Horizontality and Verticality in Old-Norse Views on Cosmology

Abstract

The aim of this article is to determine how two logically contradictory cosmological concepts, the vertical and the horizontal, could have co-existed in the Old Nordic mythological system and what their function was.

Keywords

• Old-Norse religion
• Old-Norse mythology
• cosmology
• vertical axis
• horizontal axis
• world view
• structuralism
• poststructuralism