In the beginning there was no word and no bang, but a void: Ginnungagap, the ‘yawning gap’. Between the fire in the south and the ice in the north lay a vast, silent abyss – and out of it came everything. The Norse creation myth begins not with fullness, but with the nothing that lies between.
The great creation stories of the world often begin with a creative act: a god speaks, an egg cracks, a seed sprouts. The North tells it differently and, if you like, more physically. Before all else there was a void – and at its edges two primal forces that had nothing to do with each other, until they touched in the middle. What this piece does: it explains what Ginnungagap is, where the name comes from, what the sources say – and where scholarship grows cautious.
“Of old was the age when Ymir lived; / sea nor cool waves nor sand there were; / earth had not been, nor heaven above, / but a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.”Völuspá 3, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
‘A yawning gap’ – that is Bellows’ rendering of Ginnungagap. In this single verse the whole beginning is contained: no earth, no heaven, no sea, no grass. Only the gap.
Snorri Sturluson orders the beginning into three regions in his Prose Edda (c. 1220). In the middle: Ginnungagap, the yawning void. In the north: Niflheim (‘mist-home’), the realm of primal ice, cold and fog; at its centre wells the spring Hvergelmir, from which flow eleven venomous primal streams, the Élivágar (‘ice-waves’). In the south: Muspelheim (Múspell), the realm of primal fire, so hot and bright that only its dwellers can endure it; at its border keeps watch the fire giant Surt with the flaming sword.
As the venom of the Élivágar flowed far from its source, it froze into layer upon layer of rime and ice and filled the northern half of the void. From the south blew the heat of Muspelheim. And where the sparks and warm air met the ice, it began to drip. From those first drops of meltwater the first being took shape: the primal giant Ymir. So the empty gap became the cradle of life – not through a creator’s word, but through the meeting of fire and ice. How it went on – Ymir, the primal cow Audhumla, the building of the world from a giant’s body – we tell in the piece ‘Ymir & the making of the world’.
The second part of the word is clear: gap means ‘cleft, chasm, opening’ (the same word as English gap). The first part, ginnunga-, is more disputed. Traditionally it is rendered ‘yawning’ – the ‘yawning gap’, an empty, open maw. But part of scholarship reads ginn- as an intensifying, sacred element (compare ginn-heilagr, ‘most holy’, a word the Edda uses of the gods). Then Ginnungagap would be not merely an empty, but a ‘magically charged’ or ‘creatively laden’ void – not a dead nothing, but a space full of possibility. Rudolf Simek, for one, leans towards this reading.
Curiously, for some medieval Icelandic geographers Ginnungagap was not just a primal myth but a real place. In learned manuscripts of the 14th century the name appears for the wide, mist-shrouded sea in the far north-west – somewhere between Greenland and the newly discovered coasts to the west (the fabled Vinland). Out of the cosmic void at the beginning of time had become a spot at the edge of the known world: there, where the map ends and the fog begins.
There is a peculiar dignity in this beginning. No almighty will forms the world out of nothing; it arises from tension – from the meeting of opposites, from cold and glow, from stillness and motion. Whoever lived in the raw North, between glaciers and volcanoes (think of Iceland, where these myths were written down), knew this image first-hand: fire and ice, side by side, and life between them. Ginnungagap is the Norse way of saying: out of the void and the strife comes becoming.
Ymir & the making of the world · Yggdrasil, the world tree · The Norse pantheon · Ragnarök · What comes after? · The Edda as a source.
Poetic Edda (Codex Regius): Völuspá (st. 3), Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál. Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda / Gylfaginning (ch. 4–5), c. 1220. English public-domain translation: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (s.v. Ginnungagap, Niflheim, Muspell, Élivágar); John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001). On the medieval geographic placement of Ginnungagap: Icelandic geographical manuscripts of the 14th c. Evidence and interpretation are kept apart.