Norse family tree

The Norse family tree is small, tangled and full of holes, and the holes are honest ones. Where Greek genealogy was systematised by poets working to fit every city's claims together, nobody ever performed that operation on the Norse material. What survives is a set of poems that assume relationships without stating them, plus one thirteenth-century writer's attempt to organise the result.

Everyone is part giant

The single most striking feature of this tree is that the boundary it appears to draw does not exist. Odin's mother Bestla is a giantess, and his father Borr is the son of Búri, who was licked out of the salt ice by the primordial cow Auðumbla. Thor's mother is Jörð, the earth, reckoned among the giants. Loki's father is the giant Fárbauti. Freyr's wife Gerðr is a giantess; Njörðr's wife Skaði is one; Thor's son Magni is born of the giantess Járnsaxa.

The gods and the giants are not two species. They are two political groupings, and the tree shows a ruling family that is substantially descended from and married into the group it defines itself against. Almost every Norse myth turns on that boundary being tested, and the genealogy is the reason the testing never stops.

The two families that merged

The Æsir and the Vanir fought a war that ended in stalemate and an exchange of hostages, and the tree records the settlement rather than the conflict. Njörðr and his children Freyr and Freyja come across from the Vanir and stay. Snorri says Njörðr's children were born of his sister — the Vanir permitting sibling marriage, which the Æsir did not — and that detail, if it is genuine rather than an antiquarian's inference, is one of the few pieces of evidence for the Vanir as a distinct religious system rather than a narrative device.

Freyja's husband Óðr is a near-blank: he goes away, she weeps tears of gold, and the sources say almost nothing else. His name's resemblance to Óðinn's has generated a great deal of speculation and no consensus.

Loki's line, which is the plot

The most consequential branch on this tree is the one nobody wanted. By the giantess Angrboða, Loki fathers three children: the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel. The gods bind the first, throw the second into the sea, and set the third over the dead. All three come back at Ragnarok, and between them they account for the deaths of Odin, Thor and much of the rest of the pantheon.

Loki is also the mother of Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse, having taken mare form to lure away a giant's stallion. The tree draws that line as a maternal one, because that is what the sources say.

By his wife Sigyn he has Narfi and Váli, and their fate is part of his punishment: one is killed and the other transformed, and the dead son's entrails become his father's bonds.

Where the sources genuinely disagree

• Loki's status. He is listed among the Æsir and is the son of two giants. He is Odin's sworn blood-brother, which is a relationship of oath rather than blood, and the diagram marks it as such rather than as kinship.
• Frigg and Freyja. Whether these are two goddesses or one split in transmission has been argued for two centuries. The Old English and Old High German evidence points one way, the Norse sources treat them as clearly distinct. The tree follows the Norse sources and notes the question.
• Odin's sons. The lists vary by source. Thor, Baldr, Víðarr, Váli and Höðr are stable; Bragi, Heimdall, Týr and others appear in some enumerations and not others, and Snorri is the one doing most of the enumerating.
• Týr's father. Snorri makes him a son of Odin. The Eddic poem Hymiskviða makes him the son of the giant Hymir, which is a completely different placement, and both are marked.
• Heimdall's mothers. He is said to be born of nine mothers, who are usually read as the daughters of the sea. No source explains the mechanism, and the tree records it as given.

Who survives

Unlike any other tree on this site, this one has an end date and a list of survivors, and it is worth reading the diagram with that in mind. Víðarr and Váli, Odin's avenging sons, live. Thor's sons Magni and Móði live and inherit the hammer. Baldr and Höðr return from the dead. Hœnir remains. The generation that dies is the one currently in charge, and the generation that inherits is made up mostly of sons who exist in the sources for no other purpose than to survive their fathers.

Reading the diagram

Solid lines are relationships the sources agree on; broken lines carry the disagreement and name the works. Marriages and liaisons run horizontally, and giant ancestry is shown rather than hidden, which makes the tree busier than the tidy versions in most handbooks and considerably more accurate to what the Eddas actually say.

Figures whose only attestation is a single line in a list — and Norse mythology has a great many of these — appear with no descent drawn, because inventing one would be exactly the failure this tree exists to avoid. For how the whole corpus reached us and how much of it depends on one man, see the Norse tradition hub.