How the Worlds Came to Be

In Völuspá the seeress tells Odin of a time before the familiar world: no earth, no sky above it, no grass, only a yawning gap. Snorri calls the gap Ginnungagap.

He places two primordial regions on opposite sides of it. In the north lies Niflheim, cold and mist, with the spring Hvergelmir. In the south lies Múspell, bright and hot, guarded by Surtr with his flaming sword.

Frozen, poisonous water spread into the gap. Heat from the south met the frost, and the melting drops came alive as Ymir, the first giant and the ancestor of the frost-giants. So the beginning is not a god speaking a finished universe into being. Life appears where cold and heat meet.

Another creature came out of the ice: the cow Auðhumla. Her milk fed Ymir, and she lived by licking salty ice. As she licked, she uncovered a being called Búri. His son Borr married Bestla, the daughter of a giant, and their sons were Odin, Vili and Vé. The gods are not wholly separate from the beings they later fight: Odin has giant blood through his mother.

Odin and his brothers killed Ymir. In Snorri’s telling the blood from his wounds drowned the frost-giants, all but Bergelmir and his wife, whose children carried their people on. Then the brothers took Ymir’s body into Ginnungagap and made the world from it.

Grímnismál (stanzas 40–41) gives the correspondences:

• his flesh became the earth
• his blood, the sea
• his bones, the mountains and rocks
• his hair, the trees
• his skull, the sky
• his brain, the clouds
• his eyebrows (or eyelashes, depending on the translation), the protective wall around Midgard

Snorri adds that four dwarfs named North, South, East and West hold up the corners of the sky, and that sparks from Múspell became the lights in it. The gods are arranging materials that already exist.

Midgard matters most to us. Its name means roughly “the middle enclosure”, the protected home of people. Its boundary, made from Ymir’s brows, keeps out the giants. Making the world meant making land and also drawing a line around a place where people could live.

Snorri says the gods found two tree trunks on a shore and made the first human pair, Ask and Embla, giving them breath, understanding and the shape of people. Völuspá (stanzas 17–18) tells it with different givers: Odin, Hœnir and Lóðurr, not Snorri’s Odin, Vili and Vé. It is a reminder that these are related traditions, not one agreed script.

At the centre of this world stands Yggdrasil, a huge sacred ash. The surviving texts give no creation scene for it. They do not say Odin planted it, that it grew from Ymir’s corpse, or that anyone built it to hold nine worlds. Völuspá simply has it in the seeress’s picture of the early world, and later shows it standing green beside Urðr’s well. Its beginning is left unexplained.

Its role is clearer than its origin. Its reach, roots and wells join the cosmos together, and it is where the gods gather every day to give judgment. Divine rule, fate, wisdom and the life of the world all meet there.

The sources do not agree on the roots. Grímnismál (stanza 31) has three roots running three ways, with Hel beneath one, the frost-giants beneath another and human beings beneath the third. Snorri has roots toward the Æsir, the frost-giants and Niflheim. Any tidy modern map has already chosen between these.

Snorri ties the tree to three sources of water:

• Urðarbrunnr, Urðr’s well: where the gods hold their court and the Norns shape the fates of people.
• Mímisbrunnr, Mímir’s well: a well of wisdom, where Odin gave an eye for a drink.
• Hvergelmir: the spring under the Niflheim root, home of serpents and of the dragon Níðhöggr.

So the roots lead into the powers that govern existence: fate, knowledge, water and death.

The usual nine are Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, Niflheim, Muspelheim and Hel (or Helheim). The list is a useful way in, but it is not a medieval inventory, and different books give different nines. Nidavellir is the clearest case: Völuspá (stanza 37) puts a golden hall of Sindri’s kin there, and some lists give it its own place while others fold it into Svartalfheim. Snorri places Hel inside Niflheim, which makes it hard to count the two as separate. Each world has a short note on its own panel in the explorer.

They also did not all “happen” at once. The sources give no nine-part creation. Niflheim and Múspell belong to the conditions before the earth. Midgard is fashioned and fenced. Asgard is set up as the gods’ home. Other places enter the stories as homes, inheritances, gifts or destinations with no account of how they began. “The gods made nine worlds from Ymir” is too neat: the texts say they made the earth and its structures from him, and say nothing like that for every named world.

In Grímnismál (stanzas 32–35) an eagle sits above, the squirrel Ratatoskr runs messages between the eagle and Níðhöggr below, four stags eat the new shoots, serpents lie under the roots, the side of the tree rots and Níðhöggr gnaws from beneath. The poem says the ash “suffers hardship, more than men know”.

Against this the Norns tend it. Snorri says they pour holy water over it every day, and Völuspá names the three chief Norns Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, who lay down laws and allot lives beneath the tree.

It is fair to read this as a world kept going by constant renewal, not by being safe from decay. That is a reading, not something the sources say outright; they show damage and care side by side.

The world’s weakness ends in disaster. In Völuspá kin turn on kin, violence spreads, Heimdall blows his horn and Yggdrasil shudders. The collapse is cosmic, but it is also the collapse of family and oath.

Snorri gathers the enemies: Fenrir breaks loose, the Midgard serpent rises, the forces of Múspell ride and Bifröst breaks. Odin falls to Fenrir. Thor kills the serpent and dies of its venom. Freyr falls to Surtr, and Surtr burns the world. The fire that was there before the inhabited world returns to end it.

It is not the last image. The earth rises green from the sea, fields grow unsown, the surviving gods meet and Baldr comes back from Hel. Snorri adds a surviving human pair, Líf and Lífþrasir, who renew humankind. Be careful about the tree itself: the poem shows it shaking but gives no clear account of its death or of a replacement, and the renewal passage does not draw a fresh map of nine restored worlds.

To read the sources themselves: Gylfaginning chapters 4–9 for creation, chapters 15–17 for Yggdrasil and its surroundings, and chapters 51–53 for Ragnarök and renewal; Grímnismál stanzas 29–35 and 40–41; and Völuspá for the beginning and the end of the world. Chapter and stanza numbers vary by edition, and the translations used on the places’ own pages (Thorpe and Blackwell) do not always number them the way the modern editions this note followed do.