Ymir's Dismemberment

Norse cosmogony as recorded in the Eddas begins not with nothing but with Ginnungagap, a yawning, formless void positioned between two older realms, the fiery Muspelheim to the south and the freezing Niflheim to the north. Where the heat drifting from Muspelheim met the rime and ice flowing out of Niflheim, in the emptiness of Ginnungagap, the meeting warmth caused the ice to drip and take shape, and from these dripping, melting layers the first living being formed: the giant Ymir, ancestor of all the frost giants. As Ymir slept, he sweated, and from the sweat under his left arm a male and a female giant grew, while his two legs together produced a six-headed son, the first generations of giants born without any female partner needed at all.

The same meltwater that formed Ymir also shaped a great cow, Audhumla, who nourished Ymir by her milk while she herself fed by licking the salty blocks of ice nearby. Her licking gradually uncovered a man's shape frozen within the ice, and over three days of licking she freed him entirely: Buri, the first of the gods, whose grandsons, born to his son Bor and the giantess Bestla, were Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve, the three gods who would eventually turn against Ymir and the giants he had spawned.

Odin, Vili, and Ve, dissatisfied with the disorder Ymir and his giant offspring represented, turn on the primordial giant and kill him. So much blood pours from Ymir's wounds that it floods the world and drowns nearly the entire race of frost giants in it, all but the giant Bergelmir, who manages to escape the flood with his wife by climbing into a hollowed-out log or boat, and from that pair the surviving lineage of frost giants descends. With Ymir dead, the three brothers drag his enormous corpse to the center of Ginnungagap and set about building the ordered cosmos directly out of his body.

His flesh becomes the earth itself, and his blood the encircling seas, lakes, and rivers. His bones are raised as the mountains, and his teeth and the fragments of his shattered bones become the boulders and loose stones scattered across the land. His hair is planted as the trees and other growing things, and his skull, lifted up and set over the earth, becomes the dome of the sky, held aloft at its four corners by four dwarves named for the cardinal directions. His brain, thrown up into the air, becomes the clouds, and sparks and glowing embers gathered from Muspelheim are fixed in their places to become the sun, the moon, and the stars, completing a world built entirely from the body of the being the gods had just destroyed.