Jörð
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In Norse mythology, Jörð (or Jarð in Old East Norse; Earth, sometimes Anglicized Jord or Jorth) is a goddess and the personification of the Earth. She is identified with Fjörgyn and Hlôdyn (Bellinger 1997:235).
Jörð is one of Odin's spouses and the mother of Asathor (Gylfaginning 9). Fjörgyn, also known as Hlôdyn "hearth" (Völuspá 47), is the mother of Thor by Odin (Völuspá 48), and by extension, Meili (Hárbarðsljóð 9). She is daughter of Annar and Nótt and sister of Auð and Dagr. Otherwise she is essentially unknown. Some think she may simply have been an alias of Odin's wife Frigg. In the Skáldskaparmál, however, she is called the rival of Frigg, Rindr and Gunnlod.
Jörð is the everyday word for earth in Old Norse and so are its descendants in the modern Scandinavian languages (Icelandic: jörð, Faroese: jørð, Danish/Swedish/Norwegian: jord). It's a cognate to English earth.
Fjörgynn appears as a male god, the father of Frigg and a thunder god (Lokasenna). Fjörgyn/Fjörgynn is cognate to Gothic fairguni "mountain", Anglo-Saxon firgen "mountain forest", and the Balto-Slavic thunder god, Perkunos. This may support PIE *Perk(w)unos as the original name of the Proto-Indo-European (or at least northern areal Balto-Slavic-Germanic) thunder god, in Germanic mythology still appearing as the grandfather the thunder god of a new generation of gods *Þunraz or thunder personified.
[edit] References
Bellinger, Gerhard J., Knaurs Lexikon der Mythologi Weltbild/Bechtermünz, Augsburg (1997), ISBN 3828941559.
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