the disposal of Jörmungandr. 🐍🧺

In The Witch's Heart and Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarök, it's explained that Odin can't outright kill his blood brother's monstrous children and so has to instead imprison them.

Hel gets the limitations of caretaking a whole world with its eternal duties of ruling & constantly processing the dead, her own half-dead condition potentially restricting her there.

Fenrir's everlasting & immeasurable hunger is tied down by a cord of equally impossible constructions, and this takes him out of the game.

But when we look at Odin's nonchalance in throwing Jörmungandr into the ocean we have to ask how is this imprisonment? We could presume Angrboða's serpent is a type of amphibian, initially able to breath air & live on dry land, but when Odin casts him into the water where a restriction has to be in effect from thence onward since we don't hear of Jörmungandr coming ashore, only above water when hooked by Thor, or magically bi-located via the displacement sjónhverfing of Útgarða-Loki into his jötunn cat almost lifted by Thor. Otherwise he's limited to be in the deepest of waters until the final conflict.

[Thor successfully baiting Jörmungandr from the 17th c CE Edda Oblongata (AM 738 4to, 43r).]

One might suspect that Odin bet good odds on the serpent becoming victim to the always bigger fish (or Kraken or Hafgufa) in the sea, but being a Lokisson gave Jörmungandr an inherently crafty advantage in all his encounters until he encircled all of Midgard, but got stuck holding his own tail within his mouth as a final boundary, which might've been Odin's fallback ultimate long-game chokepoint restriction plan.

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.