The image of Night as a rider driving a chariot across the sky, paired with a chariot-driving Day, places Nott within a much wider Indo-European habit of imagining the alternation of light and dark as a race between mounted or wheeled figures rather than as an impersonal cycle. The Greeks personified night as the primordial goddess Nyx, one of the very first beings born from Chaos in Hesiod's Theogony, though the Greek tradition generally does not give her the same chariot-and-horse imagery Snorri gives Nott, while Vedic hymns address Ratri, night, as a goddess who follows her sister Ushas, the dawn, across the sky in a related but independently developed poetic tradition.
What is distinctive about the Norse version is its mechanical precision: Nott and Dagr are assigned specific named horses, Hrimfaxi and Skinfaxi, whose very manes are said to generate the dew and the daylight respectively, turning an abstract cosmic alternation into a concrete image of two riders and two animals locked in an endless relay circuit around the world, one handing off to the other at the horizon in an unbroken sequence that requires no divine intervention or renewal, simply the ceaseless motion of an established order. This kind of tightly mechanical cosmology, where natural cycles are explained by the fixed, repeating actions of named figures and named animals rather than by ongoing divine will or attention, is characteristic of a good deal of Norse cosmological poetry, which tends toward an almost engineered, clockwork vision of how the physical world keeps running once the gods have set its pieces in motion at creation.