This final component of Midgard, its boundary, is an example of a central concept in the Viking mind that is encountered throughout their view of the world. The suffix -garðr literally means an enclosed space, somewhere set about with a border. In the Scandinavian languages even today the word gård simply means ‘farm’, and this is its basic sense—a settled place, a bounded place, even a whole world; in the same meaning of enclosure, it is the root of the modern English ‘yard’. This idea of being inside the wall, as distinct from what is beyond and therefore outside one’s control, is at the
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