Most creation stories begin with a maker. This one begins with a temperature difference, and the first living thing in it is a by-product of condensation. Nothing is designed. A body is found, killed, and used up — flesh, teeth, blood, skull, brains, eyebrows, the maggots in the meat — with the thoroughness of a household that cannot afford to waste an animal. The Norse world is not created. It is butchered out of something else and assembled from the parts.
The gap, and the two directions
Before anything, there was Ginnungagap.
Völuspá describes it by listing what was absent: no sand, no sea, no cold waves, no earth anywhere, no sky overhead — a yawning emptiness, and grass nowhere. That last item is the one that lands. The poem checks for grass.
To the north of the gap lay Niflheim, ancient and freezing, with the spring Hvergelmir at its centre and eleven rivers running out of it, the Élivágar. The venom carried in those rivers hardened as they got further from the source; the flow slowed, the poison set like slag, and the ice built layer on layer out over the void.
To the south lay Muspell, so hot that no one born outside it can go there, with Surtr sitting at its border holding a burning sword and waiting for the end of the world, which he is going to cause.
Where the rime reached far enough south to feel the warm air, it thawed and dripped. And the drips, quickened by the heat, took on the shape of a man.
Ymir, and what grew on him
That was Ymir, whom the frost-giants call Aurgelmir. He was not good, and neither was anything descended from him — the sources say so flatly and do not soften it.
He slept, and he sweated, and under his left arm a man and a woman grew. One of his legs fathered a six-headed son on the other. Every frost-giant alive traces back to those two events, which is the least dignified genealogy in European myth and is presented without comment.
The melting ice also produced a cow, Auðhumla. Four rivers of milk ran from her and that is what Ymir lived on. She lived by licking the rime-stones, which were salty. On the first day of her licking, hair appeared in the stone. On the second, a head. On the third, a whole man came out: Búri, handsome and large. His son Borr married Bestla, daughter of a giant, and they had three sons: Odin, Vili and Vé.
The killing, and the flood
Borr's sons killed Ymir.
There is no account of a quarrel, no provocation, no negotiation. It is stated as a decision and the narrative moves straight on to the consequences, of which the first is a flood. So much blood came out of him that it drowned the entire race of frost-giants — every one of them except Bergelmir, who got himself and his household onto a lúðr and floated, and from whom all later giants descend.
That single word has been argued over for a century, because it does not obviously mean "boat". It is used elsewhere of a hollowed wooden thing: a chest, a bier, a coffin, the trough or casing of a mill. Translators who render it "ark" are importing a Genesis shape onto a Norse noun. Those who render it "mill" are importing a different theory — that a lost Norse cosmology involved a world-mill, an idea supported by a difficult skaldic verse about a mill grinding at the ocean's edge and by the mill in Grottasöngr, and resisted by everyone who thinks that is a great deal of structure to hang on one obscure word.
The construction site
They hauled the carcass into the middle of the gap and built with it. The Eddic poems give the correspondences as a list, and the list is remarkably stable across sources:
- The earth was made from his flesh.
- The mountains and crags from his bones.
- Stones, boulders and scree from his teeth and jaw and from the bones they had broken.
- The sea from his blood, laid in a ring all the way round the outside, so that the land floats in a circle of it.
- The sky from his skull, raised over the earth and fixed at four points, with a dwarf holding each corner: North, South, East and West, whose names are simply those directions.
- The clouds from his brains.
- Trees from his hair.
Sparks and glowing embers blown out of Muspell were caught and set in the sky as stars, and given fixed courses, which is how anyone could tell the time of year afterwards. The sun and moon were set in motion, each in a chariot, each pursued by a wolf that will eventually catch it.
From his eyebrows they built a wall around the middle region and made it habitable: Midgard, a fortified enclosure with the giants outside it. The world humans live in is a walled compound in the middle of hostile country, and that is not a metaphor imposed by modern readers — it is what the word means and what the story says it is for.
And the maggots that had bred in the dead flesh were given human wits and human shape and became the dwarfs, who live in the rock and the earth. Norse myth's great craftsmen, the makers of Mjölnir, Gleipnir and Draupnir, begin as vermin in a corpse.
Two logs on a beach
Walking along a shore, the gods found two pieces of driftwood — or two trees, depending on which text you follow — and made a man and a woman out of them, Askr and Embla, ash and something disputed. Each of the three gods gave one gift, and then the pair had breath, and mind, and warmth and colour and the use of their senses.
Here the sources conflict outright, and it is a conflict worth stating rather than smoothing over. Völuspá names the three as Odin, Hœnir and Lóðurr. Snorri, in Gylfaginning, names them as Odin, Vili and Vé — the same brothers who killed Ymir. Lóðurr appears almost nowhere else and nobody knows who he was; the identification with Loki is a guess that has been made for two hundred years and never proved. Snorri may have been tidying, or he may have had a tradition we have lost.
Sorting out the sources
Four texts carry the cosmogony, and they carry different parts of it.
- Völuspá supplies the gap, the shaping of the world by Borr's sons, the making of Askr and Embla, and the ordering of sun and moon — in about a dozen dense stanzas, without a narrative connecting them.
- Vafþrúðnismál is a wisdom contest between Odin and a giant, and the giant is the one who supplies the early history: where Aurgelmir came from, how he reproduced, who survived the blood-flood. Giants are the reliable witnesses to the beginning of the world because they were there.
- Grímnismál gives the body-parts list in compact verse.
- Snorri's Gylfaginning stitches all of it into the continuous account most readers know, and adds material that appears nowhere else.
The single most important thing to know about this myth is that Auðhumla the cow is attested only in Snorri. No poem mentions her. She is one of the most famous images in Norse mythology and our entire knowledge of her rests on one thirteenth-century Icelandic author. That does not make her invented — Snorri clearly had sources we do not — but it does mean she should never be cited as pan-Germanic tradition.
The etymology of Ginnungagap is likewise unsettled. The obvious reading is something like "gaping void"; an alternative takes the ginn- element as an intensifier with magical force, giving a gap charged with latent power rather than a simple emptiness. Both are defensible from the word alone.
Relatives elsewhere
The dismembered-primordial-being pattern is not unique to the north, and the comparison is one of the stronger cases in Indo-European studies.
The Rigveda's hymn of the cosmic Man describes a primordial being sacrificed and divided, with the moon coming from his mind, the sun from his eye, the sky from his head and the earth from his feet. Ymir's name has been connected to Sanskrit Yama and Avestan Yima, all deriving from a root meaning "twin", and Bruce Lincoln and others have reconstructed a common ancestral story in which a first man sacrifices his twin and builds the world from him. The Iranian Gayōmard material and Tacitus's report of a Germanic ancestor called Tuisto — a name apparently also meaning "twofold" — are usually brought into the same file.
It is a real argument with real linguistic footing, and it is not proof. What it establishes is a family resemblance, not a line of descent for this particular narrative.
A separate and weaker comparison gets made to Mesopotamia, where Marduk splits Tiamat's body to make sky and earth in the Enuma Elish. The parallel is genuine at the level of image and there is no plausible transmission route; it is best treated as two cultures independently noticing that a body is a set of materials.
Things worth being clear about
Are the gods the good guys here? The text never says so. They commit the first killing in the world, on a being who has done nothing to them, and their creation drowns an entire kindred as a side effect. Norse myth is not organised around a moral opposition; it is organised around lineages, and the gods are one lineage that won.
Is there anything before Ginnungagap? No, and Vafþrúðnismál deliberately pushes the question. Odin asks the giant what the oldest thing he can remember is, and the answer goes back to Bergelmir on the lúðr — no further. Even the best-informed witness in the world has a horizon.
What is Ymir's skull held up by? Four dwarfs, one at each corner, in Snorri's account. It is an oddly architectural detail — the sky as a roof with corner posts — and it sits awkwardly beside the poems' vaguer picture, which is one of several signs that Snorri is systematising material that was never a system.
Do the wolves ever catch the sun? Yes, at Ragnarök, which is the closing bracket to this story: the sun swallowed, the stars gone from the sky, the earth sinking into the sea it was ringed with. The world made from a body is unmade back into the water made from his blood.
Why do trees come from hair and clouds from brains? Because the correspondences are visual and physical, not symbolic. Hair looks like foliage; brains look like cloud; teeth look like scree. This is a cosmogony assembled by people who had butchered large animals and knew what the inside of one looks like.
Continue with Ymir, the void at Ginnungagap, the tree that grows through it all at Yggdrasil, the giants as a kindred, and the ending at Ragnarök. The full arrangement is at the Norse hub and the Norse family tree.