YMIR — THE FIRST GIANT, AND THE BODY THE WORLD WAS MADE FROM
Before the gods, before the tree, before the sea, there was a giant lying in the dark, and everything that exists was made from him.
The Norse called him Ymir. The poems also give him another name, Aurgelmir. He was the first living being, and he did not die of old age. He was killed, and the world was built out of what was left.
WHERE HE CAME FROM
The Norse creation story does not begin with a god. It begins with a gap. Ginnungagap, the “yawning void,” lay between two realms: Niflheim in the north, a land of frost and mist, and Muspelheim in the south, a land of fire. Our main source for the details is Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, written in Iceland in the 1200s, which draws on older poems.
Snorri says that the rivers of Niflheim flowed out into the gap and froze, layer on layer, until the ice reached the edge of the fire. Where the heat from the south met the frost from the north, the ice began to melt. From the dripping rime, life took shape. That life was Ymir, a giant, and the ancestor of all the giants.
THE COW AND THE SLEEPING GIANT
A cow came out of the melting ice as well. Her name was Auðumbla, and Ymir lived on her milk. She fed herself by licking the salty ice-blocks. On the first day her tongue uncovered hair, on the second a head, and on the third a whole man: Búri, the grandfather of the gods.
Ymir, meanwhile, slept, and in his sleep he sweated. Snorri says a man and a woman grew under his left arm, and that one of his feet fathered a son on the other. From these came the race of frost giants. The giants in the Norse stories, the old enemies of the gods, are all Ymir’s family.
THE THREE BROTHERS
Búri had a son, Borr, who married a giantess named Bestla. Their three sons were Odin, Vili and Vé. The first gods were therefore part giant, and the giant they killed was their own kin. The old stories never pretend the line between gods and giants is clean.
The brothers killed Ymir. The poems do not give a reason, and perhaps none was needed: the world did not yet exist, and he was in the way. Snorri says so much blood poured from his wounds that it drowned nearly all of the frost giants. One giant, Bergelmir, escaped with his wife in a boat and kept the line alive. Later giants, including the ones who fight the gods at Ragnarök, descend from him.
THE WORLD MADE FROM A BODY
The brothers carried the body into the middle of the void and built the world from it. The poem Grímnismál lists the parts, and Snorri repeats it. The earth was made from his flesh. The sea and the lakes were made from his blood. The mountains were his bones, the trees his hair, and the stones his teeth and his broken bones.
His skull became the sky. The gods set it over the earth and placed a dwarf at each of its four corners to hold it up. Their names are Norðri, Suðri, Austri and Vestri: North, South, East and West. The clouds were his brain. From his eyebrows, the gods built a wall around the middle realm to keep out the giants, and called it Midgard. People live inside it still.
Even the dwarves came from him. In Snorri’s telling they started as maggots in his flesh, and the gods gave them minds and the shape of men.
WHAT THE DESIGN CARRIES
Our Ymir tee puts the giant on the front of the chest. It is a huge, bearded face drawn in rough black brushwork: deep, dark eye sockets, a heavy nose, and a long beard that falls in dripping strands across the whole body of the tee. A single oxblood-red slash cuts diagonally across the forehead, like the one mark of colour in a black-and-white world.
We drew him as a face, not a battle, because that is how the myth works. He is the giant who is the ground. We chose one red mark because everything else is ink and bone, and he is the one who bled.
WHY HE STILL MATTERS
Most creation stories are about someone making the world. This one is about what the world is made of. Every mountain is a bone, every sea is blood, and every tree is hair. The Norse did not see the land as a gift from the gods. They saw it as a body, and the gods as the ones who killed it to build a home.
It is a hard story, and an honest one. The world begins in an act of violence, and the first thing that was ever alive is the thing we stand on.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
Ymir comes first in our Norse Saga collection, and everything else follows from him. The tree that stands in his world is told in Yggdrasil. The serpent at its root is told in Níðhöggr. The god who walks his mountains is told in Thor, and the end of the world he made is told in Ragnarök. The stag on Odin’s roof whose antlers feed the rivers is told in Eikþyrnir.
— Neolithic Store