Norse Mythology Creatures

Norse mythology creatures are the beasts, monsters, and other beings of the Norse myths, from the monstrous wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jörmungandr to Surtr, the guardian of the fire-world Múspell, the Norns who shape fate, and Odin's Valkyries. Most are known from the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, both written down in 13th-century Iceland; a few, like the huldra and the kraken, belong to much later Scandinavian folklore.

Many famous characters in Norse mythology would not be as memorable without exciting enemies to fight. Countless creatures crossed paths with Odin, Thor, and the other gods, and each one carries its own background story rooted in Norse mythology symbols and their meanings.

Most of what we know was written down in Christian Iceland in the 13th century, long after the Viking Age, so how Viking-Age people saw these beings is hard to say. Later folklore certainly used them to explain the unknown: bad dreams were blamed on the mara, tangled hair on her touch, and stray boulders on trolls.

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What Are the Fire Monsters of Norse Mythology?

Norse myth has no class of beings called fire monsters. What it has is Múspell (Muspelheim), the burning world in the south, and its guardian Surtr. In Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson says Surtr sits at the edge of that land to defend it, holding a flaming sword. At Ragnarök he rides out at the head of the sons of Múspell, his sword shining brighter than the sun, and in the end he flings fire over the earth and burns the whole world. Modern books call them fire giants, a label the sources do not use. Alongside them, the most fearsome monsters of Norse myth include the great wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, and the dragon Níðhöggr, who in Völuspá sucks the corpses of the dead and in Grímnismál gnaws Yggdrasil from below.

The Gods Fought Them, but Not Forever

The Norse gods and goddesses were not the only powers known to people. Many beings shared the world with the Vikings in one way or another. People did look to the gods for victory: the poem Hyndluljóð says Odin gives victory to some and wealth to others, and Snorri calls Týr a god with great power over victory in battle, good for brave men to call on. But no source has the gods cross Bifröst to fight beside human warriors. Snorri calls Bifröst the bridge the gods made from earth to heaven, and the Æsir ride over it every day to their court at the well of Urðr.

The gods clashed with many of these beings, and those struggles made them famous among the people. Most creatures were weaker than the gods, yet they were essential to the Norse universe we know today.

Some of these beings were chaotic, fearsome, and destructive, while others were benevolent. A few could be either, depending on the story.

Most Popular Norse Mythology Creatures

Some of these beings belonged to the night, like the dead who walked again and the mara that rode sleepers, and many were far more powerful than any human.

The Norse world also held beings who could help as well as harm, such as the dwarfs, who forged the gods' treasures, and the elves.

Among the most important beings were the giants (jötnar), the gods' great rivals, though several gods married giantesses. One well-known figure of giant descent is Hel, Loki's daughter by the giantess Angrboða, to whom Odin gave authority over nine worlds and over those who die of sickness or old age. The most notable being in the Norse end-times narrative, however, is Fenrir, the wolf that swallows Odin at Ragnarök.

With the surface scratched, here is a closer look at the most prominent beings of Norse myth.

1) Dwarfs

Dwarfs were known across the Germanic world, not only in Scandinavia. Snorri says they first came to life as maggots in the flesh of the primeval giant Ymir, and by the gods' decree gained human understanding and the likeness of men, though they live in the earth and in rocks. Nothing in the Eddas says they are small; the short dwarf owes more to later folklore.

In Snorri's Edda, dwarfs and "black elves" (svartálfar) seem to be the same beings: when the gods need a fetter for Fenrir, they send to certain dwarfs in Svartálfaheimr, a place he never describes. Dwarfs are the master smiths of the myths. In Skáldskaparmál the sons of Ívaldi make Gungnir, Odin's spear, and the dwarf Sindri (Eitri in some manuscripts), with his brother Brokkr at the bellows, makes Mjölnir, Thor's hammer.

Daylight was dangerous to such beings. In the poem Alvíssmál, the wise dwarf Alvíss comes to claim Thor's daughter as his bride, and Thor keeps him answering questions all night until the sun shines into the hall. The poem ends there; it is usually read as Alvíss turning to stone, but it does not say so. The plainest case is a giantess: in Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar the troll-woman Hrímgerðr is kept talking until day breaks, and she stands there turned to stone.

2) Elves

Snorri Sturluson describes two kinds of elves: the ljósálfar, or light elves, who live in Álfheimr, and the dökkálfar, the dark elves, who live down in the earth. The two are unlike in looks and still more unlike in nature. Whether these dark elves are the same as the svartálfar of other passages, and so the same as the dwarfs, is still debated.

The light elves are fairer than the sun to look at, Snorri says, and the dark elves blacker than pitch. Grímnismál says the gods gave Álfheimr, the elven homeland, to the Vanir god Freyr in days of old as a tooth-gift. Elves could heal as well as harm: in Kormáks saga a wounded man is told to redden an elf-hill with a bull's blood and feast the elves on its meat, and he will recover, while later Scandinavian folklore blamed elves for sickness.

3) Draugar (the Undead)

The draugr (plural draugar) is the undead grave-dweller of Norse tradition; the sagas also speak of an aptrgöngumaðr, "one who walks again", or a haugbúi, "mound-dweller". These are not ghosts but bodily corpses of great strength and weight, closer to walking corpses than to modern vampires. In Eyrbyggja saga the body of the overbearing Þórólfr Lame-foot grows so heavy that the oxen hauling it go mad and run until they burst, and when he is dug up later he is "blue as Hel and big as an ox", the same words Grettis saga uses for the dead shepherd Glámr.

Some draugar stayed in their burial mounds with the treasure they were buried with. In Grettis saga, Kárr the Old has walked again until every other farmer has left his island, and Grettir breaks into his mound, wrestles him and takes the treasure. Others left the grave to haunt the living. Glámr wrestles Grettir at a farmhouse and, beaten, lays a curse on him: Glámr's eyes will always be before him, and he will find it hard to be alone.

Ending a draugr meant cutting off its head and laying it at its buttocks, as Grettir does to both Kárr and Glámr, or burning the body until only cold coals were left, as was done to Glámr and Þórólfr. In the sagas the dead who walk are often people who were hard to live with in life: Þórólfr is called the most overbearing of men, and Glámr was not to people's liking.

4) Hulder (Huldra)

The huldra of Norwegian folklore, like the Swedish skogsrå or forest keeper, belongs to the nature spirits of later Scandinavian folklore rather than to Eddic myth. She watches over the woods and appears as a woman of striking beauty, with a tail like a cow's and a back that is hollow or, in Swedish tales, like the bark of a tree.

The huldra could pass as a young woman and walk among people, her disguise broken only if someone glimpsed her tail. She lured single men into the forest to make them lovers or servants, and in some tales drained the life from them.

5) Kraken

The kraken is a giant sea-monster of Norwegian fishermen's lore. It belongs to much later folklore, not to the Eddas or the Viking Age: the classic account is by Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History of Norway (1752–53, in English 1755). He describes it as round, flat and full of arms, with a back about one and a half English miles around that looks like a cluster of small islands.

Fishermen, Pontoppidan says, knew it was below when the sea seemed far too shallow and their lines came up full of cod and ling, and they rowed away fast when the bottom seemed to rise. When the kraken sank again, it raised such a swell and whirlpool that it drew everything down with it. Pontoppidan took it for a real animal, perhaps a giant polyp or starfish, and its sheer size made it one of the most enduring monsters of the northern seas.

6) Ratatoskr

Ratatoskr is a squirrel that scurries up and down Yggdrasil, the great tree of the cosmos. Grímnismál (stanza 32) says he carries the eagle's words down to Níðhöggr, the dragon that gnaws the tree from below. Snorri places the eagle in the ash's branches and says Ratatoskr carries words of envy between the two.

Modern retellings make Ratatoskr a deliberate troublemaker who keeps a feud alive between the dragon below and the eagle above. The sources only say that he carries spiteful words between them; they give no reason for it.

7) Trolls

In Old Norse texts troll is a loose word for giants, witches and other hostile beings. Later Scandinavian folklore knows trolls of many kinds and sizes, from huge, ugly trolls of the mountains and forests to smaller ones that live deep in caves and under the earth. They are usually seen as malevolent and dim, though some stories show them repaying a favour with kindness.

The Scandinavian countryside is strewn with boulders, and folklore held that trolls hurled these rocks as weapons. Another belief says the boulders are trolls themselves, caught in sunlight and turned to stone.

8) Norns

The three Norns, Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld, are female beings who shape fate. In Völuspá (stanza 20) they come from the lake under the world-tree, lay down laws and choose the lives of the children of men. Snorri says they live by the Well of Urðr under Yggdrasil and every day pour water and mud from the well over the ash so that its branches do not wither or rot. He adds that other norns come to every child that is born, some of the gods' kin, some of the elves' and some of the dwarfs'.

The tree needs that care. Grímnismál (stanza 35) says the ash suffers more than men know: a hart bites it from above, it rots at the side, and Níðhöggr gnaws it from below. When Ragnarök comes, Völuspá says, the ash shakes and groans, yet the poem goes on to see the earth rise again, green, from the sea.

9) Valkyries

The Valkyries are among the most famous beings of Norse myth. They are Odin's female spirits, whose name means "choosers of the slain." Snorri says Odin sends them to every battle, where they choose which men will die and decide the victory. The fallen who go to Odin become the einherjar in Valhalla, where Valkyries bring them ale, and they wait there for Ragnarök, when Grímnismál says eight hundred of them will march out of each of Valhalla's doors to fight the wolf.

The Valkyries served Odin and shaped the outcome of war. The poem Darraðarljóð, preserved in Njáls saga, even shows them weaving a battle on a loom of men's entrails, weighted with men's heads. If you honour this tradition, you can carry it with you through our Viking jewelry collection or a piece like this Valkyrie design.

10) Sleipnir

Sleipnir is Odin's eight-legged horse, and Grímnismál calls him the best of horses. His origin is one of the strangest in the myths. Loki, in the form of a mare, lured away Svaðilfari, the powerful stallion of the giant who was building the wall around Asgard, and some time later bore a grey foal with eight legs. So Loki is not Sleipnir's father but his mother.

11) Mare

The mara, or mare, is a night-spirit that brings bad dreams; she survives in the English word nightmare. The oldest story comes from Ynglinga saga: the Swedish king Vanlandi lies down to sleep and cries out that a mara is trampling him, and when his men try to help, she tramples his legs until they nearly break and then smothers his head until he dies. The sorceress Huld had worked the spell, paid by Drífa, the wife Vanlandi had abandoned. In later folklore the mara sits on the chest of a sleeper, pressing down and giving nightmares, and was held to be a wandering soul that slipped from a person's body to torment others in the dark.

Another belief cast these spirits as witches whose souls could take animal form and roam at night. The mare's touch was said to tangle what it brushed against, twisting the hair of sleepers into knots known as marelocks.

12) Fenrir

Fenrir is the most famous wolf in the Norse universe. He is the child of the god Loki and the giantess Angrboða. Prophecies warned the gods that Loki's children would bring them great harm, so the Æsir raised the wolf at home, where only Týr dared to feed him, and Fenrir grew at an alarming rate.

As he grew larger and more dangerous, the gods resolved to bind him, and turned it into a test of strength. Fenrir snapped the fetters Læðingr and Drómi with ease, so the gods sent to the dwarfs, who made Gleipnir from six strange things, among them the sound of a cat's footfall and the roots of a mountain.

Suspecting a trick, Fenrir demanded that one of the gods place a hand in his jaws as a pledge of good faith. None of the gods would offer a hand until Týr put his right hand in the wolf's mouth. When the wolf found he could not break free, he bit Týr's hand off at the wrist.

The gods chained Fenrir and propped his jaws open with a sword. His slaver runs out as the river called Ván, "Hope" or "Expectation", and poets call him Vánargandr, the monster of the Ván. At Ragnarök, Fenrir breaks loose and swallows Odin himself, and Odin's son Víðarr avenges him by tearing the wolf's jaws apart.

Two more wolves chase the sun and the moon across the sky. Snorri says Sköll chases the sun, while Hati Hróðvitnisson runs ahead of her and wants to seize the moon, and that both come from an old giantess in the Ironwood (Járnviðr) who bears giant sons in the shape of wolves. At Ragnarök one wolf swallows the sun and the other takes the moon. They are often called Fenrir's sons for two reasons: Grímnismál (stanza 39) calls Hati the son of Hróðvitnir, almost the name Lokasenna gives Fenrir (Hróðrsvitnir), and Völuspá (stanza 40) says the old one in the Ironwood bred Fenrir's kin.

Norse Mythology Creatures: FAQ

What are the fire monsters of Norse mythology?
The sources do not speak of fire monsters as such. They tell of Múspell, the burning world in the south, and its guardian, the giant Surtr, who holds a flaming sword. At Ragnarök, Surtr rides out at the head of the sons of Múspell, his sword shining brighter than the sun, and flings fire over the earth that burns the whole world.

Who is Fenrir in Norse mythology?
Fenrir is the monstrous wolf, child of Loki and the giantess Angrboða. The gods bound him with the dwarf-made fetter Gleipnir while Týr's hand lay in the wolf's jaws as a pledge, and Týr lost it. At Ragnarök, Fenrir breaks free and swallows Odin.

What does Ratatoskr do?
Ratatoskr is a squirrel that runs up and down the world-tree Yggdrasil, carrying words between the eagle in its branches and the dragon Níðhöggr, who gnaws the tree from below. Snorri calls them words of envy; the sources give no reason for his mischief.

Where did Sleipnir, Odin's horse, come from?
Sleipnir is Odin's eight-legged horse, the best of horses. He was foaled by Loki, who took the form of a mare and lured away Svaðilfari, the stallion of the giant who was building the wall around Asgard.

Who are the Norns?
The Norns are three female beings named Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld who shape fate. They live by the Well of Urðr under Yggdrasil and every day pour water and mud from the well over the tree so that its branches do not wither or rot.

Which Creature Would You Least Want to Meet?

These are some of the most famous beings of Norse myth, and the wider tradition holds many more. If you were a Viking warrior, which of these creatures would you most want to avoid? Share your answer in the comments below.

Keep exploring: Fenrir and Jörmungandr, the full Norse pantheon, or shop wolf & serpent jewelry.