Episode 1: Before Odin — The Stranger in the Ice

Long before there were roads to follow or mountains to lose your way among, there was a place called Ginnungagap. To call it a place is perhaps generous, for there was no ground beneath it and no sky overhead. It was an immense gap between two very different realms. In the north lay Niflheim, wrapped in cold and mist; to the south burned Muspelheim, so fiercely hot that anyone who did not belong there could not endure it. Between them, where neither frost nor flame entirely held sway, the first living things would appear.

The ice came slowly into Ginnungagap. Rivers flowing from the spring Hvergelmir traveled far from their source, until the poisonous substance they carried hardened. Frozen vapor gathered above them, laying frost upon frost, and the layers spread farther into the emptiness. From the other direction came warm air and sparks from Muspelheim. Wherever that warmth reached the frozen masses, their edges softened and began to drip. For a while, there was only this meeting of heat and cold. Then the melting drops quickened into life and took the shape of a being.

His name was Ymir, and he was the first giant. When he came into existence, there was no meadow on which to lie down, no riverbank along which to wander, and certainly no one waiting to explain what a giant ought to do with himself. The frost was still melting around him, however, and it soon produced another creature. This one was a cow called Audhumla. Four streams of milk flowed from her udders, and Ymir fed on them. It was fortunate that she had appeared when she did, for there was nothing growing in Ginnungagap, and a creature of Ymir’s size could hardly have managed without food.

Audhumla needed nourishment as well, though hers was easier to find. The ice was salty, and she fed by licking its frozen surfaces. While Ymir drank her milk, she steadily wore away the blocks around her. It might have seemed an ordinary enough arrangement in a place where almost nothing could yet be called ordinary. But on the first day, as the ice thinned beneath her tongue, something appeared that had no business belonging to a block of frozen salt. By evening, she had uncovered strands of hair.

Beneath that hair, the rest remained hidden. There was no one to say how it had come to be there, and the old story offers no explanation. Audhumla continued licking as she had before, and on the second day a head emerged. What she was uncovering had a human shape, like Ymir, though it had not formed from the melting drops as he had. It was already there within the ice, becoming visible a little at a time. On the third day, she cleared away what remained and revealed an entire man, handsome in appearance, large and powerful. His name was Buri.

Buri matters to our story because the family that would lead to Odin began with him. He was not Ymir’s son, nor was he one of the beings that would spring from the giant’s body. His appearance marked the beginning of another line of descent. We are told little about his own life, but we are given the name of his son: Bor. Before we follow that family any farther, however, we must return to Ymir, whose household was growing in a manner rather different from any family you are likely to know.

As Ymir slept, he began to sweat. Beneath his left arm, a male and a female grew into being, while one of his legs fathered a son with the other. Strange as it sounds, this was the beginning of the frost giants. Their descendants would become numerous, and in the tales to come they would be neighbors, rivals, spouses, and dangerous enemies of the gods. For the moment, they belonged to a world that had still to be made, sharing the same early existence as Buri and his family.

The two families soon became connected. Bor married Bestla, the daughter of a giant named Bolthorn, and they had three sons: Odin, Vili, and Ve. Through their father, the brothers descended from Buri, the man Audhumla had uncovered in the ice. Through their mother, they belonged to giant kin. Remembering that connection will save us some confusion later, when gods and giants begin quarreling; their disagreements were never simply a matter of strangers meeting across a boundary.

Odin had no kingdom then. Asgard had not been built, and there were no human beings to call upon him. Beyond the first families lay the frost, the heat, and the great expanse of Ginnungagap. Ymir had lived there before them all, sustained by Audhumla’s milk, while the generations born after him began to multiply. Yet it would be Bor’s three sons who brought this early age to an end. They would turn against Ymir, and what followed would change far more than the fortunes of their family. From the body of the first giant, the brothers would make the ground beneath our feet.