The Norse gods spring from a lineage that begins with ice and a slain giant. In the Prose Edda, the first being Búri fathers Borr, who marries the giantess Bestla, and their three sons — Odin, Vili and Vé — kill the primeval giant Ymir and build the world from his body. Odin, the All-Father, becomes chief of the Aesir; with his wife Frigg, queen of the gods, he presides over a divine family whose bloodlines run straight back into the race of giants they are perpetually at war with.
That giant blood is the family's great structural irony, and no one embodies it more than Thor. The thunder god is Odin's son not by Frigg but by Jörð, the earth herself a giantess; Thor in turn fathers Magni and Móði by the giantess Járnsaxa, alongside his daughter Þrúðr by his golden-haired wife Sif. Odin and Frigg's own son is Baldr, the shining god whose death sets Ragnarök in motion. Layered on top are the Vanir — Njörðr and his children Freyr and Freyja — a second divine tribe folded into the Aesir by marriage and hostage-exchange after the two clans go to war.
The most tangled figure of all is Loki. This genogram follows Snorri Sturluson's tradition, in which Loki is the son of the giant Fárbauti and Laufey, and is bound to Odin not by blood but by an oath of blood-brotherhood — which is why he moves among the Aesir as one of them while never quite being one. Loki's offspring are the engine of the world's doom: with the giantess Angrboða he fathers the wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel, ruler of the dead; with his loyal wife Sigyn he has the son Narfi. At Ragnarök, Loki's own children are the monsters that kill the gods who raised him among them.
These relationships are reconstructed almost entirely from two medieval Icelandic sources — the anonymous Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda, both written down in the thirteenth century, long after Scandinavia's conversion to Christianity. The sources disagree constantly, and this tree, like every Norse genealogy, is a choice among them: Snorri systematizes what the older poems leave ragged. That very raggedness is the appeal — a family tree assembled from fragments of a faith its own scribes no longer practiced, whose gods know they are related to the giants who will one day destroy them.
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