Nordheim

is a country of the Hyborian Age.

Geography
Nordheim extends as far north as any man has ever roamed, into vast and inhospitable tundras. One half of this country is Vanaheim on the shores of Western Ocean, bordering Pictish Wilderness southwest. The other is Asgard, bordering Hyperborea to the east. Cimmeria lies south, beyond the ice-capped Eiglophian Mountains.

History and politics
Nordics own no over-lord, but each tribe has its king. There's continual war on the borders.

Nordheim was never conquered by the Pictish nor the Hyrkanian empire. Nordic tribes continued to fight the also independent Cimmerians and sweep into the borders of Hyperborea (now a Hyrkanian province).

Then the glacier ages begun and ice fields started to move southwards. The northernmost Nordic tribes started drifting, displacing kindred clans and eventually crushing the Pictis and Hyrkanian empires.

The western world was now dominated by roving tribes of Nordic barbarians, east to Vilayet, and from the Arctic circle to the lands of Shem (excepting the Cimmerians, in the old Turanian kingdom). These never cared to form a consolidated Nordic empire and their kingdoms often warred against each other.

For about a century Nordheim remained an uninhabited ice waste until it vanished beneath the waves of another cataclysm and formed the North Sea. Only Asgard remained, as the Scandinavian peninsulas.

The buckling of the land thrust up great mountain ranges in the north-central part of former Thuria. Whole Nordic tribes were blotted out, and the rest retreated eastward to Vilayet. The territory about it was not affected, and there, on the western shores, the Nordic tribes began a pastoral existence, living in more or less peace with the Cimmerians, and gradually mixing with them. Their growing population forced many o them to migrate southward, northward and westward, later known as Aryans.

Population and culture
This snow country with the flaring rays of the borealis shining above the mountains belongs to the Nordics. These people are tall and fair and blue-eyed, and of like blood and language, save that the Æsir (Aesir) of Asgard have yellow hair and the Vanir of Vanaheim, red hair.

They are great ale drinkers and fighters; they fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night. They are wild and wayward and fierce. They wear horned helmets and use shields.

Their chief god is Ymir, the frost-giant. His daughter Atali plays tricks on dying men, luring them into the wastelands to be slain by her brothers, the ice-giants, who lay men's red hearts smoking on Ymir's board. Afterlife is in vaulted halls of the Valhalla.

In The Phoenix on the Sword, King Conan tells Prospero that he has always preferred the merry and boisterous way of life of the Aesir to the austerity and somberness of his Cimmerian countrymen.

Stories set in

 * The Frost-Giant's Daughter [wikisource]

Characters from
See Vanaheim and Asgard.
 * Ymir
 * Atali