Chaos Weary

by Daniel Bullard

October 26th, 2025

The status and worth of “giants” is a hotly debated topic in modern Heathenry. These ettins are the beings called jӧtunn by the Norse and eoten by the Anglo-Saxons. In the surviving mythology, ettins are outsiders who are often cast as antagonistic to the gods. However, many of the gods are descended from ettins; Oðinn’s mother and grandmother are both ettins, as are many of his consorts. There are also some ettins who we recognize as gods, such as Skaði, on account of their actions or contributions to our lives. So, if many ettins have such close relationships with gods and have even become gods in their own right, is there even a difference between them and the gods? 

There have been many attempts over the short history of modern Germanic polytheism to give definition to the line between gods and ettins. Earlier writers often worked in terms of Good and Evil, while others have used concepts like Utangard, reciprocity, or nature versus society to define the difference. However, among my fellow Anglo-Saxon Heathens, Chaos vs. Order is a commonly cited dualist theory as to why the gods are worthy of worship and the ettins are not. The argument goes that the gods support the Order of reality, and the ettins support Chaos. Since Order is required for life to exist, the gods are worthy of worship because of their support for it. This argument, however, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the cosmological principles involved. I contend that ettins are not agents of Chaos and that they participate in the state of Order as fundamentally as any other being. 

Chaos, in a cosmic sense, is a term that is widely misunderstood. The most common cause of misunderstanding is a conflation with the mundane use of the word chaos: a state of utter confusion. Cosmic Chaos actually refers to the state of the universe before the existence of anything. It is an idea that comes to us from Greek mythology, where Khaos (“chasm”) was the first god and also an empty space between worlds. Hesiod wrote the poem Theogony in the 8th century BCE, which narrativized the origins of the Greek gods. In it, the first being to emerge is Khaos, though after the war between the Titans and Olympians, Khaos is described instead as the space between Earth and Tartarus, where many of the Titans are imprisoned. This early conception of Chaos is best described as the space between places; a non-place where nothing exists.

The Roman writer Ovid in Metamorphoses treats the concept slightly differently. He wrote, “Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky were made, in the whole world the countenance of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together.”(Ovid, 1.1) To Ovid, the “nothingness” of Chaos isn’t empty space, but a mass of matter without life, form, or function. It is “all the same”; a homogenous soup where elements have no way to differentiate from each other. 

As an Anglo-Saxon Heathen, I’m acutely aware that there is no surviving creation myth of the Anglo-Saxons. As such, we modern practitioners often look to the Norse myths for information. 

 Ár var alda þar er Ýmir bygði,

vara sandr né sær né svalar unnir,

jörð fannsk æva né upphiminn,

gap var ginnunga, en gras hvergi.

Of old was the age | when Ymir lived;

Sea nor cool waves | nor sand there were;

Earth had not been, | nor heaven above,

But a yawning gap, | and grass nowhere.  

- Völuspá, stanza 3

 Gap var ginnunga (“yawning gap”), or Ginnungagap, was a place of utter nothingness, situated between Niflheim, a world of ice and mist, and Muspelheim, a world of fire. The Völuspá is unclear as to what happens in the gap, but Snorri Sturluson, writer of the Prose Edda, is more explicit. As heat and mist flowed into the chasm, rime formed and melted, creating a giant, Ymir, and a cow, Auðumla. Auðumla sustained Ymir with her milk, and Snorri says that while he slept, he sweated and from that was born the hrímþursar (“rime giants”). The cow licked at the salty ice and over the course of days a man emerged, named Búri. Buri had a son named Borr, who married Bestla, an ettin, and together they had three sons, Óðinn, Vili, and Vé. Óðinn and his brothers killed Ymir and used his corpse as the material to make the universe. (Sturluson, Gylfaginning 4-8) 

The fact that the gap co-existed with Niflheim and Muspelheim is a bit of a contradiction, but one that can be understood as poetic license. It’s clear from the Völuspá that the writer intended to frame this beginning point of the universe as empty nothingness into which Ymir is placed. Ymir is never an active participant in the mythology, he is a character that things happen to. He creates giant-kind not by his actions, but by sweating them out in his sleep. In essence, he is the passive, undifferentiated matter described by Ovid. From this passive body in which matter is homogeneous, the Earth and rocks and trees and people are made. The line that matter must cross to begin existence is differentiation, the process of making something distinct. This process is the domain of ontology..

Ontology is the school of philosophy that concerns what it means for something to exist or to come into existence. Something that exists is said to have being, and anything with being will be referred to, going forward, as an entity. All entities are unique, made so by the differentiation of spacetime, form, function, and other such classifications. You and I are both human, but no two humans are the same. Even identical twins, who share an entire genetic code, are unique: they think differently, take different actions, and exist in different locations in spacetime. Even two atoms of hydrogen-1, the simplest element in the universe, are different from each other. We can see that the hydrogen present in our Sun exists separately from the hydrogen currently fusing inside Polaris despite appearing identical if examined side-by-side. In order to exist, a thing must be different to all other things. 

As far back in spacetime as we can observe, the universe was as small as 1 astronomical unit (AU) across, which is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. That relatively small space contained all of the matter that would come to make up the universe as we know it. Physicists describe the state of the universe at that point as a plasma, a homogeneous fluid too dense for atoms and particles to bond together due to their constant collisions. We do not know what, if anything, existed before this dense plasma state, or if anything exists beyond the boundary of our universe. The name “The Big Bang” makes the origin of the universe sound like an explosion, but it was simply an expansion which began 13.8 billion years ago and continues to this day. As the universe expanded, the density of this primordial plasma decreased, which caused energy and the rate of particle collisions to decrease as well. After about a year of expansion, the universe was finally in a low enough energy state to allow nuclear fusion to occur. From fusion all of what we know in the universe came into being. (Siegel, 2021)

This scientific look at how the universe came to exist is fascinating, and bears some resemblance to ancient concepts of Chaos, but that is only a poetic way of describing the state of the early universe. Because of the high energy state, particles were unable to retain their forms, but at any given moment, there were different particles in different locations in space. Ultimately, we do not know if it is possible for the substances of the universe to not exist. However, this is a description of physical things, and the gods are not physical. In a previous article, I argued that the medium of communication we have with the gods is consciousness, as opposed to matter, which is the medium through which physical beings communicate with each other. Matter is the substance of our physical existence, and consciousness is the substance of our experience and, I argue, the very medium of the gods.. As matter is differentiated into elements, objects, and living things, consciousness is differentiated into gods, spirits, and our experiences, to name a few. If something exists, then it has been differentiated.

Order is a state of existing, as Chaos is non-existing, and since no entity can be in both the state of existing and non-existing, neither can one be both Orderly and Chaotic. Order and Chaos thus form a binary state, not a continuum. There is no thing which is both differentiated and non-existent, and because a state of non-existence is a state of Chaos, there is also no thing which is both differentiated and in a Chaotic state. All things that exist are Orderly. 

So ettins, as entities that exist, are themselves Orderly, but what of the claim that they are agents on behalf of Chaos? The argument goes that the ettins were happy existing in the universe before it was Ordered, and wish for it to return to that state. Ymir, the ancestor of all giants, was quite naturally existing in Ginnungagap in the myths. Also, during Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, many ettins fight against the gods and in the process destroy large parts of the universe and all but 2 human beings. Beings such as Fenrir, Jörmungandr, and Surtr battle the gods in this myth, and this has led many to conclude that these and other ettins are not only the enemies of the gods, but of humanity as well. Despite this, recent archaeological finds show ritual sacrifices to Surtr that occurred in Iceland from the 10th to 11th centuries at Surtshellir (“Surtr’s Caves”). Remains show the sacrifice of cows and horses inside the volcanic caves, and the Landnámabók records that Thorvaldr Holbarki ascended to the cave to recite a poem of praise to the “giant in the cave”. (Surtr, 2025) Some have argued that because ettins are not bound to uphold Order, as the gods are claimed to be, they are also not bound to respect reciprocity, also called the gifting cycle. It is problematic to think of the gods as “bound” to any course of action, as it stops treating them as beings with agency. Any god could choose to leave the gifting cycle, and the fact that they haven’t only underscores their worth. Also, many ettins have entered into reciprocity with human beings, and have given us no reason to doubt the sincerity of that action. It is not known whether the Icelanders involved in the worship of Surtr considered this a positive relationship, but there is little reason to make sacrifices to a being who cannot be trusted to honor the relationship.  

As for the ettins’ wish to return the universe to a state of Chaos, unless we take the myth of Ginnungagap as literal, we have no sound philosophical or empirical reason to believe that such a state is even possible. There is no evidence, besides mythology, that the universe has ever been in a state besides existence. While physicists have no definitive answer as to what was happening in the universe before the Big Bang, very few are operating under the theory that the universe arrived from nothing. We have much evidence for the existence of substances, but none for their non-existence, which makes it unlikely that there ever was a true Chaos to be returned to. 

So, the primary metaphysical justification for ostracizing the ettins is dismantled. By demonstrating that existence itself is a state of Order, it is clear that the ettins are not fundamentally Chaotic. They are woven into the ordered fabric of reality as intrinsically as the gods themselves. This realization forces us to critically examine what biases remain in our beliefs about these beings. Is the destructive power associated with ettins a byproduct of their nature, a result of their relationship to our gods, or simply a misconception created by our limited ability to discern divine reality? The work, it seems, has only just begun. 

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Sources and Further Reading:

Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica. Translated by Evelyn-White, H G. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. London: William Heinemann, 1914.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translation by Melville, A. D., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siegel, E. (2021). How Small Was The Universe At The Start Of The Big Bang?. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/08/25/how-small-was-the-universe-at-the-start-of-the-big-bang/

Unk. (2025) Surtr, The Troth, https://thetroth.org/resource/surtr/

Bellows, H. A. (1923). The Poetic Edda. translated from the Icelandic with an introd. and notes, by Henry Adams Bellows. The American-Scandinavian Foundation. https://www.voluspa.org/poeticedda.htm

Sturluson, S. (1901). The Younger Edda. trans. by R. B. Anderson. Scott, Foreman and Company. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18947/18947-h/18947-h.htm#gylfe_IV

Differential Ontology, https://iep.utm.edu/differential-ontology/