Ginnungagap

Summary

Ginnungagap is the empty gap that existed before anything was created, in Norse myth. In Völuspá the seeress says: in the beginning of ages there was nothing, no sand, no sea, no cool waves; earth was not found, nor heaven above; there was a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.

Snorri tells in Gylfaginning what happened in this gap. To its north lay Niflheim, from which rivers flowed whose water froze the farther it ran from its source, so that rime piled up layer upon layer until the northern part of the gap was filled with heavy ice and cold blasts. To its south lay Muspelheim, whose sparks flew out and lit the southern part. The middle of the gap was as mild as windless air. When the rime met the breath of the heat it melted and dripped, life quickened in the drops, and from them came a being in human likeness, the giant Ymir. Then Odin and his brothers killed Ymir, carried his body into the middle of the gap and made earth, sea and sky from it, and took the sparks flying from Muspelheim and fixed them in the middle of the gap, in the sky, to light heaven and earth. One root of the tree Yggdrasil stands among the frost giants, "where Ginnungagap once was", with Mímir's well beneath it.

The idea the story turns on is that the world begins in an empty place between two opposites. Cold lies in the north and heat in the south; life appears in the middle where they meet; then the gods fill the void with the body they killed and the lights they set in order. The gap does not vanish afterwards: Snorri says in Skáldskaparmál that the air is called Ginnungagap, so the void before creation became the space between earth and sky.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. Ginnungagap is two words: ginnunga, a genitive plural, and gap, the gap. The base of the first is ginn-, which we match with Arabic jinn, from janna, yajinnu; Arabic j becomes g in Norse, as in jarad, by which the end of the name Asgard is read. In Lane, jannahu al-layl is "the night veiled him with its darkness", jinn is the darkness of night and its intensity, the jinn of youth is its first part, and "I will do that thing bi-jinni dhālika" means in its first and fresh state. The second word, gap, answers Arabic jawba, which Lane gives as a gap or opening in the clouds and in mountains, and any wide gap. On this reading Ginnungagap is jawbat al-jinn, "the gap veiled in darkness at the first of things", which is what the story makes it: a dark void with neither earth nor sky, from which everything begins.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby and Vigfusson say that ginn- is a prefix found only in compounds, meaning "great, holy" in old mythological words, as in ginnheilög goð, "the most holy gods", that ginnungar is a plural in the same sense, and that from it comes Ginnunga-gap, "chaos, the formless void, in which abode the supreme powers before the creation". They think it better to derive the prefix from the verb meaning "to begin", Gothic du-ginnan, which Orel also lists. From the same base come Norse ginna, "to dupe, fool; to intoxicate", which is in the title Gylfaginning, "the fooling of Gylfi", and ginnungr, a juggler. Gap is a gap or empty space, from gapa, to gape.

Under j-n-n Lane gives jannahu, "it veiled, concealed, covered him", said of the night; jinn, "the darkness of night, or its intense darkness"; "the jinn of youth, its prime or first part"; and "I will do that thing bi-jinni dhālika, in the time of its first and fresh state"; jinn is also said of the madness of exultation. Lane quotes al-Rāghib that the primary sense of jann is veiling from the senses, whence the jinn are named. Under j-w-b: jābahu, "he made a hole in it, cut it", and jawba, "a gap or opening in the clouds and in mountains; any wide gap or opening; a depressed place amid houses".

The sounds follow the Juthoor sound laws. J, q and k form one merger group that becomes g or k in the Germanic languages, so j answers the g of ginn- and of gap. The doubled n of jinn stays a double n in ginn-. In jawba the weak w drops and b becomes p, as it does in Muspell. The three senses of the Norse prefix, beginning, hidden powers and deceit, meet the senses of Arabic j-n-n: the first part of a thing, the hidden jinn, and madness. What remains is that -ung- is a Germanic suffix that needs no counterpart.

The project's Semitic essay does not read the name of the gap; the other Norse essay mentions it in its account of creation.

Key Mythic Narratives

In the Codex Regius, the poem's main manuscript, the gap stanza begins "early in the ages, when Ymir dwelt", while Snorri's quotation has "early in the ages, when nothing was". One version places Ymir in the gap from the start; the other leaves it empty.

Cleasby and Vigfusson note that in the eleventh century the sea between Greenland and America was called Ginnungagap, so the name of the first void passed to a sea whose far end people did not know.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Norse Myths" reads the gap as an image of the North Atlantic, the space between the continents before humans knew it, or of a great volcanic crater beneath the ice, and reads the meeting of ice and fire in its middle as hot springs like those of Iceland. The eleventh-century naming of the sea between Greenland and America after the gap bears on the ocean reading, but it is a later use; the poem says the gap was there when there was neither sea nor waves.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Hesiod begins the world with Chaos, which like Ginnungagap is an open gap, read on this site as Arabic khawāʾ, emptiness. In Hesiod the earth then appears after the gap without a maker, and night comes before day. In the North, life drips from the meeting of cold and heat, and the gods then make the earth from a slain body, in the cosmic-body pattern. In Egypt creation begins from the first water of Nun, while the Norse gap has neither water nor sea in the seeress's stanza, and water reaches it as frozen rivers from the north.