The World Mill is a mytheme

Mytheme

In the study of mythology, a mytheme is the essential kernel of a myth—an irreducible, unchanging element, a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways—"bundled" was Claude Lévi-Strauss's image— or linked in more...

 suggested as recurring in Indo-European and other mythologies. It involves the analogy of the cosmos

Cosmos

In the general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from the Greek term κόσμος , meaning "order" or "ornament" and is antithetical to the concept of chaos. Today, the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe . The word cosmos originates from the same root...

 or firmament

Firmament

The firmament is the vault or expanse of the sky. According to Genesis, God created the firmament to separate the oceans from other waters above.-Etymology:...

 and a rotating millstone

Millstone

Millstones or mill stones are used in windmills and watermills, including tide mills, for grinding wheat or other grains.The type of stone most suitable for making millstones is a siliceous rock called burrstone , an open-textured, porous but tough, fine-grained sandstone, or a silicified,...

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The mytheme was extensively explored in Viktor Rydberg

Viktor Rydberg

Abraham Viktor Rydberg was a Swedish writer and a member of the Swedish Academy, 1877-1895...

's 1886 Investigations into Germanic Mythology

Investigations into Germanic Mythology

Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi is a two-volume work by Viktor Rydberg, published in 1886 and 1889....

. Donald Mackenzie described the World Mill’s symbolic relationship to the Swastika, and developed supposed analogs in Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian, and AmerInd folklore.

Clive Tolley (1995) examined the significance of the mytheme in Indo-European and Finnish mythology

Finnish mythology

Finnish mythology is the mythology that went with Finnish paganism which was practised by the Finnish people prior to Christianisation. It has many features shared with fellow Finnic Estonian mythology and its non-Finnic neighbours, the Balts and the Scandinavians...

. Tolley found that "the image of a cosmic mill, ambivalently churning out well-being or disaster, may be recognized in certain fragmentary myths", adding additional Indo-European and Finnish analogs of the mill to the material previously considered by Rydberg and others. Tolley comes to the conclusion that

"the cosmic mill was not, in extant Norse sources, a widely developed mythologem. Nonetheless, the myth of Mundilfæri connects the turning of the cosmos via a 'mill-handle' with the regulation of seasons, and the myth of Bergelmir

Bergelmir

In Norse mythology, Bergelmir is a frost giant, the son of giant Þrúðgelmir and the grandson of Ymir , the first frost giant, according to stanza 29 of the poem Vafthrudnismal from the Poetic Edda:...

 suggests the concept of a creative milling of a giant's body, associated in some way with the sea,"

Richard M. Dorson surveyed the views of 19th-century writers on the World Mill in his 1968 historical review, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists, and the mytheme is discussed in the Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, in regard to the Eddic poem, Grottasöngr

Grottasöngr

Grottasöngr or the Song of Grótti is an Old Norse poem, sometimes counted among the poems of the Poetic Edda as it appears in manuscripts that are later than the Codex Regius...

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