Völuspá stanza 3 describes the state of things before anything: in the beginning of ages there was no sand, no sea, no cool waves; earth was nowhere, nor heaven above; there was Ginnungagap, and grass nowhere.
Every clause is a negation except one. The gap is the only positive thing in the list.
The word
Gap is straightforward — a gaping, a chasm, and the source of the English word.
Ginnunga is not. The two main readings pull in different directions and both are defensible.
- From a root meaning to yawn or gape, giving "the gaping void" — the standard translation and the one behind every popular account.
- From ginn-, an intensifying prefix used elsewhere in Old Norse specifically with sacred or magical force: ginnheilagr, "most holy," is used of the gods in Völuspá itself, and ginnregin means the great or holy powers. On this reading Ginnungagap is the magically charged gap — not empty at all, but full of potential, deceptive, or numinous.
The second reading changes the myth. A void that is charged rather than empty explains why things begin to happen in it when rime and sparks arrive, and it fits a cosmogony in which nothing is created from nothing: the material of the world is a body, the world's fence is made of eyebrows, and life quickens out of dripping ice.
What happens in it
Snorri's account in Gylfaginning is the detailed one. The rivers of Niflheimr send rime southward into the gap, layer on layer, until the northern part is heavy with ice and hoarfrost and drizzle. From the south, out of Múspell, come sparks and glowing embers. The middle of the gap is as mild as windless air. Where the rime meets the warmth it melts and drips, and in the drops life quickens, and the shape of a man appears: Ymir.
Vafþrúðnismál has a leaner version — venom-drops from the Élivágar growing into a giant — and never mentions the gap at all. As with much of the fire-and-ice architecture, the elegant symmetrical version is Snorri's.
Snorri also says that when the sons of Borr killed Ymir and carried his body into the middle of Ginnungagap, they made the earth from it. So the gap is not only the pre-condition of the world; it is the space the world was built in and, presumably, still occupies.
The word on a map
There is a genuinely strange piece of evidence for how medieval Icelanders used the term.
Icelandic geographical writing of the fourteenth century — including the text known as Gripla and related material in the Hauksbók tradition — places Ginnungagap in the real North Atlantic, in the waters between Greenland and the lands to the west, sometimes described as the sea beyond Greenland where the ocean falls away or where the world's edge lies.
That is remarkable. Icelanders who knew about Greenland and about voyages further west used the name of their creation-void for an actual maritime region on the edge of known geography. It suggests the word had a life as a term for "the unbounded ocean beyond everything," and that the mythological usage may be one application of a broader idea rather than the other way round.
Not nothing
The distinction worth holding onto is between Ginnungagap and the creatio ex nihilo of Genesis, with which it is regularly and wrongly assimilated.
Norse cosmogony has no creation from nothing and no creator. There is a gap, there are two pre-existing regions with physical properties, there is a melt, and there is a body which is subsequently butchered. Everything that exists is made from something that already existed, by processes that are recognisably physical — freezing, thawing, dripping, congealing.
Snorri, a Christian writing for Christians, was in a position to smooth this into something more familiar and did not. Whatever else is true about the reliability of the Prose Edda, its creation account is conspicuously not the one its author believed.
For what came out of the melt, see Ymir and the making of the world; for the two regions, Niflheim and Surtr's fire-country; and for how differently other traditions start, creation myths compared.
Is Ginnungagap the same as chaos in Greek cosmogony?
The comparison is made constantly and it is closer than most, because Greek khaos also originally means a gap or chasm rather than disorder — Hesiod's Theogony has khaos come into being first, and the modern sense of "chaos" as confusion is a later development. Two Indo-European traditions both beginning with a named gap is interesting, and it is not evidence of contact; the metaphor is available to anyone asking what was there before there was anything. Where the two diverge sharply is in what happens next: Hesiod's cosmos generates by birth, and the Norse one condenses out of temperature.
Did medieval Icelanders think Ginnungagap still existed?
The geographical texts imply that some did, or at least that the name remained usable for a real region of ocean. Within the mythology the answer is less clear. Snorri has the world built in the middle of the gap, which would leave the gap as the container rather than a superseded stage — and Völuspá's account of the earth sinking into the sea and rising again does not suggest any return to a void. The most consistent reading is that Ginnungagap is not a moment in time that ended but a space that was filled, and that the edges of it are still out there past the last known land.