Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda opens its creation account not with gods but with a void, Ginnungagap, lying between the fire of Muspelheim to the south and the ice of Niflheim to the north. Where the two met, the ice began to melt and drip, and from that meeting of heat and cold the first living being took shape: Ymir, a frost giant, formed before any god, world or ordered structure existed at all. Ymir's own origin, then, is presented as a purely elemental event rather than an act of will by any prior creator, life generated from the direct collision of the cosmos's two founding extremes.
Ymir then reproduced without any partner, in a manner the sources describe matter-of-factly rather than treating as remarkable within their own frame: as he slept, a being grew from the sweat beneath his arm, and his two legs together produced a son, and this self-generated offspring became the first ancestors of the jotnar, the race of giants that runs through the whole of Norse myth afterward as one of its central recurring forces, allied with, opposed to, and periodically intermarried with the gods themselves. The primordial cow Audhumla appears in the same passage, nourishing Ymir with her milk while she herself licks salty ice blocks, and her licking gradually uncovers a man, Buri, who becomes the ancestor of Odin and the other gods, meaning the two great lineages of Norse cosmology, giants and gods, are set running in parallel from virtually the same founding moment.