numbers in the Bible (like 12, 40, etc) aren't literal but symbolic. It totally changed how I viewed done of the prophecies in the Bible that people interpret literally (and made me wonder why some verses are canonically interpreted literally while others are interpreted symbolically). So my mind immediately jumped to the number 9 being symbolic when you explained how uncertain people are about which 9 there are.
8:30 Jeez, Red. Snorri's gonna need to visit Niflheim to get enough ice for that burn.
In Mongolian storytelling and tradition 9 is used symbolically to mean a vague sense of a unknowable number; a group withoug fixed members or symbolically greater things.
For instance nine treasures, where what is treasured varies; nine heavens, which are unknowable; or the nine banners of Chinngis Khaan of which there are 9 of but metaphorically more. There are 99 great Tenger (sky deities) but here 99 means a group that cannot be known. There might be 99 great Tenger or more, and what members make up the 99 are unknown or may change.
It is not unfeasible that the number 9 may have been used in a similar way in the Norse myth.
That's interesting, If I recall correctly Japan does the same thing for the number 8. "8 million" is used to mean basically infinite or an unknowable amount, or all. I wonder if the two cultures influenced each other since they interacted several times.
Even 7 is sometimes used like this,
'Should I forgive my brother even seven times?'
'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven.'
>or the nine banners of Chinngis Khaan of which there are 9 of but metaphorically more
Wait, do elaborate on that one. Since Genghis was a historical figure, shouldn't the exact number of his banners be well-documented? What shenaniganery is going on there?
@@vermilionrubin More specifically, seven is used like this a lot in the Bible, presumably because the ancient Israelites used it like that.
And annoyingly sometimes it means a literal but symbolic seven (Shabbat is every seven days) and sometimes it means a metaphorical seven (God promises Cain he will be avenged "sevenfold" if he is killed).
@@brianb.6356
Well duh, the 8 & 9 also sometimes mean eight and nine.
There's an incredible short story ("The House of Asterion" by Jorge Luis Borges, 1947) which is told by the Minotaur waiting for Theseus. He mentions that the labyrinth has 14 doors, 14 balconies, seas, temples etc., and Borges adds a *very* weird footnote that Asterion probably uses "fourteen" as a synonym for infinity. The end of the video reminded me of that.
But read the story, guys, it's really good
That's probably because in the ancient world 7 was used as shorthand for "a lot", so doubling that seems like a natural shorthand for infinity.
When it says in the Old Testament that Noah was on the Arche for 40 days and 40 nights, it probably also meant that he was there for a "really long time"
Same with Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Probably didn't meant there to be exactly 40 but just "lots, man".
Very much like stories of Tolkien's world building being over-detailed because he'd try to tell the stories to his kids, only for them to ask for the insane detail or specificity.
"Ancient tree..."
"What's 'Ancient' mean?"
"Very old"
"How old was the tree?"
"Close to 2000 years."
"How close? And how did they know how old it was?"
"Ughh... 1,768 years old, planted by the elf Galadriel as a small child. Now can I get back to what the wizard is doing please?"
Also, he was a mythology nerd and many stories have these weird breaks, presumably for the same, ancient reason: kids kill good pacing.
We definitely like to use numbers to represent other things, and it definitely won't make sense out of context. E.g. some people use 8 for infinity, or a baker's dozen actually means 13 instead of 12 xD
I ran a D&D campaign set in the 9 Realms, after doing a bunch of reading I realised it basically just came down to the story I was telling - e.g. Dark Elves were distinct from Dwarves, and so got distinct realms, not because that's necessarily true, but because it's an expected convention of the fantasy genre.
Ever since I played the Skyrim quest mod "Maelstrom," Ràn has been my favorite Norse goddess. She encompasses all of my morbid fascinations: call of the abyss, thalassaphobia, death at sea, ancient unknowable dangers sealed away...
I'm glad I finally got to see your take on her at 18:26
"We're not here to unpack the psychology of I fits, I sits"
Red, you're a true poet at times
My take on the thing with Hel is that "given power over nine realms" is simply her receiving her deific domain. Not that she's the ruler of nine literal realms, but much like Hades, all dead things (some exceptions apply) are hers to claim.
no exceptions apply
@@matthewmoran1866 so you're going to tell me that Valhalla and Freya's spot whose name escapes me are in Helheim?
@@sophia-helenemeesdetricht1957 admittedly my knowledge of norse myth is quite rusty but doesn't Hela get everyone's souls after ragnarok anyways?
@@matthewmoran1866 I mean, at that point, we're getting into the deep Christianwashing of the mythology? So I have a tendency to say anything after Ragnarok is of questionable veracity _at best._
The research for this episode sounds like it was equally fascinating as it was infuriating.
Props for slugging it through that many dead ends and conflicting accounts!
Vanir: are Fertility Deities.
Red: Draws Vanaheim 9:39 with rather sus-looking towers.
Red apparently learned that fish don't exist biologically since that one podcast episode - as my professor put it, "Fish don't exist, and if they do then humans are fish."
Because red is leftist activist
We are fish.
@Whiteeye 345 What? How would anything about any political leaning relate whatsoever to anything that was said
Then what the hell did I eat from those tuna cans?
@@someinternetguy1065 it wasn't obvious like her saying category is social construct
Ah yes, time to watch Red lose her mind as I sit back and slowly attach new strings to my mythology story.
It’s what she’d want
One of my favorite interpretations of the Nine Worlds comes from Magnus Chase (legitimately Norse Percy Jackson, it’s good) where the easiest way to get to the trunk of the World Tree is to go to the Boston Public Garden and randomly select which duck in the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture makes you feel the happiest.
1 minute in and I’m overflowing with joy from the fact that Red actually understands the concept of cladistic systematics in biology.
It must have been a pain for Rick Riordan to research this for Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. (Well, also anyone else who has told stories based around Norse Mythology.) He has my respect and my sympathy.
The idea that "9" just means "a bunch" in this lore is interesting. It's the last digit, so it can be used as shorthand to mean "a high number" or "ending" (like Final Fantasy Type-0 with "When nine and nine meet nine"... I think). But it's confusing when there is nothing to clarify that 9 is a figure of speech rather than the literal quantity.
To me 9 as a synonym for ''a bunch'' makes sense. I think it just got replaced by seven and a dozen. Seven is a somewhat important number in christianity (seven days of the week, seven deadly sins/virtues etc.) and I also know a few instances where seven doesn't mean literally seven. Nine and seven both show up a lot in fairy tales.
As he just made up a lot of what happened in those books, I highly doubt that he even read the Eddas, let alone actively researched the realms.
Like, I get they were supposed to be comedic, but Thor, the god who outwitted a dwarf into turning to stone, and Odin, the literal god of wisdom, were done so dirty in that book. And let’s not forget the literal daughter of Loki and a Valkyrie being Muslim, and how Riordan acted like the Norse religion was basically illegitimate compared to Islam, which is like transplanting the thing historians have been trying to rip out of Norse mythology since the Eddas were written back into it.
@@greenjay7471 tbf, "doing the gods dirty" has been a central tenet of the Riordanverse since day one. A central unifying theme of the various series appears to be the superiority of man over gods, and downplaying aspects of the original mythologies to appeal to modern readers isn't exclusive to the Magnus chase books. The separate and non-conflicting existence of the modern mainstream God was established in Lightning Thief, so a character being half god and also Muslim is at least internally consistent
@MrCephalopod yeah, I think they addressed it in Trials of Apollo in that they're all based in belief. The gods were real because they were believed to be real. Since so many different cultures had a sun god, it didn't matter if Apollo was cast down because Ra still drove his boat, the Aztec blood sacrifices would keep theirs in the sun for another few millennia, and all those people who believed in science kept the earth in its heliocentric orbit.
It almost makes it interesting to think about that the monotheistic God is probably going through the same thing the Greek/Roman gods went through where they are basically existing as all aspects, so God has a different aspect for Yahweh and Allah, and could also be the supreme diety or universal concept of other major religions, like Brahman of Hinduism, Atum of Egyptian, primordial Chaos in Greek, etc
@@greenjay7471 it’s been a while since I’ve read the series but I thought that part about the Norse gods being illegitimate was just Sam reconciling her Islamic beliefs with her present Norse reality. I remember her saying that in her worldview the Norse gods are agents of Allah which at the time I found was a cool way of including a major religion and how that could intersect with “pagan” mythology.
I love the idea that light elves and dark elves are just the extroverts and introverts but because they live so long they just branch out (unintentional Yggdrasil pun 😅) to locations that are light or dark
While everyone in the comments is rightly gushing over the beautiful art, I would like to point out that the introduction of this video is longer than some entire early 'miscellaneous myths' videos, it really goes to show how much improvement there's been over the years, it is staggeringly impressive. Hats off to you Red.
After this, I now have an even greater appreciation for Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and all the other writers at Marvel for simplifying the Nine Realms for their comics and even codifying them for others:
Asgard(home of the Aesir), Midgard(Earth, home of mortals), Jotunheim(home of the giants), Muspelheim(home of Surtur and his fire demons), Alfheim(home of the Light elves), Vanaheim(home of the Aesir's sister race, the Vanir), Nidavellir(home of the dwarves), Svartalfheim(home of the Dark elves), and Niflheim(realm of darkness and cold, where Hel(heim) is also located).
There are also 3 additional "sub-realms": Urdarbrunnr(home of the Norns where they water Yggdrasil), Hvergelmir(part of Niflheim, where the Nidhogg gnaws at Yggdrasill's roots), and Mímisbrunnr(the source of Wisdom where Odin sacrificed his eye for).
There's also a "lost tenth realm" that Odin cut from Yggdrasill after a war: Heven(not the _Heaven_ of Abrahamic religions), where Angels reside(not the angels of Abrahamic religion either).
Okay please elaborate on that tenth realm stuff
@@mirjanbouma That's very likely a way to incorporate Anlanger and its sister realm, since they don't have very good credentials but are mentioned in an important source.
I have an even great hatred
You forgot the D&D translations, which are probably the most codified ones that exist, and got their first depictions in 1980. There's probably some overlap since Marvel first did Asgard in the 60s, but D&D tended to pull from mythology rather than other _contemporary_ fictional sources. Older fiction - like Conan - were open season though, being rather older and having had time to spawn an entire fantrasy/pseudo-history sub-genre (swords & sorcery)
@@rogerogue7226 I thought it was to incorporate former Image Comic's character, Angela, into the Marvel Universe after Marvel acquired her.
I love reviewing old mythology that I _think_ I have down right and then Red comes along on some Fridays saying “um, actually wait that’s bullshit, let me tell you why.”
I enjoy it a lot honestly.
From Miracle of Sound (and special guests) to Voiceplay to Red's own voice, "Valhalla Calling" is always a delight to hear. Perfect choice!
When i first started learning Norse mythology I was like "let's start by memorizing the nine realms… oh gods… There's too many or not enough?!?!"
i love how we as humans share a love and propensity for organizing things with vampires in classical lore whom would, according to said lore, compulsively count spilled seeds and grains. I love how this really lends itself to the idea that even when one becomes undead, they still retain some qualities of humanity.
and cranked up to eleven lol!!
and the fae! if you spill a bag of rice behind you as you run from them, they have to pick up every single grain before chasing you again.
4:08 (middle earth)
-17:08 Ægir & Rán’s realm?
5:12 Ásgardr (Aesir fortress)
-6:04 Alfheimr (Elf realm)
-14:32 Idavöllr? (Splendor-plain)
-14:57 Járnvidr? (Iron wood)
7:30 Jötunheimr (Jötun realm)
-15:46 Útgardr? (Outyards)
-16:14 Glæsisvellir? (Glittering meadow)
8:52 Vanaheimr (Vanir realm)
9:45 Niflhel (dead mist)
-Helhiemr? (Dead world)
-Niflhiemr? (Mist world)
-15:24 Nidafjöll? (Evil/dark mountains)
-10:46 9 more realms?
11:34 Niflheimr & Muspelhiemr (Fire & mist realms)
-13:16 Ginnungagap (The void)
13:36 Nidavellir (N/A)
-13:50 Okolnir? (Never cold)
14:18 Urdarbrunnr (Well of Urdr)
You somehow Managed to boil it down to 9 with Various Regions within those Nine... Because after all, if each realm is it's own Dimension/"Planet", makes sense they'd have their own countries and regions right? Good Work!
You do the Aesir's work.
@@kgmotte2363 but isn't that still 8?
@@hburton7176 Niflheimr & Muspelhiemr are spoken in the same Line, but they're Still 2 Separate Realms... Though to be Fair there's a Redundancy anyway, Since Niflheimr is already Noted in Nefilhel... Personally, I think that Hel is a Realm within Nefilheimr, And Helheimr is a specific Hall within Hel though(Kinda like how Valhalla is a Hall within Asgard).
I'd Also note that Nidavillir Is most likely a Realm or Hall within Svartalfheimr, And Okolnir is much the same. But that doesn't really Change the number so who cares.
"That's 29, do I hear 30?" - Vegeta, TFS
The idea that the world of flame and the world of ice just has a random void in between and the way they clash is what makes our earth is actually an interesting metaphor for how the planets formed around our sun, where the earth was born, killed, and cooled in the vastness of space, especially in the context of a culture who had no real idea of what the words geocentric or heliocentric meant... or they probably did and the fact they did is also lost to time.
I click on the video to get some stories and tropes, and suddenly, in 1 minute, we have a commentary on how it's hard to fit things in boxes, but we probably keep doing it because it's fun to do and satisfying when it somewhat works.
I'm just amazed. People would have probably done hour long conferences to say just that, and that's just the introduction.
What a channel.
It's almost as if these were orally transmitted religious beliefs over a long period of time, between a large number of groups in a huge region and no a centralised dogma or priestly system...
Great job Red!
Bummer they didn't use any of their established writing system to WRITE IT DOWN
@@cottagecreations2431and instead the monks of a different religion wrote them down and definitely didn't have any agenda when doing so.
Doesnt help that there are no sources that pre-date the huge wide-spred religion that has a history of earasing other's history and rewirte it to better fit their narrative
@@cottagecreations2431 even then, there's no guarantee those texts would've survived. paper and water doesn't mix very well, and considering that the norse were seafarers, lived on lands infamous for their many lakes, brooks, streams, rivers and fjords, and where it snows half of the year, water damage would've been inevitable.
@@silverdrag0n_ If only they had some other thing that they really loved writing on with their own, special writing system, that was already often used for spiritual, religious, and ceremonial purposes...
Reminds me of Japanese (Shinto) mythology: Often when numbers are used, either the numbers are supposed to not be taken literally (8 is often used to mean "all") or things are made up to have a certain number of entities or things (often 3, 5 or 7).
When it comes to worlds, the only ones that are clearly established are Takamanohara (Plain of High Heaven where the Heavenly Gods live) and Ashihara (Reed Plains where the Earthly Gods, humans etc. live). The afterworlds get more fuzzy because other than Yomi where the first dead deity goes to, the realms Ne no Kuni (Land of Roots) and Tokoyo (a realm of timelessness) are scarcely described. And these are just the worlds mentioned in the books Kojiki and Nihonshoki. In folklore, you have other realms apart from these, like Kakuriyo, some kind of otherworld.
Hey I've been studying that! What do you theorize that Takamagahara(The spelling I have) is?
I think it's possible that it was literally the first fort the Yayoi people settled.
@@deiansalazar140 Takamanohara is a different way to pronounce Takamagahara btw. Did you study that in private or at uni?
I do not feel qualified to make any theories since I only informed myself on Shintology in my spare time and did not officially study it but I think Shintologists agree that Takamagahara (and Ashihara) are based on Taoist beliefs of Heaven and Earth, with the latter mirroring the former, since Shinto was influenced by Taoism (that's where the "to" for 'way' comes from) and the beginnings of Kojiki and Nihonshoki were borrowed from the Taoist creation myth.
Additionally, since Kojiki and Nihonshoki were written for political reasons, Takamagahara (and their kami) is supposed to represent the state/culture of Yamato and Ashihara (and their kami) the state/culture of Izumo.
What Takamagahara originally might have been supposed to be, I do not know. I read a book by Nelly Naumann on the origins of Shinto and I can't remember if she talked about that...
@@EleiyaUmei I don't know oral traditions can be a lot more reliable than that to be honest. Ultimately I am mixed on that theory. I tend to view mythology as embellishments of dramatized retellings of historical events until suddenly everyone is in a lot more powerful of a place and what were once epithets or symbolism is made literal. That's my theory behind the Nemean Lion for instance.
The idea that 9 is a stand-in for "a lot" is backed up by later Medieval convention that 123 just meant "a lot", which is why the viking fleet at the Siege of Paris was said to number 123 ships despite that being very unlikely given the logistics of such a fleet at the time
Red's art is always really good, but this episode has some of the most gorgeous pieces I've seen! Beautiful stuff
Maybe the nine realms are not necessarily separate dimensions, but more like separate regions. Like Mt Olympus being the home of Greek gods, but also just being a real place that you can go to. This would mean that Yggdrasil is more of a metaphorical tree than a description of the structure of the nine realms. The nine realms might be more like nine countries, abstracted through mythicization. It’s easy to see how midgar being between the realms of fire and ice is just a description of it being at a latitude below the arctic circle, but above the hot weather of the Mediterranean. Alfheim might just be the place next to Asgard.
Which still brings up the question of which nine are capital-R Realms. (And why you need to cross a rainbow bridge to reach Asgard.)
"are not necessarily separate dimensions, but more like separate regions"
Given how people travelling through all of those locations are described... pretty much that's it.
@@timothymclean i honestly think the rainbow bridge was completely made up at some point to make it seem extra cool and magical.
@@GusCraft460 That is how stories work, yes. How does it answer my actual question?
@@timothymclean Maybe cause Asgard exists in the sky somewhere. Find a rainbow, walk up towards it, Bob's your uncle you've found Asgard.
Considering you can never actually reach a rainbow it's a good place to put your mythical god city.
Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology book is my favourite variation of Norse myths, not just because, well, he's Neil Gaiman and I happen to like his storytelling very much, but also because he actually makes it make sense and turns into a compelling, intertwined narrative.
3:36 as a german student, i can heavily relate to that
Even if it's unsatisfying, I appreciate that you keep the education and information true to life.
Just a guess, but I think the Alfheim in Asgard is meant to be the name for the neighborhood where the most elves live (in the way that English speakers call places Chinatown or Little Italy) rather than a whole other realm crammed into Asgard. Love the idea that 9 just means "some", by the way.
I definitely feel like this could be in line with and could have potentially influenced how Tolkien set things up in his lore as well. The Valar live in a separate continent of Aman, who at a point in history after the Elves were born brought them to Aman and they established their own named cities and regions, so the areas inhabited by the Elves are the Alfheim to Tolkien's Asgard, at least roughtly.
The Alfar are *very* seldomly referred to in the lore, it's extremely unclear what they are. The most likely explanation is that they are servants of the Aesir or something like that, since they seem to be closely associated with them, but it's all just rampant speculation. For all we know that association was because they both start with a vowel and the poet needed to alliterate.
this could also be alluded to the fact that the álfar were likely deities themselves, albeit minor ones compared to the æsir (they even had their own blót dedicated to them, literally/obviously called álfablót)
Gotta love how, even though Red is slowly losing her mind over all this, she still (or maybe because of it) made great paintings of these locations.
3:56 I love the phrase “a forgery written by the ghost of Tacitus”
I like the seven seas comparison. Mainly because I am fairly certain that is exactly the case - the nine realms were a couple of realms ppl agreed upon, and then some extras. But which the extras were, depended on the sailor (storyteller) and their origin. And just like characters in king arthurs tales from your episode about it, the vagueness of some of them allowed the storyteller to actually invent their own OC's ("OR" [Original realm] in this case?). This is why, just like seas, there are a bunch more realms than there should be. Even if someone's story is adopted, it might later fall off and become less relevant once a significant enough paradigm shift has happened (like some nations sea goes away when the nation no longer exists, etc). Maybe we brought home slaves from a new area, with significant visual differences from what we are used to know? Or we traveled far enough to experience a wildly different climate? Or the climate itself changed? Or we brought home slaves who learnt our language and communicated their myths that had to be meshed with ours (maybe the answer is that they came from a distinct realm, where their gods was yet another race of beings)?
As for the hot and cold realms, feels like they could simply have been the way to explain why midgard had such a distinct temperature gradient as you traveled north or south. And if stories survived from or even throughout ice-ages (or ppl interpreted traces correctly), that might explain some other stuff too. After all, mythology is often simply a reflection of reality, and is humanity's best attempt at explaining what they lacked the means to properly explain (in a way, it is the science of that time. Where people were told "these things exist and are fact, this is a natural event you need to explain, now feel free to extrapolate an explanation based on your axioms." Much like when someone is told about physics in school, _doesn't verify its veracity themselves and simply trusts it,_ and then publishes some great explanation or theory based on it that furthers our understanding of reality).
But that's just some theories. A game theories!
Something you didn't mention: "Aesir and alfar" (elves) are mentioned together often enough, without elaboration, that some people think that "alfar/elves" was just another name for the Vanir. Which makes sense, if you think about it, since they're ruled over by Frey, and would also explain Alfheim being right next door to Asgard.
I'm actually glad Red mentioned at the very end the idea that '9' might just be a more poetic way of saying something vs like actually 9. I have been taking a Japanese History/Mythology class in my university and something my teacher brought up was how in the Myth where Susanoo goes out and fights the giant fuck off snake the number '8' pops up a lot like all throughout the myth, but that '8' isn't supposed to represent the number 8 it was a literary short hand meant to invoke this idea of like a really impressive number or amount of something. Like something was 'uncountable' so they used the number 8. He also said this has some relations to Ancient Chinese beliefs but he didn't go into a lot of detail with that so I don't know. Obviously I haven't fact checked my professor on this so I don't know if it's true or not, but that was something I wondered watching this video if the number 9 isn't 9 so much as it is meant to be like 'uncountable' this could also explain why there are supposedly 'other realms within realms'. Just an interesting thought. I personally find that really interesting since from a creative point of view it gives us a lot ot work with if we wanna make something up for like a DnD campaign or something.
15:00 "Also maybe yeeees?" is saving my life right now. I am in so much pain and nausea. Thank you for being here, OSP. Bless whoever invented the internet, too.
Finally, there's someone who acknowledge the fact that there's something is up with the number 9 in norse mythology
I love how, even though they are only tangentially referred in the writings, Red still makes unique backgrounds for the other proposed realms. It feels like the drawings also become gradually better as they become more niche.
Thank you for addressing the (IMO likeliest) possibility that "nine" was just the ancient Norse way to say "a bunch." While humans have always liked to sort and categorize things, I do think that modern Americans are WAY more obsessed with strict categorization of everything than a lot of other cultures (past and present).
16:50 so glad i wasn't insane for hearing, magical never grow old land with a notable young woman and thinking 'Tír na Nóg'
A slight suggestion for future video topics:
1. Saxo Grammaticus
2. Euhemerus
3. The Origins of Hera
4. Anubis
5. Horus vs Set
6. A video about mother quacking Zagreus or even his sisters
one, ONE video of Hecate please
@@hermoonself Surely they should make three videos at once?
I am debating paying 500 bucks for a 15 minute video about the Frankish Epic Cycle
@@billcipher4368 There's really not that much to be said about Zagreus, or his sisters that get, like, single references. But another conspiracy board about them would be cool.
Ah yes, I remember reading my Roger Lancelyn Green Norse myth collection as a child, seeing the term 'nine worlds' and going, 'wait but did he mention all of them?