The Serpent at the Chart's Edge

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — the Lofoten coast, deep winter

The old chart-makers of the northern coast never left the edges of their maps empty. Where the soundings ran out and the known skerries gave way to blank vellum, they drew coils — a great ribbed body, sometimes crowned, always turning back upon itself. Fishermen here still speak of it more plainly than any cartographer dared: Jörmungandr, the serpent that lies along the seabed of the whole world, so long that its jaws have closed at last upon its own tail.

The story, as it comes down through the Eddas, gives the serpent a parentage that already marks it as trouble. It is child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, sibling to the wolf Fenrir and to Hel who keeps the dead. Odin, reading the shape of what was coming, cast the serpent into the sea that girdles Midgard, and there it grew until its body reached all the way round and its mouth found its own tail again. The old telling calls this the World Serpent for good reason — it is not a monster in the sea so much as a boundary drawn in flesh, the line past which the charted world becomes something else.

It surfaces properly only twice in the tales that survive. Once when Thor, disguised and short-tempered aboard the giant Hymir's boat, baits a hook with an ox's head and hauls the serpent up from the deep, close enough that the two of them look each other in the eye before the line is cut or the giant's nerve fails, depending on which version the teller favours — the sources themselves do not agree, and I have long since stopped trying to force them to. And once more at the end of things, at Ragnarök, when the serpent rises from the sea in earnest, poisoning the sky with its breath, and meets Thor a final time. In that meeting each kills the other — the god managing nine steps away from the serpent's body before the venom takes him. It is one of the few places in the mythology where an ending is allowed to be an ending, with no clever escape written in afterward.

What interests me, walking this coast, is how naturally the serpent moved from saga into seamanship. Sailors who never sat in a hall to hear the Eddas recited still knew a version of the tale, passed hand to hand along the same routes the herring followed, and by the time the great printed sea-charts of the sixteenth century were being drawn — the Carta Marina and its kin — the coiled sea-serpent had become shorthand on the page itself, a mark meaning here the water is deeper than any line can sound, here the ordinary rules of the coast no longer apply. Whether the chart-makers believed in Jörmungandr precisely, or simply inherited a shape that had always stood for the unknown edge of things, I could not settle to my own satisfaction. The two possibilities are not, in any case, as distinct as they first appear.

Stand on this shore in winter, with the light going early and the swell coming in long and grey from somewhere past sight, and the old instinct is not hard to recover. The world does have an edge here, or feels as though it does. Something is holding it together at the seam. It is, I think, no accident that the serpent's death and the god's death arrive together — a boundary and its keeper, going down in the same hour, so that neither one is left to mean anything without the other.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.