Jormungandr the World-Serpent, the Wrath of the Earth
The word gandr can mean a staff used in magic, but it can also mean a spirit being, sometimes sent out by someone with the magical power to do so, but sometimes one with its own will (Korecká, Wizards and Words, pp. 235-245). Jǫrmungandr, “Great Gandr” or “Primal Gandr,” is best known as Thor’s foe. Thor fishes it up and tries to kill it in Hymiskvi›a (Gylfaginning 48), tries to lift it in Utgardaloki’s hall (Gylfaginning 46-47), and will one day kill and be killed by it (Gylfaginning 51, Vǫluspá 54).
Not too terribly much to go on, is it?
To go a little deeper, and maybe claw out a bit more for Jormungandr in ancient art or literature, we have to turn to folk art and folk tales.
The Muckle Stoor Worm
Myths of Jǫrmungandr may have survived in Orkney, where there are tales of the Muckle Stoor Worm (“very big worm”) or Muckle Stove Worm, an enormous sea-dragon that feeds upon maidens. The hero of the tales defeats the Worm by setting his liver on fire. As the Worm writhes in his death throes, his flailing forked tongue gouges out the Baltic Sea, the teeth that he sheds become Orkney, Shetland, and the Faroes, and his coiled body becomes Iceland, with the liver inside it stillburning (Dennison, “Orkney Folklore: Sea Myths II,” pp. 130-131).
Depictions of Giant Serpents in Ancient Artwork
Several Gotlandic picture stones associate the sea with great serpents. The design on the Hablingbo Havor II stone is bordered by waves that bear serpents’ heads, and this is shown even more clearly on the Hejnum stone, where a ship is sailing on the waves (Pearl, “The Water Dragon and the Snake Witch,” esp. figs. 2, 4, 7). Other Gotland stones from the earlier stages (ca. 400-600 CE) show serpents coiling around circles with wavy or spiraling geometric motifs.
Perhaps the finest is the Sanda stone, where two serpents face each other as they coil around circles containing wave patterns. The people who made these stones may not have seen the serpent as hostile, but rather as the boundary between the ordered world and primal chaos. Dragons, of course, coil themselves around treasure—sometimes gold, sometimes women, and perhaps in this case the Earth itself. They defend their treasures, but what they defend does no good to anyone in the end, unless it can be released. The carvers of the picture stones may have thought of Jǫrmungandr as similar to dragons (Myrberg, “Burning Down the House,” pp. 101-110).
The Cosmological Jormungandr: the boundary of horizontal space
In fact, all three of Angrboda’s children by Loki may be thought of as defining the axes on which the cosmos is arranged. Jǫrmungandr surrounds the lands of men, creating the boundary of “horizontal” space; Hel rules the world of the dead below the center, defining the “vertical” axis of realms surrounding Midgard; and Fenrir’s binding happens at the beginning of time and his loosing will mark its end, creating the time axis along which Midgard’s history happens (Lindow, Murder and Vengeance, pp. 54-55).
Seen in this way, Angrboda and her children are not evil, as such.
Was Jormungandr Ever Worshipped in History?
We have no evidence of Jormungandr’s worship in history.
While all of Angrboda and Loki’s children are assigned their own parts in the grand scheme of the divine drama: defining the cosmic order and eventually bringing it to its fated conclusion; nowhere in any of the existing literature or artwork are Fenrir, his brood, and Jǫrmungandr shown as bringers of anything good to humans. There is no evidence that any of these beings were worshipped in ancient times.
But, as with all these answers, this shouldn’t be a stopping point. If we were doing reenactment, maybe. If the whole point of our faith was just to pretend to be ancient people, then we wouldn’t be pretending very well But is there something about Jormungandr’s story that, when read today, produces a different reaction?
Today Jormungandr is seen by some Heathens as the wrath of an angry planet, the force of nature’s justified wrath responding to human encroachment on the wilds and the disruption of nature’s balance
It’s important that we try to talk about the modern development of Heathen belief not as something to be prevented but as something that is meant to be understood. When people who practice our religion confront the situations and the realities of our modern world, myths and stories necessarily take on different coloring. That’s exactly what stories are supposed to do.
This belief isn’t surprising given the eco-conscious nature of modern Pagan movements and the general feeling that the ongoing climate catastrophe is a justified response by an angry mother earth who is attempting to restore balance against human disruption through over-consumption.
It makes sense first when you think about the difference of the threat that nature posed to mankind in the late iron age when the poems in the Edda were composed, versus the threat that mankind poses to nature now. For many modern people, the anxiety is the exact opposite: instead of nature destroying us, the real concern is that the humanity is destroying nature itself–perhaps beyond any repair.
Jormungandr fills in quite nicely here as a powerful avenging force of the earth, but also as a kind of divine punishment for humankind’s incursion against nature and our greedy and selfish use of natural resources.
In fact, for some Heathens, it’s harder to imagine or pray to a God like Thor to protect humanity when things like the climate crisis are, in fact, our own fault. To these Heathens, it feels more just to pray instead for the defender of the downtrodden earth against the relentless destruction of the natural world.
For these Heathens, then, Jormungandr becomes the hero of the Earth, who comes to its aid whenever human activity threatens the delicate balance of life.