Nott

Nott is the personification of night in Norse myth, a giantess (jotunn) who rides across the sky in a chariot drawn by the horse Hrimfaxi, Frost-mane, from whose bit the dew is said to fall each morning. In Snorri's account she is dark as befits her kin, and by her third husband Dellingr she is mother of Dagr, Day, who rides after her on the shining horse Skinfaxi whose mane lights the sky, so that night and day are a mother and son circling the heavens in turn.

The scheme, set out in the poem Vafthrudnismal and elaborated by Snorri, is characteristic of Norse cosmology's habit of assigning a driving figure to each recurring feature of the sky. Nott has no cult; she is a figure of cosmological poetry rather than of worship. Nott's genealogy varies between sources: Snorri gives her three successive husbands, ending with Dellingr, father of Dagr, while the eddic poem Vafthrudnismal names her more simply as daughter of the giant Norvi, a discrepancy typical of the way Norse cosmological genealogy could be elaborated differently by different tellers without any single version being treated as final. Her horse Hrimfaxi, Frost-mane, is paired directly with Dagr's horse Skinfaxi, Shining-mane, in the same eddic poem, so that the entire day-night cycle is imagined as two riders and their mounts completing an endless circuit of the sky rather than as an abstract alternation.

The image of Night as a rider driving a chariot across the sky, paired with a chariot-driving Day, places Nott within a much wider Indo-European habit of imagining the alternation of light and dark as a race between mounted or wheeled figures rather than as an impersonal cycle. The Greeks personified night as the primordial goddess Nyx, one of the very first beings born from Chaos in Hesiod's Theogony, though the Greek tradition generally does not give her the same chariot-and-horse imagery Snorri gives Nott, while Vedic hymns address Ratri, night, as a goddess who follows her sister Ushas, the dawn, across the sky in a related but independently developed poetic tradition.

What is distinctive about the Norse version is its mechanical precision: Nott and Dagr are assigned specific named horses, Hrimfaxi and Skinfaxi, whose very manes are said to generate the dew and the daylight respectively, turning an abstract cosmic alternation into a concrete image of two riders and two animals locked in an endless relay circuit around the world, one handing off to the other at the horizon in an unbroken sequence that requires no divine intervention or renewal, simply the ceaseless motion of an established order. This kind of tightly mechanical cosmology, where natural cycles are explained by the fixed, repeating actions of named figures and named animals rather than by ongoing divine will or attention, is characteristic of a good deal of Norse cosmological poetry, which tends toward an almost engineered, clockwork vision of how the physical world keeps running once the gods have set its pieces in motion at creation.