Midgard Serpent

The Midgard Serpent is the world-encircling figure in Norse mythology that Varg Vikernes recasts as more than a mythic creature: in his account, it is also the equator, making the story of Thor’s fishing expedition a key to his speculative history of the earth and Atlantis. The serpent thus joins cosmology to myth, and myth to Vikernes’s claims about the origins and dispersal of the Aryans.

The Serpent as Equator

Vikernes’s explanation begins with extraterrestrial visitors who, he claims, moved the earth by setting off nuclear explosions because the planet was too far from the sun. As the earth moved, the equator shifted too; Vikernes identifies that equator with the Midgard Serpent. The creature becomes a mythic name for a proposed planetary feature, allowing a change in the earth’s position to be read through Norse cosmology.

He links this interpretation to the Völuspá, which he reads as saying that the gods move celestial bodies. The seeress who narrates the poem comes from a world before the present one; Vikernes takes this earlier world to be another planet. In this reading, the serpent’s place in the myth belongs to a larger story in which cosmic movement and the gods’ actions preserve traces of events from a prior world.

Thor’s Catch and the Atlantis War

The Midgard Serpent also supplies Vikernes with a pattern for interpreting the conflict he places on Atlantis. He connects Thor’s fishing expedition, in which the god catches the serpent, to a war waged after giants grew jealous of the gods’ creation of Aryan man. As in the myth where Hymir sends his trolls to take revenge on Thor, Vikernes’s account makes the war a consequence of the serpent-catching episode. The connection is interpretive: a familiar mythic conflict becomes a template for his account of an ancient catastrophe.

After that war, Vikernes says, Atlantis sank and the Aryans sought refuge on other continents, where they eventually mixed with other human populations. In his telling, the serpent therefore stands at a junction between two stories: Thor’s encounter with a world-encircling creature and a claimed prehistoric conflict whose aftermath reshapes human settlement.

Function in Vikernes’s Cosmology

The serpent’s significance in this account is chiefly structural. It links the earth’s supposed displacement to a Norse myth, then lets that myth echo through Vikernes’s narrative of Atlantis, the survival of Aryan groups, and their dispersal. Rather than presenting the creature as an independently acting being outside the myth, the passage makes it a bridge among cosmological speculation, inherited myth, and racial prehistory.