Auðhumla

Summary

Auðhumla is the first cow of the Scandinavian myths. She arose from the melting rime at the beginning of creation, suckled the first giant, and licked the grandfather of the gods out of the ice. In Gylfaginning Gangleri asks where Ymir lived and on what he fed, and Hárr answers: as the rime dripped, there came of it a cow named Auðhumla; four rivers of milk ran from her teats, and she fed Ymir.

Then he asks what the cow fed on, and is told: she licked the rime-stones, which were salty. On the first day she licked them, a man's hair came out of the stone by evening; on the second day his head; on the third day a whole man was there, named Búri, fair to look at, great and mighty. Búri had a son named Borr, who married Bestla, daughter of the giant Bölþorn, and she bore him three sons, Odin, Vili and Vé, whom the speaker calls the rulers of heaven and earth. These three later killed Ymir; his blood ran until it drowned the frost giants, and they made the earth from his flesh, the sea from his blood and the sky from his skull.

The idea the story turns on is that the cow stands between two lineages. Ymir, father of the giants, lived on her milk; Búri, grandfather of the gods, came out from under her tongue. Both lines take their life from her: one drinks from her, the other is uncovered by her from the stone. No one feeds her or tends her: she lives on the salt of the rime, and her milk flows out to others. Then Búri's grandsons kill her nursling Ymir, and the two lines that came out of her work turn on each other. Snorri does not mention her again, and the poems that tell the world's beginning, Völuspá, Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál, do not mention her at all; her whole story is in this one chapter of his prose.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay reads her name. The final a of Auðhumla is the nominative ending of a weak feminine noun; the chapter title itself reads Frá Auðhumlu, "Of Auðhumla". Two parts remain, auð- and -huml-. The first has a ð, and Norse ð is exactly Arabic dh; before it stands a vowel where a gh has dropped, as gh often drops in the Juthoor correspondences, so it is Arabic ghadhā. In Lane, ghadhawtu aṣ-ṣabiyya is "I fed him, or nourished him, a child, with milk", and ghadhā is also "it flowed", said of water, blood or sweat. The second part has h, m and l in order: Arabic hamal. Hamala and inhamala are said of water that "overflowed, and poured forth", and ahmala al-māshiya is "he left the cattle to pasture by themselves, without a pastor, by night and by day". On this reading Auðhumla is "the free-grazing one who nourishes": a cow left to pasture alone, from whom milk overflows and feeds. That is what the story makes her: no one tends her, she lives by licking salt, and four rivers run from her teats to feed Ymir, who himself arose from dripping drops and whose first offspring came from his sweat.

Linguistic Root

Auðhumla, ghadhw and hamal

Cleasby–Vigfusson does not list the cow's name. It does give auðr, "riches, wealth, opulence", with Gothic and Old English cognates, and calls it "probably akin to óðal", the inherited land; before it stands the prefix auð-, "easy". Faulkes's index of names calls her "a primeval cow" and does not explain the second part. If the first part is wealth, the Norse name means something like "the rich one", followed by a cattle word our dictionary does not explain.

Lane, under gh-dh-w: ghadhawtuhu, "I fed him, or nourished him", the example being a child fed with milk; and ghadhā, "it flowed", said of water, blood or sweat, so the verb carries two senses side by side. From the same root, al-ghādhī is "a good manager or tender of cattle, as though he fed them". Under h-m-l: hamala al-māʾ and inhamala, "it overflowed, and poured forth"; ahmala al-māshiya, "he left the cattle to pasture by themselves, without a pastor, by night and by day"; and an eye that is hammāla flows abundantly with tears.

The comparison drops the gh, which in the Juthoor sound laws mostly drops or becomes g; it sets Arabic dh against Norse ð with no substitution, and it keeps h, m and l. One thing remains: the Norse dictionary knows auð- as a word of its own meaning wealth, and the reading makes it ghadhā, meeting the Norse sense in abundance and parting from it in the letter it assumes has dropped.

Other readings

Neither essay reads the cow's name. The Norse essay reads her nursling Ymir as al-yamm, the wide sea; put together, the two readings make the first creation a matter of water and flow: Ymir from drops of rime, and the cow pouring milk in rivers. The first part could also be read ʿaṭāʾ, "gift", with the ʿayn dropped, but that has a ṭ, not a dh; only ghadhā keeps the dh.

Key Mythic Narratives

Ymir before and after the cow

Snorri sets the cow's story between two stories of Ymir. In the chapter before, Ymir arises from the drops, then sleeps and sweats; under his left hand grow a man and a woman, and one of his feet begets a son with the other, and from them come the frost giants. In the chapter after, Borr's sons kill Ymir, and only the giant Bergelmir and his wife escape drowning in his blood. So the cow feeds the body that bears the giants, and that body is then killed by the grandsons of the one she uncovered from the stone.

Borr's sons in the poems

The poems do not mention the cow, but they know the line that came from under her tongue. Völuspá says that Borr's sons raised up the lands and made Midgard, and the sun shone on its stones and the ground grew green with leek. Völuspá in skamma says that Baldr's father was Borr's heir. Faulkes's index makes Búri Odin's grandfather and points to a skaldic verse quoted in Skáldskaparmál that names him.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse rereading essay reads the cow as "nature that nourishes", her milk as the rivers, and her licking of the ice as the slow thaw that uncovers rock and soil, so that habitable land appears. The text itself supports this in its wording: Snorri does not only say the milk flowed; he calls the streams mjólkár, "milk-rivers", with the Norse word for river inside the compound. What comes out from under her tongue is a man, not land, so the reading reads the thaw, while the story makes the thaw uncover a lineage.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Iranian creation a first ox stands beside the first man, as Auðhumla stands beside Ymir. The Bundahishn tells that Ahriman came upon the primeval ox, and when it passed away something grew from each part of it: from its marrow fifty-five species of grain and twelve of medicinal plants, from its horns peas, from its nose the leek, from its blood the vine; its seed was carried to the moon and purified, and from it came the species of animals, first an ox and a cow. The difference is that the Iranian ox dies and its body becomes plants and animals, which makes it closer to Ymir than to the cow, while Auðhumla is not killed but suckles, and in the North the body that becomes a world is the giant's. Both accounts join cattle with the first body and divide the two roles between them in different ways, and both belong to the cosmic-body pattern. Bundahishn 10 and 14.

In Egypt Hathor is drawn as a cow, the cow of the sky who gives birth to the sun every day. Both cows stand at the source of life, but Hathor gives birth every day, while Auðhumla suckles once at the beginning and then the story falls silent about her.

Her rise from drops of rime, and the milk running from her in rivers before there was any sea, place her with Ymir among the primordial waters.