jörð

Jörð, Old Norse for "earth," is a goddess in Norse mythology who personifies the earth. She is typically treated as a divine being associated with the ground and natural fertility, and is considered one of the Æsir's consorts in many sources.

Most often, Jörð is described as the mother of the thunder god Thor, with Odin as her father. This parentage is stated in the Prose Edda. Some variant traditions, especially in nineteenth-century scholarship, attempt to place her as the daughter of Nótt or other figures, but these are not as widely attested.

Jörð appears in both the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, where she is part of the cosmology of Midgard and the broader family of gods. While she lacks a large body of mythic narratives of her own, she is used symbolically to denote the earth as a living, personified force and is connected with agricultural fertility and the natural world.

Her name in Old Norse literally means "earth" or "soil," reflecting her function as the earth itself. In modern Icelandic and Norse-inspired contexts, Jörð is still recognized as the Earth goddess and is sometimes equated with Gaia-like concepts in comparative mythology.

See also: Earth in Norse mythology, Thor, Odin.