Jotunheim (also Utgard, "the outyards") is the homeland of the jotnar, the giants, in Norse cosmology, and its place in the mythic geography is as important as its inhabitants. It lies outside and against the ordered world of gods and men: a rugged, cold, untamed land of mountains, forests, and rivers, beyond the walls that protect Asgard and Midgard, and its very name marks it as the realm of the "other." The giants who dwell there are the gods' chief adversaries, the forces of chaos, cold, and the wild that the divine order must perpetually hold off, yet the relationship is far more entangled than simple enmity.
The gods repeatedly journey into Jotunheim (as when Thor goes to the hall of Utgarda-Loki, or to recover his stolen hammer), and they marry, seduce, and are descended from giants: Odin's mother, Thor's mother, and Freyr's wife are all of giant kin. Jotunheim thus embodies a fundamental ambivalence in Norse thought, the wild is both the enemy that threatens the ordered cosmos and the older, generative source from which even the gods spring, the reservoir of a primal power that order can never fully separate itself from and that will, at Ragnarok, overwhelm it.