>>14457
Huh, I've never considered the jotnar as being a real people, but a mythopoeic understanding of nature vis-a-vis with the aesir.
The jotnar, then, are the mountain, the wood, the storm, the sea…the untamed earth that very well can kill us if we don't know how to tame their wiles.
And the knowledge of this comes from the aesir and vanir. Odin the wanderer who, with his wide-spanning wisdom of the world and traveling, teaches us to outsmart them. Thor, with his unyielding strength, teaches us to overcome them by endurance. Even Loki, who's dishonor, teaches us to use any means necessary to defeat them in the most bleak of situations. Freyr teaches us how to lord over the land and rule it.
Our gods are gods of making gardhr – enclosures like asgard – to secure human life over and against the jotnar, who threaten it, and through boldness, take the boons the jotnar have hidden away.
Basically, the whole thing is an illustration about civilisation vs. natural dangers. our gods are civilisers, the jotnar – the wilds.