Jord was the Norse goddess and personification of the Earth — the primal, giant-born mother who, by Odin, bore the mighty thunder-god Thor. Less a goddess of stories than a fundamental power of the world, she is the earth itself given divine form: the mother-ground from which all life springs and to which the thunder-god owes his deepest strength.
The Earth Personified
Jord (Old Norse Jörð, simply “earth”) was the personification of the earth, a goddess usually reckoned among the giant-kind (jötnar) and counted as a daughter of Nott (Night). She was the land itself made into a goddess — the soil, the ground, the fertile body of the world. As such she belonged to the oldest and most elemental layer of the Norse divine, more a cosmic force than a personality, the very earth on which gods and mortals walked given a name and a mother's nature.
The Mother of Thor
Jord's great significance lies in her motherhood. By Odin, the All-Father, she bore Thor, the mightiest of the gods — so that the thunder-god, defender of gods and men, was the son of the sky-king and the earth herself. This parentage is deeply fitting: Thor, the god of storms and rains and thunder, the bringer of the weather that makes the crops grow, was the child of the union of heaven and earth, born of the Earth-mother and the All-Father. Through Jord, Thor is rooted in the very ground of the world, and his protective power over the fertile land flows from his mother's nature.
The Elemental Mother
Because she was the earth itself rather than a deity of human-like deeds, Jord has few myths of her own — she appears most often simply as Thor's mother and as a poetic name for the ground and the world. But her very lack of stories speaks to her nature: she is too fundamental, too elemental, to be confined to mere adventures. She is the stable ground beneath everything, the fertile soil, the solid world — the mother-earth on which the whole drama of gods and giants and mortals plays out. Norse poets used her name as a kenning for the land, and she stood alongside other earth-figures in the rich Norse personification of the natural world.
The Ground of the World
Jord endures as the Norse personification of the earth and the mother of Thor — the elemental goddess of the soil and the land, the fertile ground from which life rises and the deep source of the thunder-god's strength. She embodies the most ancient and universal of all divine ideas, found across the world's mythologies: the Earth as Mother, the living ground that bears and feeds all things, here given her Norse name and made the mother of the gods' mightiest champion.
The thunder-god who guards the world was born of the Earth herself — for Thor's mother was the very ground beneath his feet.