The Creation of the World

In the beginning there was no sand, no sea, no cool waves — 'earth was not, nor heaven above; a yawning gap, and grass nowhere,' says Völuspá. To the north lay freezing Niflheimr, to the south burning Múspellsheimr, and between them the void Ginnungagap. Where the rime of the eleven ice-rivers met the sparks of the fire-world, the melt quickened into Ymir, the first giant, and the cow Auðumbla, whose milk fed him and whose salt-licking uncovered Búri, ancestor of the gods.

Búri's grandsons — Odin, Vili, and Vé — slew Ymir and built the world from the body: flesh into earth, blood into sea, bones into mountains, skull into sky held up by four dwarves, brains into clouds, eyebrows into the wall around Midgard. They caught sparks from Múspell and set them as sun, moon, and stars, and appointed Night and Day to drive their chariots around the sky, chased by wolves.

Then, walking the new shore, the three brothers found two trees — Askr and Embla, ash and (perhaps) elm — and made them human: Odin gave breath and life, Vili (or Hœnir) gave wit and feeling, Vé (or Lóðurr) gave face, speech, hearing, and sight. Every person is a tree the gods stopped to finish. The Norse cosmos thus begins in violence and craftsmanship at once: the world is a made thing, and its makers knew it would burn.

Before the beginning: Ginnungagap

Most creation myths start with something — water, darkness, an egg. The Norse version starts with a described absence. Völuspá's opening negatives ("sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves") are among the most imitated lines in Germanic literature: a ninth-century Old High German prayer, the Wessobrunn Prayer, opens with an eerily similar catalogue of things that did not yet exist, suggesting the formula is ancient common property.

What did exist, in Snorri's fuller account in Gylfaginning, was a geography of extremes. Ages before the earth was made there was Niflheim, the world of mist and cold, and in its midst the well Hvergelmir, from which flowed the eleven rivers called the Élivágar. Far to the south lay Muspelheim, the world of fire, so hot that it is unbearable to anyone not native to it — and at its frontier sat Surtr with his flaming sword, already waiting, at the world's first moment, for its last. Between the two stretched Ginnungagap, the "yawning gap" — though the first element ginnunga- may carry an older charge of magic or potency, a void loaded like a spell.

The rivers of venom-cold flowing from Niflheim hardened into rime, layer on layer, filling the northern gap; sparks and heat blew from Muspelheim into the south of it. And in the middle, where the rime met the warm air, it melted and dripped — and in those drops, by the power of the heat, life quickened. Creation, in this cosmology, is what happens at the boundary where opposites touch. It is hard not to notice that this is a fair description of Iceland, where the people who wrote these books down watched glaciers and volcanoes share a horizon.

Ymir and the cow: the strangest nursery in mythology

The first drop of quickened melt became Ymir, the primeval giant, ancestor of all the jötnar — the frost-giants call him Aurgelmir, the giant Vafþrúðnir tells Odin in Vafþrúðnismál. Ymir was not made; he condensed. And he was prolific in the manner of a being with no possible partner: as he slept and sweated, a male and a female grew under his left arm, and one of his legs begot a six-headed son on the other. From this sweaty, entirely parentless brood descend the giants, which is worth remembering every time the gods and giants fight: the war of the mythology is a family quarrel between two lines of descent from the same melting ice.

The second condensation was Auðumbla, the primeval cow, from whose udder ran four rivers of milk that fed Ymir. She herself fed on the salty rime-stones, licking them — and here the myth produces one of its most dreamlike images. On the first day of her licking, a man's hair emerged from the ice; on the second day, his head; on the third, the whole man. This was Búri, beautiful, great, and mighty: the first of the gods' line, uncovered rather than born, as if he had been in the ice all along waiting for attention. Búri had a son, Borr, who married Bestla, daughter of the giant Bölþorn — giant blood entering the divine line at the second generation — and their sons were Odin, Vili, and Vé.

Auðumbla appears only in Snorri among our written sources, but she is old: a cow at the beginning of the world has parallels across Indo-European myth, and she survives in a single precious image on the medieval carvings scholars still argue about. Then she wanders out of the story entirely. Nobody ever says what became of the cow.

Why did Odin kill Ymir?

The sources give no motive. Snorri simply reports that the sons of Borr killed Ymir; the poems treat the killing as the necessary first act of building. And perhaps that is the motive: Ymir was not evil, but he was formless fecundity, matter without order, and the world could not be made except out of him. Where blood is spilled in this mythology, it is rarely wasted — and Ymir's flowed in such quantity that it drowned nearly all his descendants. Only the giant Bergelmir escaped with his household, riding — depending on how one reads a disputed word in Vafþrúðnismál — a boat, a hollowed trunk, or (Snorri's reading) a lúðr, perhaps a mill-frame or a coffin-like box. From Bergelmir the giants descend anew, which means the giants at Ragnarök are avenging, among other things, a drowning at the dawn of time. The flood-and-survivor pattern is so close to Noah that scholars have long debated whether it is Christian influence on Snorri or a genuinely ancient parallel; the poem's stanza, at least, looks older than the conversion.

Killing your world's first being has a moral cost, and the mythology knows it. The gods' world is built on the dismembered body of their own great-grandmother's kin; the giants never forget it; and the seeress of Völuspá, tallying the guilt that ends at Ragnarök, is tallying a ledger that opens on page one.

The world made from the body

The dismemberment is systematic, and both Grímnismál and Vafþrúðnismál preserve versions of the catalogue in verse, which Snorri expands:

• Flesh became the earth; bones, the mountains; teeth and jaws and broken bone-bits, the rocks and scree.
• Blood became the sea, laid as a ring around the earth's disc — "and it will seem an impossibility to most to get across it."
• Skull became the dome of the sky, set up over the earth with a dwarf under each corner: Norðri, Suðri, Austri, Vestri — North, South, East, West, holding up heaven for eternity.
• Brains were thrown into the air and became the clouds — which explains a certain amount about the weather's temperament.
• Eyebrows became the fortification enclosing Midgard, the "middle enclosure," the walled world of humans set safely back from the coasts where the giants were allotted land.

This is the world-from-body cosmogony, and it is one of the oldest ideas humanity owns: the Vedic Purusha, dismembered to make the cosmos; Babylonian Tiamat, split to make sky and earth; a Chinese parallel in Pangu. The Norse telling is distinguished by its craftsman's tone — the gods work like shipwrights, and the skalds returned the compliment by calling the sky "Ymir's skull" and the sea "Ymir's blood" in kennings, so that every poem about sailing quietly retells the creation.

Then the brothers took the sparks and embers flying out of Muspelheim and set them in the sky, fixed and wandering, to light heaven and earth and mark time. They appointed courses: Sól and Máni — sun-maiden and moon-man, children of a man arrogant enough to name them "Sun" and "Moon" — drive their chariots on appointed roads, and they drive fast because they are pursued. The wolves Sköll and Hati run behind them and will catch them at the end. Even the clock of this cosmos is a chase. Night, a giant's dark daughter, and her bright son Day circle the sky in turn, drawn by the horses Hrímfaxi ("Frost-mane," whose bit-foam is the morning dew) and Skinfaxi ("Shining-mane").

The gods gave the giants the shorelands to settle, built Midgard for the humans who did not yet exist, and raised Asgard for themselves — and, in the golden age Völuspá remembers, they built temples and forges, worked gold, and played games with golden pieces in the grass, "until three giant-maids came, mighty in power, out of Jötunheimr," and the first age ended. Those same golden pieces are found again in the grass of the world reborn after Ragnarök: the mythology closes its ring deliberately.

The first humans

Last came the witnesses. Walking by the sea, the three brothers found two trees — or two logs of driftwood, in Snorri's telling, which suits an Icelandic imagination for which driftwood was treasure — and raised them up as Askr ("Ash") and Embla (perhaps "Elm," perhaps "Vine"). Völuspá describes what they were before with unexpected tenderness: they had no breath, no soul, no warmth, no voice, no good color; they were ørlöglausa — "fateless." The gods' gifts fixed all of it: breath and life, mind and feeling, warmth and the bloom of living color — and with life came fate, a thread assigned at the norns' well beneath the world-tree. From these two descend everyone who has ever lived in Midgard, dwelling behind the wall of Ymir's eyebrows. The episode has its own page, including the puzzle of exactly which three gods were on the beach that day.

In the primary sources

The creation must be assembled from four texts, and they do not perfectly agree.

Völuspá gives the visionary skeleton: the naming of Ginnungagap, the raising of the earth by "Burr's sons," the sun uncertain of her hall, the gods ordering time and playing in the golden age, and the making of Askr and Embla — by Odin, Hœnir, and Lóðurr. Notably, Völuspá never actually narrates Ymir's killing; the poem moves straight from the void to the lifted world.

Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál, the great catalogue-poems of the Poetic Edda, preserve the body-cosmogony in verse — earth from flesh, sea from blood, sky from skull — plus Aurgelmir's origin from the Élivágar's venom-drops, the arm-and-leg begettings, and Bergelmir's escape.

Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, is where the full connected narrative lives — Auðumbla, Búri, the flood of blood, the four dwarves, the courses of sun and moon — with Snorri quoting the poems as he goes and asking us to trust him for the connective tissue. His creators are Odin, Vili, and Vé, not Hœnir and Lóðurr; his humans are made from logs, not standing trees. Where Snorri is our only witness (the cow, the licking, the flood), scholars enjoy him and audit him in equal measure: he wrote two centuries after conversion, loved a tidy system, and had read Genesis.

The disagreements are small, but they are honest evidence of what this material really was: not one canonical scripture but a living tradition, told differently in different halls, frozen at two different moments by two different kinds of text.

What happens after

Everything. The world made from Ymir is the stage for every other myth on this site — the first war cracks its new wall, a builder offers to mend it, the wolf is bound, Baldr dies — and the whole structure is explicitly temporary. The sea that rings the earth is blood and will rise; the sky is a skull and will crack; the sun is running from a wolf that will catch her. The makers built knowing it would burn, and built anyway; and after Ragnarök, the earth rises green from the sea to be lived in again. In Norse myth, creation is not an event at the back of time. It is a promise the cosmos keeps twice.