Audhumla

Before there was ground to stand on, there was a gap. On its northern side lay heavy ice and rime, thick as a winter that had never been asked to end. From the south came sparks and heat out of Muspell, the burning country. Where the warm air reached the rime it began to drip, and the drops quickened into life. The first thing they made was a giant called Ymir. The second was a cow.

That is the order in which Snorri Sturluson tells it, writing in Iceland around 1220 in the part of his Edda called Gylfaginning, the Deluding of Gylfi. A wandering king calling himself Gangleri questions three mysterious figures about how the world began, and the one called High explains that the moment the rime dripped, the cow called Audhumla sprang up out of it. Four rivers of milk ran from her teats, and Ymir drank from them. There is a fine, flat practicality to the scene. The universe has one inhabitant, he is hungry, and a cow arrives.

Gangleri, sensibly, asks the obvious follow-up question: what did the cow eat? High’s answer gives Audhumla the only story she has. She licked the blocks of rime, which were salty. On the first day of her licking, by evening, a man’s hair came out of the ice. On the second day there was a man’s head. On the third day the whole man stood there. He was called Búri, and he was handsome, big and strong. It is slow work: a tongue moving patiently over a cold, white, glittering block, the salt grit catching on it, a little more of the thing inside showing with every stroke, and a dark tangle of hair surfacing at dusk where a moment ago there had been only rime.

Búri had a son, Borr, who married Bestla, the daughter of a giant named Bölþorn. Their three sons were Odin, Vili and Vé. Those three brothers killed Ymir and built the world out of his body. So the cow stands at the root of both families that will spend the rest of the mythology at war. She suckles the forefather of the giants with one end and uncovers the forefather of the gods with the other. The American scholar John Lindow has pointed to exactly this as her distinctive role: she is the one figure who connects the two opposing lines at their very beginning, nourishing Ymir, ancestor of all the giants, and bringing into the light Búri, ancestor of the Æsir.

Her name is the next thing worth weighing. It survives in three spellings across the Edda manuscripts, Auðumbla, Auðhumla and Auðumla, and the usual reading takes it apart as auðr, wealth or riches, and humala, hornless, to give something like “the hornless cow rich in milk”. It is a dairy farmer’s compliment, the sort of name a good beast might carry in a byre. The first element is slippery, though. Auðr can also mean fate, and a near-identical word means empty or desolate, which has let some readers turn her into something stranger and bleaker. The hornless reading has the advantage of being plain, and of sitting comfortably beside the fact, noted by the Austrian scholar Rudolf Simek, that Germanic peoples did keep hornless cattle.

Her body is otherwise a blank. Snorri does not give her a colour, a size, a voice or a temperament. The Edda says cow, and then it says milk, and then it says salt, and that is all. Everything else is the reader’s own barn. Even her scale has to be inferred from her work: an animal whose teats run in four rivers, enough to keep a frost giant fed, is not a beast anyone could milk with a pail.

Here the record gets thin. Audhumla appears in exactly two places in the whole of Old Norse literature. One is that passage in Gylfaginning. The other is a list. Among the þulur, the versified catalogues of poetic names that travel with Snorri’s Edda, there is a run of names for cows, and Audhumla is in it, with the note that she is the noblest of cows. No surviving Eddic poem mentions her. Völuspá knows Ymir. Vafþrúðnismál knows where Ymir came from and tells it differently, out of venom-drops blown from the icy rivers called Élivágar. Neither of them has room for a cow. Whether Snorri had a lost poem in front of him when he wrote the licking scene, or built it himself to answer the question his own Gangleri asks, cannot now be settled from what survives.

That has not stopped people comparing her with other great cows. Simek sets her beside the cow-goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean, Egyptian Hathor and Isis and Greek Hera, all of whom were imagined in bovine form or with bovine titles. The comparison is fair as a likeness and risky as a pedigree. Hathor was worshipped in temples for thousands of years. Audhumla, so far as the record shows, was never worshipped by anyone. She is a figure in a story about how things started, not a goddess with a cult, and the Edda never calls her divine.

What she can do follows straight from what she is. A cow gives milk, and her milk is the first food in the world, poured out in quantities fit for a being whose skull will later become the sky. A cow licks salt, and her licking is the first act of uncovering, slow and steady and three days long, that brings the line of the gods out of the cold. She makes nothing with her hands, fights no one and speaks no words. Her power is entirely the power of patience and appetite, which in a world made of ice and steam turns out to be enough.

Her limits are just as plain. Once Búri is free, she vanishes from the narrative. Snorri does not say what became of her when Ymir was killed and his blood ran out in a flood, nor whether she survived into the world made from his corpse, nor whether anything at all happened to her afterwards. The noblest of cows simply walks out of the story. Painters have tried to bring her back into view, among them the Danish artist Nicolai Abildgaard, who painted Ymir drinking at her udder, but on the page she gets one scene, a single name list and nothing else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Audhumla in Norse mythology?

Audhumla is the primeval cow in the Norse creation story told by Snorri Sturluson in the Gylfaginning section of his Prose Edda, written in Iceland around 1220. She formed from dripping rime at the beginning of the world, fed the first giant Ymir with four rivers of milk, and licked Búri, the grandfather of Odin, out of a block of salty ice.

Who did Audhumla feed?

Audhumla fed Ymir, the first giant and the ancestor of the frost giants. Four rivers of milk flowed from her teats, and Ymir drank from them. She herself lived by licking the salty blocks of rime around her.

How did Audhumla create Búri?

Audhumla uncovered Búri by licking a block of salty ice over three days. On the first evening a man’s hair appeared, on the second day his head, and on the third day the whole man. Búri’s son Borr married the giantess Bestla, and their sons were Odin, Vili and Vé.

What does the name Audhumla mean?

The name Audhumla is usually read as “hornless cow rich in milk”, from the Old Norse auðr, meaning riches, and humala, meaning hornless. The manuscripts spell it Auðumbla, Auðhumla and Auðumla. Because auðr can also mean fate, and a similar word means desolate, a few other readings of the name have been proposed.

Where does Audhumla appear in the Norse sources?

Audhumla appears in only two places: the creation account in Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning and a versified list of cow names in the þulur that accompany his Edda, which calls her the noblest of cows. No surviving Eddic poem mentions her, even though poems such as Völuspá and Vafþrúðnismál discuss Ymir.

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Ymir, Odin, Jötunn, Surtr, Yggdrasil, Eikthyrnir, Ragnarök, Hathor, Isis, Hera, Gayomart (Kayumars)