In the beginning, said the Norse poets, there was Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void — and on its northern side stretched Niflheim, the home of mist and ice, and on its southern side Muspelheim, the realm of fire. Where the rime of the one met the heat of the other, the ice began to drip and to take on form; and from the dripping was made the first living thing, who was called Ymir.

Ymir was a giant of vast proportions, neither male nor female alone but containing both, and from him sprang the race of frost-giants — under his arm a man and a woman were born of his sweat, and from his joined feet a six-headed son. Ymir lived from the milk of the cow Audhumla, who had likewise come into being out of the melting ice, and who licked salt from the rocks; from her tongue's licking emerged the first of the gods, the man Búri.

Búri begot Borr, who took to wife the giantess Bestla; and Borr and Bestla begot the three brothers Odin, Vili, and Vé. These three slew Ymir at last, for they could not bear the giant's growing race; and from his body they made the world. His flesh became the earth; his bones, the mountains; his blood, the seas (and so vast was the bleeding that it drowned all the giants save two, who escaped in a hollow tree); his skull, lifted upon four pillars at the cardinal points, became the dome of the sky; his brains, scattered, became the clouds; his hair, the trees; and his eyebrows the high wall of Midgard, the middle-earth that the gods built for their human children. So the world is built upon the corpse of the first giant, and the gods are murderers; and the children of Ymir whom they could not catch — the giants — have remained their everlasting enemies.