Ginnungagap is the empty gap that lay before the world in Norse mythology. For the Ginnungagap meaning, Brodeur’s translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda gives “the Yawning Void.” Snorri set ice on its north side and sparks from Múspellheim on its south.
What is Ginnungagap?
Ginnungagap is the open space that came before the earth and the sky. Snorri describes it in Gylfaginning, part of his Prose Edda. The Völuspá, a poem of the Poetic Edda, has the same gap in a single line.
In Snorri’s account the void is not a place where nothing happens. The ice from the north and the heat from the south meet in the void, and Ymir forms. The full creation story is told in its own post, so this page keeps to the void itself.
Ginnungagap meaning: what does the name say?
Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur wrote the name and its English side by side: “even into Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void.” Henry Adams Bellows, translating the Völuspá, chose “a yawning gap” for the same phrase. Both translators render the first element ‘yawning’.
Bellows added a short note on the word. He wrote that the phrase “is sometimes used as a proper name.” So the poem’s yawning gap and Snorri’s named place are one word, read two ways. The texts read for this page say nothing more about the roots of the word.
Where was Ginnungagap?
Snorri set ice on one side of the void and fire on the other. To the south lay Múspell, and he wrote that “it is light and hot; that region is glowing and burning.”
The northern side of the gap, in Brodeur’s words, “became filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime.” The southern side “was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of Múspellheim.” That is the whole map. None of the three texts read for this page gives Ginnungagap a size, a depth, or a fixed place among the nine worlds.
What do the sources say about Ginnungagap?
Three old texts bear on the void. Most of the detail comes from Gylfaginning, chapters IV, V, VIII, and XV. Chapter IV gives the hot south, chapter V the void itself, and chapters VIII and XV what came after.
The Völuspá gives one line in stanza 3, in Bellows’ translation: “But a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.” Snorri quoted the same stanza, but his copy opens differently. Bellows gave that first line as “Of old was the age ere aught there was.” The two copies of one stanza do not quite agree.
The Vafþrúðnismál, stanza 31, tells where the first giant came from. Bellows rendered it: “Down from Elivagar did venom drop, And waxed till a giant it was.” The poem does not name the void. Bellows’ note ties it in, saying the venom “froze into ice-banks over Ginnunga-gap.”
Was Ginnungagap really empty?
Not in Snorri’s telling. Ice and rime filled the north, and sparks lit the south. Between them, he wrote, “Ginnungagap was as mild as windless air.” Where the breath of heat met the rime, it melted and dripped, and life began in the drops.
Here the record stops. The sources say what filled the void and what lit it, but not how big it was. They also leave the Old Norse sense of the name’s first part unexplained, beyond the translators’ ‘yawning’.
Where Ginnungagap sits in the mythology
The void does not vanish once the world begins. Snorri returned to it in chapter VIII. The gods “took Ymir and bore him into the middle of the Yawning Void, and made of him the earth.” The post on Ymir’s death covers that part, and the creation of the first man and woman comes next in the same story. That account is Snorri’s; the stanzas read here do not tell it.
The same chapter has the gods take the glowing embers and sparks cast out of Múspellheim and set them “in the midst of the Yawning Void” to light heaven and earth. Chapter XV places one root of Yggdrasil among the Rime-Giants. It stands “in that place where aforetime was the Yawning Void.”
Ginnungagap meaning FAQ
It is the empty gap before the world. Snorri set ice to its north and the fire of Múspell to its south. Life began where the two met.
Brodeur translated it as “the Yawning Void,” and Bellows as “a yawning gap.” The sources read here go no further into the word’s roots.
No. In Snorri’s account Múspell lies to the south of the void. Its sparks fly out and light the southern part.
None of the texts read here says. They give what filled the void and what lit it, but never its size or depth.
Sources
- Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916), read it on Wikisource
- The Poetic Edda, Völuspá, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923), read it on Wikisource
- The Poetic Edda, Vafþrúðnismál, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923), read it on Wikisource
