Indo-European Poetry and Myth

There was not sand nor sea nor the cool waves;

earth was nowhere nor heaven above;

Ginnunga Gap there was, but grass nowhere.

Besides the general parallelism in the series of negative statements, we may
note the specific correspondence between the Germanic formula ‘nor heaven
above’ (noh u ̄fhimil, né upphiminn) and the Vedic nó víoma ̄ paró yát, literally
‘nor the heaven which (is) beyond’.^50 A fourth text may be added from Greek:

Χα ́ ο 6ν κα? Ν7ξ nΕρεβο ́  τε μλαν πρ;τον κα? Τα ́ ρταρο ε1ρ3,

γH δ, ο1δ, q^ρ ο1δ, ο1ραν: 6ν.

There was Chasm and Night and dark Erebos at first, and broad Tartarus,

but earth nor air nor heaven there was. (Ar. Av. 693 f.).

Aristophanes must have known the motif from a serious cosmogony current
in his time. The analogy between the Hesiodic Χα ́ ο‘Chasm’ and the Nordic
Ginnunga Gap‘Gaping(?) Opening’ has often been noted; Aristophanes’
Χα ́ ο 6ν matches Gap var Ginnunga in the Vo ̨luspá.

The solitary Twin

That Eddic passage alludes to Ymir as the primal being, and to the sons of
Bur (Odin, Vili, and Vé) raising up the earth and fashioning Miðgarð, the
habitable world. Ymir was a frost giant. From the sweat of his two armpits
came a man and a woman, and one of his legs made love to the other and
fathered a six-headed son, ancestor of giants. Odin and his brothers killed
Ymir and made the earth out of his flesh, the mountains from his bones,
the trees from his hair, the sky from his skull, and the sea and lakes from his
blood.^51
Ymir’s name is thought to mean ‘Twin’. But whose twin could he have
been, seeing that he was a unique creature? The answer may be ‘his own’, in
the sense that he was bisexual, a combination of male and female. The story
that one of his legs begot a son with the other looks like a half-understood or
bowdlerized paraphrase of procreation by self-fertilization.
This interpretation is supported by a Germanic and an Iranian parallel.
The Germanic one is the poetic tradition reported by Tacitus (Germ. 2. 2)

(^50) The three texts were compared by Güntert (1923), 333; H. H. Schaeder, Die Weltliteratur 18
(1943), 84 f. = Schmitt (1968), 79 f.; Schmitt (1967), 204–6.
(^51) Vafprúðnismál 21, 33, Grímnismál 40 f., Gylf. 5–8. I take the couple born from the armpits
to be the first humans, though Snorri leaves them unexplained and later provides a separate
account of the creation of the first man and woman from two logs (Gylf. 9).
356 9. Cosmos and Canon