Ginnungagap

Ginnungagap (Old Norse, roughly “void filled with magical potential” — the etymology of ginnunga is disputed; related to ginna, to deceive or fill with magic) is the primordial emptiness at the beginning of Norse cosmology. Before the Nine Worlds existed, there was only this: a vast, boundless void, silent and dark. Völuspá stanza 3 names it in the seeress’s account of the beginning: “gap var ginnunga” — “gap was yawning.”

Fire and ice

Gylfaginning ch. 4–6 provides the fullest account. To the north of Ginnungagap lay Niflheim, the world of primal ice and mist, from whose spring Hvergelmir the frozen rivers Élivágar flowed south into the void and solidified into layer upon layer of ice. To the south lay Muspelheim, the world of primal fire, ruled by Surtr, whose sparks and heat flowed north. Where the fire’s warmth met the ice, it melted — and from the melting drops Ymir was animated.

Creation from Ymir

From Ymir’s sleeping body the first other jötnar emerged (one from his armpit, one from his leg crossing the other). From a thawing salt-block, the first cow Auðhumla also appeared; she licked the ice and after three days uncovered the figure of Búri, ancestor of Odin. Odin, Vili, and Vé — Búri’s grandsons — slew Ymir and from his body shaped the cosmos: his flesh became earth, his blood the sea, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky.

The void after Ragnarök

Völuspá stanzas 59–66 describe the world after Ragnarök sinking back into the sea and rising green and fresh. The implication held in the earliest layers of Norse thinking is that Ginnungagap persists beneath the worlds as the condition of possibility — what was there before creation can hold what rises after destruction.