Ilmr

No origin myth or narrative is preserved for Ilmr in the surviving medieval sources cited here. Her attestations are literary: she is listed between Iðunn and Bil in the Nafnaþulur appended to Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda and her name occurs several times in skaldic verse (notably in the work of Kormákr Ǫgmundarson and in a verse preserved in Landnámabók attributed to Hrómundr halti). Modern commentary therefore reconstructs her origin only as an onomastic and poetic survival from the Viking Age—her name circulated in poetic naming-practices of the 10th–11th centuries but no cultic, genealogical, or narrative origin is recorded in the cited material.

There is no preserved physical description or iconography for Ilmr in the cited sources. The surviving traces of her name are formulaic and onomastic: she appears in lists of ásynjur and as an element in kennings for 'woman' and, in some battle-related kennings, in constructions resembling those formed from valkyrie-names. Beyond these poetic contexts the sources give no direct details about appearance.

The sources contain no direct statements of Ilmr's powers or behaviors. Scholarly interpretations based on her occurrence in kennings and on etymological proposals are explicitly hypothetical: some scholars note that her name is used in battle-kennings alongside names otherwise associated with valkyries, suggesting a possible valkyrie-like association (Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon as summarized in the cited material). Alternative etymological suggestions link Ilmr to the masculine noun ilmr 'pleasant scent' (noted by Jacob Grimm) or to almr 'elm', prompting the hypothesis that she could have been a tree-dís; these lines of inference are interpretive and not attested as factual abilities or functions in the primary texts.