A cosmos under threat

What distinguishes the Norse gods is a cosmology shadowed by its own ending: the world-tree Yggdrasil, the nine worlds it holds, and the foretold destruction of the gods at Ragnarok, from which a renewed world emerges. The gods are powerful but mortal, bound by fate.

These figures were revived in the modern Heathen and Asatru movements and are objects of contemporary devotion as well as historical study; the entries distinguish the medieval literary record from later and modern reconstruction.