Ymir was the primordial frost-giant of Norse myth — the first living being, born of the meeting of fire and ice at the dawn of creation, the ancestor of all the giants, and the being from whose slain body the gods fashioned the entire world. He is the raw, chaotic matter of the cosmos given form: the giant who was the universe before the universe, and whose death gave birth to everything that is.
Born of Fire and Ice
In the beginning, says the Norse creation myth, there was only Ginnungagap, the great yawning void, with the realm of fire (Muspelheim) to the south and the realm of ice (Niflheim) to the north. Where the heat of the one met the rime of the other, the ice melted and dripped, and from those drops the first being quickened into life: Ymir, the primordial frost-giant, vast beyond measure. As Ymir slept, he sweated, and from the sweat of his armpits were born the first other giants, a male and a female, while his two legs begot a son between them — and so from Ymir alone sprang the whole race of the jötnar, the giants. He was nourished by the milk of the primeval cow Audhumla, who had also formed from the melting ice.
The First Gods
The cow Audhumla licked the salty rime-stones, and from them she freed another being: Búri, the first of the gods, the grandfather of Odin. Buri's son Borr married the giantess Bestla, and their sons were Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve. Thus the gods and the giants shared a common origin in the primordial dawn, both descended from the first beings of fire and ice — cousins and enemies from the very start.
The Slaying and the Making of the World
Odin and his brothers, the first gods, rose up and slew the giant Ymir. So vast was the primordial being that his blood gushed out in a flood that drowned almost all the other giants. Then the gods took Ymir's enormous body and built the world from it, piece by piece: from his flesh they made the earth; from his blood, the seas and lakes; from his bones, the mountains; from his teeth and shattered bones, the rocks and stones; from his skull, the dome of the sky, held up at its four corners by four dwarves; from his brains, the clouds; and from his hair, the trees. The sparks of fire from Muspelheim they set in the sky as the sun, moon and stars. Thus the entire ordered world — earth, sea, mountains, sky — was made from the body of the slain primordial giant.
The World That Was a Giant
Ymir endures as one of the most profound figures in all of world mythology — the primordial being whose body became the cosmos, an image of creation found, in kindred forms, across many cultures. He embodies the deep Norse vision that the world itself is made of the stuff of an ancient, chaotic, giant being — that the very earth beneath our feet is the flesh of Ymir, the mountains his bones, the sea his blood, the sky his skull. We live, in the Norse imagination, inside the body of the first giant.
The earth is his flesh, the mountains his bones, the sea his blood and the sky his skull — for the gods built the whole world from the body of the first giant they slew.