In the Land of the Frost Giants
I write these words in a world suddenly transformed, a new world of gleaming white and blowing cold. A place in which survival suddenly becomes something which one can longer take for granted. Of all the moods of Nature that we experience on our land, the arrival of a serious winter storm shows us one of her harshest and the most beautiful. It is a test of fortitude and preparedness that challenges all of those who live comfortably insulated from nature to remember that She is our mistress and She does what she wills.
As the snow fell and the cold began to set in, something transformed within me as well, internally, spiritually. My imagination awakened in the dark snow-filled forests of a mythic Northern realm, where storms like this howled through the thatched roofed halls and snow blew in under the massive oak doors. In place of the modest wood stove which warms our modern barn house, in this hall there blazed a raging fire in the hearth in the middle, keeping the fierce cold at bay with its circle of light and flame. The stories of the Frost Giants from Norse mythology sprang to my mind.
We have spoken of Chaos monsters who preceded creation, emerging from the cold depths of beginningless time, great titanic beings of the primal darkness from whose shattered bodies the cosmos was made. In the Gylfaginning, the first saga in the famous Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, the Primal Being, Ymir, the father of all Frost Giants, from whose body, vanquished by the First Gods, Odin, Vili, and Ve, the world in which we live, Midgard, was made. But before he died, as he slept, from the sweat of his sleeping body male and female frost giants were formed. His legs became a pair of giants as well. Thus born the children of Ymir multiplied in Jotunhein, the land of the hrimthurs, the wintry home of the titanic Jotun, the anti-gods of Norse cosmology.
We have also spoken of the wind and storm demons from the tales of ancient peoples who lived close to the land, the mischief makers and disease spreaders who roar down upon the cities and farmsteads trailing misfortune in their wake. According to one medieval source “their nature is to sow discord, create hatred, evil thoughts, theft, and greed; they give lead if desired, kill anyone and destroy limbs, their bodies are long and slender, full of wrath, and anger…their movement is the movement of the wind and the appearance of an earthquake. Their sign is that the ground will appear white, full of snow when they are invoked.” (Peterson, Sworn Book of Honorius, 233.) We can imagine, perhaps, some kinship between these dark creatures of the cold northern quarter, and those denizens of the regions of this Middle Earth in which we live, that lie perilously close to the frozen wastes remaining from the beginning of time, the Hrimthurs from the land of the giants.
From Jotunheim, they emerge, gathering up the frigid darkness, the Stygian gloom that precedes creation, transforming themselves into huge storms of ice and snow, into howling winds and whiteout blizzards which strand the traveler and freeze even the birds on the wing. Southward they rush across boreal forest and expanses of steppe, into the farms and townlands where people live their settled lives. The frigid host of ice demons stream into the cities and enter into the hearts and minds of sleeping humans, filling their dreams with troubled visions, while Boreas the North Wind rattles the windows and blasts them with ice.
Whirlwinds of flying white, dance devish-like across the land, skipping and reeling in the icy blast. We in our hall huddle close around the fire and voice a prayer of protection for the safety of the travelers and wayfarers, for the farmers and those that help the stranded, those with no home, or in darkness, without heat, for the cattle and the flocks, for birds huddled in the cedars and the deer that browse the bare branches and the lean coyotes and huddled rabbits.
A prayer something like this one, an adjuration and a plea:
“I compel you Frost Bringer! And you Ear Biter!
You Gripper, You Grasper, Chiller, and Roarer!
Restless mover and Frostrime!
By the Name of the Mighty Thunderer
By the power of the Three who vanquished Ymir
Oðinn, Vili, and Ve
I command you
Leave this place in peace!
Or be broken like your grandsire!
Mighty Ones, Æsir, aid the people
those who struggle in the cold,
Protect the homes, the farms, the travellers,
Our livestock and the wild ones
And those among us who bravely toil
So that we may stay safe
Warm, well fed, and happy in our halls
While the storm rages outside”
Among the indigenous people of the far Northern regions of North America and Greenland, the Inuit, inhabitants of one of the harshest climates on Earth, every aspect of Nature is a person, has an inua (the word itself is cognate with Inuit), an owner, an inhabitant, an indweller. According to psychoanalyst and scholar of religion Daniel Merkur:
“An inua is an idea that indwells in and imparts individual character to a physical phenomenon. As one Nunamiut put it, an inua is the ‘essential existing force’ of a physical phenomenon, that causes it to be what it is. An indweller has, employs, and is a power. As they indwell in physical phenomena, indwellers are ordinarily invisible…Indwellers are anthropomorphic, regardless of the phenomena in which they indwell, whenever they can be seen. In all cases, indwellers are personal beings that think, have emotions, and act with motivation. As a rule, the indwellers in nature are autonomous and disinterested in man. The disinclination of natural phenomena to accommodate the wishes of mankind exhibits this disinterest. However, indwellers are also anthropopsychic and social beings, who are capable of communication with man. Indwellers in phenomena that undergo periodic change, e.g., the winds, earth, caribou, sea, moon, etc., may be the objects of cultic devotion designed to influence their changes in desired manners.”
The Wind indweller, who the Inuit call Sila, is fierce and stern, and hence Arctic weather is harsh, as it is an expression of the personality and action of Sila. It is to Sila, likewise the Inuit shamans appeal in their ecstasies when they endeavor to bring favorable weather for fishing and hunting. The Wind Indweller is the Breath Soul of all living things, animating the natural world as the human breath soul animates the human body.
The Inuit shamans know that the Arctic wind is the breath of life itself. Blowing harsh and cold at the top of the world, endlessly circulating the exhalations and inhalations of the living world. When it comes in with force and power, we experience it as demonic or monstrous, threatening our lives and our livelihoods like the hrimthurs of the old sagas. The ancient people who lived intimately with these powers believed they were animate beings, persons of vast power, and destructive potential. If you couldn’t make a deal with them personally, you could at least make a pact with a greater power that could keep them in line, an angelic or divine power. This is an idea which I find endlessly fascinating. I sense in the depths of my own breath soul its kinship with the primal wind spirit. I hear its voice speaking as it roars through the bare branches, shakes the corn stalks, and rattles the metal roofs of our aging buildings. I see the dancing swirls of snow as they advance across the land. With a touch of fear and trepidation, I am filled with respect and love for the awesome power of the Indweller of the Wind, by whatever name it may be called.
The takeaway here, an idea that I have been haunted by all of my life, and one that I feel like I am always harping about, is that the forces of nature are intelligent and purposive. When we interact with them, we interact with the Indweller who manifests through them. As the Sun warms are faces, or the wind chills us to the bone, the thunderstorm brings welcome rain to the parched land, we are experiencing the Indweller. The Indwellers of nature are the ancestors of the gods, demons, and spirits of the various pantheons and religious traditions of the world, increasingly abstracted from the natural forces they originally represented, but never entirely disconnected from them. A re-enchanted relationship with nature sees the Divine at play in the phenomenal, a relationship full of meaning and interaction. These gods are not the distant gods of theology. Although they may seem aloof, they are as close as the sensual touch of a smooth breeze on bare skin on a summer night.
As the cold sets in to stay, and the snow blankets the ground, smoothing all of the contours and obscuring what lay beneath, we are forced by circumstance to wait, to rest, to heal, and to plan for the coming year and season. In the midst of the icy darkness, as the days begin to lengthen almost imperceptibly, I feel in my soul the barest hint of a yearning for sunny days and warm spring rain, for sowing seeds in soft soil, when thoughts of ice demons and frost giants and all of the harsh faces of the Wind Indweller fade into distant memories. When frigid Boreas, the North wind is replaced by gentle Zephyrus, the West wind.
Postscript:
As we in Kentucky sit huddled by the wood stove, the fire safely contained, keeping the indwellers of cold and snow at bay, the people of Southern California are currently plagued by devastating wildfires. Our heart and our prayers go out to them. I would take frost giants over a Balrog any day. Move to safety immediately if you’re caught in the path of the Wildfire Indweller. He is not to be trifled with. The indwelling spirit of Mother Earth continues to show her wrathful side in 2025, just like she did in 2024. The current state of affairs probably isn’t going to improve as the planet warms and the climate patterns become more chaotic.
Bibliography and recommended reading:
First I am indebted to the work of modern Pagan author Robin Artisson for introducing me to the concept of the indweller through the work of psychologist and scholar of religion, Daniel Merkur, particularly in his (Robin’s) book An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Faerie Faith (Black Malkin Press). I will discuss this work more in my next Winter Reading post.
Becoming Half Hidden (Routledge)and Powers that We Do Not Know, by Daniel Merkur. The former I managed to find an e-book copy for this post, the latter is out of print and expensive, and not available in e-book format, but extensive quotations can be found in Artisson’s work cited above.
The poem/prayer above is original and is not meant to be an actual historical document from the heathen past, we might even say that it is pseudepigrapha. Feel free to scream it into the North Wind if necessary.
Peterson, Joseph, The Sworn Book of Honorius, Ibis Press
Sturluson, Snorri, Gylfaginning, Edda, The Everyman Library