Asatru seems highly keyed towards space exploration. Indeed, the cosmology aspect gives me shivers. Distinct homeworlds in space connected by a branching network seems like outright sci-fi world building.
In the gap between fire [stars] and ice [nothingness], there are nine homeworlds connected by the branches of the world tree. The world tree to me sounds like some kind of stellar transportation network between habitable worlds, interpreted clumsily by our tribal folk long ago. If we're to inerpret the cosmology literally, I don't see what other way you can go given our modern understanding.
Some of these worlds are physical worlds like Midgardr inhabited by other physical species. Some are spiritual realms, such as Asgardr. I don't believe the spiritual realms or the gods and spirits that inhabit them can directly interact with the physical realms, but instead act through inspiration. Memes and feelings. They are not on the prime material plane. Only five worlds are in our physical universe.
Jotunheimr; The homeworld of the ettins, the eotena. Mountain Giants.
Neiflheimr; Mistworld – Perhaps uninhabited, or perhaps inhabited by Frost Giants. Or perhaps it was attacked by the Aesir somehow, exterminating the ettins here, so it may be a former Ettin world that is now uninhabited.
Mullspellheimr; Magmaworld – Colonized by ettins. Fire Giants. The ones who will join the spiritual world of Hel in an attack on Asgardr at the end of Ragnarok.
So these Ettins are a physical species that are capable of spiritual attacks on higher realms such as Asgardr, or perhaps it can be thought of as psychic attacks, and have had entire worlds fall to psychic attacks by the Aesir. They are a spacefaring, multi-world race and may have colonized more in the past 1,000 years.
Then there is the fourth world, which is said to be inhabited by the Vanir, but this is unlikely. This is probably an error from the fog of history. The Vanir would almost certainly be spiritual beings not on the prime material plane. The confusion comes from the whole Aesir-Vanir war bullshit which is both controversial and unreliable.
The fourth world would almost certainly belong to the Dwarves. The "Dusk Elves." These are definitely physical beings, and they have their own homeworld, and its name is not Vanaheimr, but (probably) Dokkalfar. The Dwarves are related to the Light Elves and Dark Elves which are spiritual beings. My ad hoc hypothesis is that the Dwarves are a starfaring species who underwent some type of spiritual or psychic speciation. They 'learned to ascend' it might be said. Those that ascended became Elves and are a midway point between the physical and the spiritual realm of Asgardr. Those that remained in the physical universe became Dwarves. Those that DESCENDED became the black elves, and could be thought of as the forces of Hel in the physical world. The Christcucks turned the light elves into Angels and the black elves into Demons.
But it is the Dwarves that are of greatest interest to us Humans right now. They could very well be allies against the Ettins, which are not only powerful, aggressive, and evil but are starfaring and have enough psychic power to be a danger to our gods when combined with the Black Elves and Hel. The Dwarves, being older and having access to psychic power of their own, will be important allies for us Humans should we burgeon out from Midgardr to participate in Ragnarok as the Gods intend for us to do.
Finally there's Midgardr, the middle world, home of us young Humans. Created specifically by the gods through divine inspiration, guidance, and celestial meme magic. :^)
For a thousand years, something has stopped the Ettins from their aggressive expansion through Yggsdrasil space. That thing is the psychic attack that devastated them. We know they are pissed, but we don't know the nature of this spiritual attack which is totally unlike the sort of weapons we think of as physical beings. It would be more like a poisonous super meme. It may have been a psychic attack which caused them to go to war with themselves, and the chaos of that infighting is what slowed them down and made one of their worlds uninhabitable.
In any case, we have a literally divine mandate not only to save our race, conquer the skraelings, and begin space exploration, but to find the Dwarves and learn from them, and then find the Ettins and exterminate them with what we learned from our older cousins.