Ymir: the first being of the Nine Realms

Ymir was the original Jötunn, the first being that came into existence in the Nine Realms and the progenitor of all living creatures. Formed in the great void of Ginnungagap where the primordial forces of fire and ice first met, he was, in the words of Mimir, "a being of pure creation and chaos, mother and father to all that came after." Every god, man, and beast descended from his flesh, including the Aesir who would one day turn against him. His murder at the hands of Odin and his brothers gave the Allfather the substance from which he shaped Midgard and much of creation, and it opened a wound between the Aesir and the Jötnar that was not answered until the last day of Ragnarök.

Birth in the great void#

Before there were realms, there was only Ginnungagap, the great void, and the primordial forces that surrounded it. There was fire, and there was ice, and in the void the two met. Mimir taught that their meeting produced more than water, calling it the mystic life blood of something entirely new. From this water Ymir took form, the first sentient being in existence, alongside Auðumbla, the two of them the first giants of the young cosmos.

Ymir was a creature of staggering scale and stranger nature. He was the first Frost Giant, and the Jötnar who came after him were held to have inherited their command of ice from their progenitor. Yet he was more than a giant. Mimir described him as a being of pure creation and chaos, and even Odin, the one who destroyed him, spoke of Ymir less as a person with intent than as a force of nature and a vessel of immense power. Little was ever recorded of his mind or his wishes. What mattered to the ages that followed was what came out of him.

Mother and father to all that came after#

Ymir's life force became the foundation of all life in the Nine Realms. Gods, giants, humans, and beasts alike traced their existence back to his body. First among his descendants was Búri, the earliest of the Aesir gods, who was followed by his son Borr, and after Borr by his grandsons Odin, Vili, and Vé. The Aesir Royal Family itself, for all its later pride, was descended from the Primordial Jötunn it came to despise.

The lore of the Jötnar and the notes of Atreus preserved further traditions about how much of the world flowed from the first giant. The wind, the trees, and the sun were said to have come from Ymir's flesh, along with the maggots of his body that would in time become the dwarves. The accounts did not always agree. Mimir told that the sun came from Surtr, the first Fire Giant, who was called Ymir's younger brother. A marker in Midgard likewise credited Odin with the creation of Ask and Embla, the first man and first woman, while Mimir held that everything came first from Ymir's flesh. The two tales were not impossible to reconcile, since the very land and the trees that grew from it were themselves made of the first giant, but they showed how deeply Ymir sat beneath every later story of creation.

The murder of the progenitor#

The Aesir did not honor their origin. It was not long before they believed themselves so superior that they should hold dominion over all of creation. Odin, with his brothers Vili and Vé, raised arms against the being from whom his own line had come. The Allfather struck Ymir down with his spear Gungnir, piercing the progenitor of all life and spilling his life blood into the world.

The consequences were catastrophic. Ymir was so vast that the flood of his blood nearly drowned all of creation, and most of his Jötnar descendants perished in it. Only two survived, Bergelmir and his wife, who escaped the deluge and fled to Jötunheim, where they repopulated the race of giants and thwarted any hope Odin had of erasing them entirely. From that day the giants of Jötunheim and the Aesir of Asgard held a bitter resentment toward one another that shaped every age which followed.

Odin never denied the deed. He called it a necessary evil, done to bring order to the realms, and claimed his actions protected his own kin. Mimir judged it otherwise. In his telling, Odin took arms against his creator, fashioned a domain from the wreckage, and then named himself Allfather, "as if he was the creator, and not the creator's destroyer."

A world built from a corpse#

From Ymir's torn flesh Odin fashioned the world of Midgard for his own, and six of the Nine Realms in all were shaped from the first giant's body. Only Muspelheim, Niflheim, and Jötunheim stood apart from that grim inheritance. The world that mortals walked, the ground beneath their feet and the terrain around them, was in the oldest sense the corpse of their first ancestor.

Not all of Ymir was rendered inert. Scattered through the realms lingered the Ancients, immense creatures of living rock said to be surviving parts of the primordial being himself. They had existed since the beginning of time, and most dwelt hidden in the landscapes of Midgard, their stone bodies indistinguishable from the terrain, though one made its home in Alfheim. Through them, some measure of Ymir's essence endured in the world his killer had claimed.

The Rift and the Allfather's obsession#

The murder left one more remnant, and it haunted Odin above all else. Where the Allfather slew Ymir long ago, a strange green and unnatural light appeared out of nowhere, a small rift seemingly floating in the air. This tear in reality, later hidden beneath the Great Lodge of Asgard in a secret chamber, held within it the secrets of creation itself, and the sight of it consumed Odin from the moment it opened.

The god who had unmade the first being became obsessed with understanding what he had exposed. He recovered a primordial mask, the Mask of Creation, which he believed would let him look into the rift, though half of it was missing and its pieces lay scattered across the realms. Ages later he brought Atreus beneath the Great Lodge and showed the boy the rift and the mask, explaining what he sought from the aftermath of his fight with Ymir. The knowledge Odin killed for remained forever just out of his reach.

Vengeance at Ragnarök#

Ymir himself passed into memory, honored in the shrines of the Jötnar and kept alive in the stories Mimir told. One such shrine depicted the first giant, and when Atreus asked where Ymir had come from, Mimir recounted the tale of Ginnungagap and of Odin's betrayal, naming the Allfather a small and covetous tyrant before thinking better of finishing the story.

The debt of the first murder was finally paid at Ragnarök. When the armies of Alfheim, Vanaheim, Helheim, Svartalfheim, and Muspelheim broke through Asgard's walls, Kratos, Atreus, and Freya confronted Odin at last. After a brutal struggle, the Allfather met his fate at the very place where he had murdered Ymir millennia before, and he suffered a doom worse than death when Sindri destroyed his soul, denying him any afterlife. A little time later Surtr, Ymir's younger brother, having become Ragnarök itself, destroyed what remained of the Allfather's crumbling kingdom. The kingdom Odin had raised over his ancestor's blood ended where it began, and the first being of the Nine Realms was avenged.