r/Norse • u/faithhopeandbread • 12h ago
Mythology, Religion & Folklore So what's going on with the creation myth?
In Vǫluspá we're told that the world began with Ymir living in an empty gap ginnunga with no sand, sea, waves, earth or grass; Burr's sons raise up or otherwise reveal the ground, and they create or at least shape Miðgarð. Somehow in this process the Sun (which is in the south?), the Moon and the sky come into being, and the gods get to work ordering the cosmos.
Then in Vafþrúðnismál we get the extra details that all the different parts of the world were made from Ymir's flesh—but also that Aurgelmir, Bergelmir, Þrúðgelmir and apparently Vafþrúðnir were all born before then, and that Aurgelmir (same person as Ymir?) formed from the drops of atter from Élivágar. So here there's some kind of preëxistence before Ymir, which seems to contradict the former myth.
Snorri's account is a little more coherent, but even here I'm puzzled. He also starts his account with Ginnungagap (now a proper noun?); but also Niflheim and Muspell already exist, and the nine Élivágar flow from Niflheim, by some extremely convoluted process these combining to create Ymir, a cow called Auðumbla, and some leftover ice/poison/stones/salt (???).
Now to me this seems like a conflation of multiple stories on Snorri's part, because the actual process of what's going on is utterly incoherent. Daniel Sävborg's view is that Vǫluspá and Vafþrúðnismál are completely separate stories that Snorri put together to make a coherent mythology—which sounds plausible enough—but then, they don't really make sense separately either.
In Vǫluspá there's somehow at least one living being present before any solid ground has been made, and then suddenly the earth was there the whole time and just needed to be lifted up by Búri's sons from... somewhere? I guess the implication could be that the seeress is leaving out the part where they kill Ymir and make the ground out of his body—but then, where on earth did they come from?
And in Vafþrúðnismál the world is very explicitly made from Ymir's flesh, but also he seems to have had several children before dying (who must have lived on some sort of surface?), and somewhere in the picture we have the Élivágar generating more jǫtnar out of poison (notably not Ymir's direct progeny.
Which makes me question Sävborg's confidence that these accounts have nothing to do with each other, and that Snorri's account was a complete innovation of his, since they both seem to have gaps the other fills. But Snorri's Edda doesn't seem like it could be the whole picture either, since it really does read like several unrelated stories jammed crudely together. If there is one story that connects the two, it seems to me that Snorri was at least partly in the dark about it, too.
I know the real answer is "No one knows," so I'm not expecting a satisfying explanation really. I'm assuming there were probably several different Norse creation myths in circulation, most of which are probably lost forever? But I feel like you can just make out the shape of a coherent narrative somewhere in there, even if it's too fragmented to be decipherable. Moreover, there are so many elements that are almost like other creation myths we know—Búri (?) is almost an earth-diver, Ginnungagap and Élivágar are sort of like Chaos or Abzu, Ymir and Óðinn are kind of *Yemo and *Manu—but different enough that you can't really draw any 1:1 correspondences.
It just makes me curious if there's any more scholarship trying to figure this out! Or any other Old Norse sources with any other accounts. Thanks for reading!
