The world of the Vikings is, quite literally, built from a corpse. From the slain primal giant Ymir the first gods shaped heaven and earth, mountains and sea. It is one of the darkest and grandest creation myths in the world – and it begins with a dripping block of ice.
In the piece on Ginnungagap we set the stage: the yawning void, the ice of Niflheim in the north, the fire of Muspelheim in the south. Now the first being steps onto the stage – and with it a tale of birth, murder and creation that runs from the primal cow to the first human pair.
Where the warm air of Muspelheim melted the poisoned primal ice of the Élivágar, the drops gathered – and took shape. So arose Ymir (also called Aurgelmir), the first of the frost giants, ancestor of all giant kin. Ymir was hermaphroditic: in his sleep he sweated, and from the sweat of his armpits grew a man and a woman, while his legs begot a son together. So from him alone the race of giants multiplied.
“Out of Elivagar sprang venom-drops, / and there a giant grew.”Vafþrúðnismál, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
From the same melting ice a second being arose: the primal cow Audhumla. Four rivers of milk flowed from her udder and nourished the giant Ymir. The cow herself licked the salty rime of the ice blocks – and what she uncovered was the beginning of the gods: on the first day a hair appeared, on the second a head, on the third a whole, handsome man. His name was Búri, the first god.
Búri begot a son, Borr. Borr took the giantess Bestla to wife, and from this union of god and giantess came three brothers: Odin, Vili and Vé. So from the very start the veins of the highest gods carry giant’s blood too – a keynote of Norse myth, in which gods and giants are inseparably kin and foe at once.
The three brothers slew Ymir. In his blood almost all the giants drowned as in a great flood; only one, Bergelmir, escaped with his wife in a hollow trough and became the ancestor of the new giant kin. This motif – a primal flood from the blood of the slain giant, from which a single pair escapes – is one of humanity’s many flood tales, and scholars readily compare it with other Indo-European traditions.
Now Odin, Vili and Vé built the world from the dead giant. No part went unused – the myth has an almost anatomical rigour:
“Out of Ymir’s flesh was fashioned the earth, / and the ocean out of his blood; / of his bones the hills, of his hair the trees, / of his skull the heavens high.”Grímnismál 40–41, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
His flesh became the earth, his blood the sea and lakes, his bones the mountains, his teeth and shattered bones the rocks and scree, his hair the trees. From his skull the gods vaulted the sky and set at its four corners four dwarves – Nordri, Sudri, Austri and Vestri (North, South, East, West) – to hold it up. His brains they cast into the air, and from them came the clouds. Sparks and embers from Muspelheim they set in the sky: the stars, the sun, the moon. And from Ymir’s eyebrows they raised a wall and made behind it Midgard (‘middle enclosure’), the protected world of humans, ringed by an ocean in which the Midgard Serpent later lies.
The world stood, but it was empty. Then the gods found two logs of driftwood on the shore – and from them made the first humans. According to the Völuspá, three gods (Odin and two companions, in one version Odin, Hœnir and Lóðurr) gave each a gift: Odin breath and the spirit of life, the second understanding and motion, the third warmth, colour and the senses. So from dead wood came the man Ask (‘ash’) and the woman Embla (probably ‘elm’ or ‘vine’) – the first parents of all humankind.
“Soul they had not, sense they had not, / heat nor motion, nor goodly hue; / soul gave Othin, sense gave Hönir, / heat gave Lothur and goodly hue.”Völuspá 18, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
That it is wood that becomes the first human is no accident in a world where trees – above all the world ash Yggdrasil – form the backbone of the cosmos. In the North, the human being is quite literally made from the tree.
The Norse creation myth knows no pure, unblemished making. All becoming here is bound up with violence and transformation: out of venom comes life, out of a murder comes the world, out of dead wood comes the human. This is not pessimism but a worldview that made sense in the raw North – nothing comes from nothing, everything is transformed matter, and even death already carries the seed of the new. That very attitude returns at the end of the world, when after Ragnarök a new, green world rises from the downfall.
Ginnungagap – the void before · Yggdrasil, the world tree · The Norse pantheon (Æsir & Vanir) · Ragnarök · What comes after? · The Edda as a source.
Poetic Edda (Codex Regius): Völuspá, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál (st. 40–41). Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda / Gylfaginning (ch. 5–8), c. 1220. English public-domain translation: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001); Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society (Harvard 1986) on the Indo-European parallels (Ymir – Purusha – *Yama). Evidence and comparative interpretation are kept apart.