The Creation of the World from Ymir’s Body

Long ago, a king named Gylfi travelled in disguise to the hall of the gods, hoping to learn their secrets. There he met three mysterious lords seated on three high thrones, one above another. They were called High, Just-as-High and Third. Gylfi called himself Gangleri, and he asked them question after question. One of the first things he wanted to know was how the world began, and what there was before it.

High answered him with the words of an old poem, the Prophecy of the Seeress:

In the morning of time
there was nothing at all:
no sand and no sea,
no cool rolling waves.
There was no earth below
and no heaven above,
only Ginnungagap, the great yawning gap,
and no grass anywhere.

“Many ages before the earth was made,” Just-as-High went on, “there was Niflheim, the misty world of cold. In the middle of it lies a spring called Hvergelmir, and from it flow eleven rivers, with names like Svol and Gunnthra, Slid and Hrid. The last of them, the river Gjoll, runs closest to the gates of Hel.”

“But even earlier,” added Third, “there was a world far to the south called Muspelheim. It is so bright and hot and blazing that no one who was not born there can bear to be in it. A giant named Surt stands at its border to guard it. He holds a flaming sword, and at the end of the world he will ride out to make war, defeat all the gods and burn the whole world with fire.”

Gangleri asked what happened next, before there were any races of beings and before people grew many.

The answer came in parts, first from one lord and then from another. The rivers that flowed out of Niflheim, called the Elivagar, carried a poisonous foam with them. When they had run a long way from their spring, the foam hardened like the cinders that run out of a furnace, and it turned into ice. When the ice stood still and stopped flowing, a drizzle rose from the poison and froze into frost on top of it, and layer after layer of ice and frost piled up until it reached right into Ginnungagap.

So the northern part of the great gap was filled with heavy ice and frost, and there were drizzles and gusts of wind all through it. But the southern part was lit up by glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim. From Niflheim came cold and everything grim, and from the side nearest Muspelheim came heat and light, and in the middle, Ginnungagap was as warm and gentle as still summer air.

Where the hot breath of Muspelheim met the frost, the frost began to melt and drip. And by the power of the one who sent the heat, the drops came alive and took the shape of a man. He was given the name Ymir, though the frost giants call him Aurgelmir. He was the first of the giants, and all giants are descended from him.

“Was he a god?” Gangleri asked.

“Certainly not,” High replied. “He was wicked, and so were all his children, the ones we call frost giants. They say that while he slept he began to sweat, and from under his left arm there grew a man and a woman, and one of his feet had a son with the other. That is where the race of frost giants comes from.”

“Where did Ymir live,” asked Gangleri, “and what did he live on?”

“The next thing that happened,” said High, “was that more of the dripping frost became a cow, named Audhumla. Four rivers of milk flowed from her udder, and she fed Ymir.”

“And what did the cow eat?”

“She licked the salty stones that were covered in frost. On the first day she licked them, a man’s hair came out of the stones by evening. On the second day came a man’s head, and on the third day the whole man stood there. His name was Buri. He was handsome, tall and strong, and he had a son named Bor. Bor married a woman named Bestla, the daughter of the giant Bolthorn, and they had three sons. The first was Odin, the second was Vili and the third was Ve. And I believe,” High added, “that this Odin and his brothers are the rulers of heaven and earth.”

“How did they get along with Ymir?” asked Gangleri. “And which of them was stronger?”

“The sons of Bor killed the giant Ymir,” said High. “When he fell, so much blood poured from his wounds that the whole race of frost giants was drowned in it, all except one, who escaped with his family. The giants call him Bergelmir. He and his wife climbed into a boat and floated to safety, and from them the new families of frost giants are descended.”

“And what did the sons of Bor do then,” asked Gangleri, “if you believe they are gods?”

“There is plenty to tell about that,” High replied. “They took Ymir’s body, carried it into the middle of Ginnungagap, and out of it they made the world. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes. From his flesh they made the earth, and from his bones the mountains and rocks. From his teeth and jaws, and from the bits of bone that had broken, they made stones and pebbles.”

“With the blood that ran freely from his wounds,” said Just-as-High, “they made the great ocean. They fixed the earth firmly in place and laid the ocean around it like a ring, and most people would think it impossible to sail across.”

“They also took his skull,” said Third, “and made the sky out of it. They raised it high over the earth, with four corners, and under each corner they set a dwarf. The four dwarfs are called Austri, Vestri, Nordri and Sudri, which mean East, West, North and South.”

Then the gods gathered the glowing sparks that had flown loose from Muspelheim, and they set them in the middle of the endless sky, above and below, to give light to heaven and earth. They gave every fire its place. Some they fixed in the sky. Others were allowed to wander beneath it, but the gods gave them a path to follow. Old songs say that this was how people first began to count days and years, for until then, as the Prophecy of the Seeress tells us, the sun did not know where her home was, the moon did not know his own power, and the stars did not know where they belonged.

“These are wonderful things to hear,” said Gangleri. “It is a mighty piece of building, and very skilfully made. But how was the earth itself arranged?”

“The earth is round,” High answered, “and around it lies the deep ocean. Along the far shores of that ocean, the gods gave land to the families of giants to live in. But to protect the inner world from the restless giants, they built a great wall all around it. For this they used Ymir’s eyebrows, and they called the land inside the wall Midgard, the middle world, where people live. Last of all, they took Ymir’s brains and tossed them up into the air, and out of them they made the clouds.”

An old poem sums it all up. From Ymir’s flesh the earth was made, and the seas from his sweat. His bones became the rocks, his hair became the trees, and his skull became the sky. From his eyebrows the kindly gods made Midgard for the children of men, and from his brains came all the gloomy, drifting clouds.

About this story

This creation myth comes from the Prose Edda, written in Iceland around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson. In the part called Gylfaginning, “The Fooling of Gylfi,” King Gylfi asks three mysterious lords how the world began, and they answer partly in their own words and partly by quoting older poems, such as the Völuspá, the Prophecy of the Seeress. It is retold here from Rasmus B. Anderson’s English translation, The Younger Edda (the linked edition is dated 1901), where many names are spelled differently (for example Ymer, Ginungagap and Audhumbla).

The idea of a world built from the body of a first giant appears in other old mythologies too. Snorri goes on to tell how the gods made the first man and woman, Ask and Embla, from two trees they found on the seashore.

Read the original: Rasmus B. Anderson, trans., The Younger Edda (Project Gutenberg #18947)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: includes Ymir’s killing, a flood of blood and the world being made from parts of his body.

The explanation has speakers

Gylfi’s questions make creation a conversation rather than an anonymous list of facts. High calls the giants wicked, yet soon names a giant’s daughter as the mother of Odin and his brothers. The family connection complicates a simple division between wholly separate good and bad peoples.

The body-to-world images also differ between prose and verse: the prose makes the sea from blood, while the closing poem says sweat. Preserving both helps readers notice that the text brings several expressions together rather than presenting a single diagram of nature.

Make an image map

Choose three transformations, such as skull to sky or bones to mountains. Explain what visible similarity makes each image work. Add the two sea descriptions as alternatives and identify where each appears. These are images within a creation myth, not a scientific account.

Talk about it

• What two worlds of fire and ice existed at the very beginning?
• Which parts of Ymir’s body became which parts of the world?
• Why do you think the gods built a wall around Midgard?

Related stories

• Odin’s Quest for Wisdom — what Odin gave up to become the wisest of all
• The Death of Baldur — another tale from Snorri’s Prose Edda
• The Mead of Poetry — how Odin won the gift of poetry from the giants