Ymir: The First Giant and the Body That Became the World
The first giant of Norse myth, born in the void, killed by Odin and his brothers, and butchered to build the world.
Ymir is the primeval giant of Norse mythology, the first living being and ancestor of the frost giants. Odin and his brothers killed him and built the world from his body.
Ymir is the primeval giant of Norse mythology, the first living being and the ancestor of the frost giants. The Voluspa places him at the very start of time: "Of old was the age when Ymir lived; sea nor cool waves nor sand there were." In the poem Vafthrudnismal he is also called Aurgelmir, and his descendants are the frost giants who become the gods' oldest enemies.
Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c. 1220) tells the fuller story. In the empty gap called Ginnungagap, rime from icy Niflheim met sparks from fiery Muspell, and the melting drops quickened into Ymir. A cow named Audhumla fed him with rivers of milk. While he slept, a man and a woman grew under his left arm, and one of his legs begot a son with the other. The gods themselves came later, from a being the cow licked out of salty ice.
Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve then killed Ymir. So much blood poured out that it drowned the frost giants, all but Bergelmir and his wife, who escaped and restarted the giant race. The gods carried the body into the middle of the gap and built the cosmos from it: flesh became earth, blood became sea and lakes, bones became mountains, and the skull was raised as the sky, held up at its four corners by four dwarves named North, South, East and West.
Scholars see Ymir as a Norse form of an old Indo-European theme, the world made from a sacrificed primal being, comparable to Purusha in the Rig Veda. His name may be related to Sanskrit Yama, meaning "twin", which fits a being who produced offspring by himself. People who read these myths alongside the Near East often point to Tiamat, whose split body forms heaven and earth in Enuma Elish: in both, the world is built out of an older, defeated giant.
The Norse gods are not the first beings: they are descended from giants, and the frost giant Bergelmir survived the blood-flood of Ymir's death in a way that reads like a miniature Noah story.
Snorri was a Christian writing two centuries after the conversion, and some of his neat system, including the flood of blood, may be his own arrangement of scattered older verses.
