Bor (Borr) was a primordial Norse god — the son of Buri, the husband of the giantess Bestla, and the father of Odin and his brothers, the gods who would slay Ymir and create the world. He is the crucial link in the genealogy of the gods, the bridge between the first divine being and the All-Father, and the father of the creators of the world.
The Son of the First God
Bor (Old Norse Borr or Burr) was the son of Buri, the first of the gods who had been licked free of the primordial ice by the cow Audhumla. As Buri's son, Bor belonged to the second generation of the divine race, in the earliest dawn of the cosmos when the world had not yet been made and only the giants, the first gods, and the primordial beings existed in and around the great void of Ginnungagap.
The Marriage to Bestla
Bor took as his wife the giantess Bestla, the daughter of a giant named Bölþorn. This union of a god with a giantess was deeply significant: it mingled the line of the gods with the line of the jötnar at the very root of the Aesir family tree, so that Odin himself — the All-Father — was half giant by descent, born of a divine father and a giant mother. The deep kinship and entanglement of gods and giants in Norse myth begins here, in the marriage of Bor and Bestla.
The Father of the Creators
From Bor and Bestla came three sons: Odin, Vili and Ve. These three brothers were the gods who rose up and slew the primordial giant Ymir, and who then took his vast body and fashioned from it the entire world — the earth from his flesh, the sea from his blood, the sky from his skull. They also created the first humans from two tree-trunks on the shore. Thus Bor was the father of the creator-gods, the sire of the three brothers who made the cosmos and humankind. Everything that exists in the ordered world was made by the sons of Bor.
The Bridge of the Generations
Bor endures as the essential link in the Norse genealogy of the gods — son of the first god Buri, husband of the giantess Bestla, father of Odin and the creators of the world. Though he has no myths of his own, his place is foundational: he is the father of the All-Father, the generation through which the divine line passed from its primordial origin to the gods who would shape the cosmos. In him the line of gods and the line of giants joined, and from him sprang the makers of the world.
Son of the first god and husband of a giantess, he fathered the three brothers who slew Ymir and built the world — the bridge between creation's dawn and the All-Father himself.