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The Flood in World Myth and Folklore
Europe |
| © 2021 Mark Isaak |
The Vikings, or Norsemen, were a primarily Scandinavian seafaring people who dominated much of northern Europe in the 9th to the 11th centuries. A main source for Norse mythology is the Prose Edda, which Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson compiled from older sources around 1220.
Oden, Vili, and Ve fought and slew the great ice giant Ymir, and icy water from his wounds drowned most of the Rime Giants. The giant Bergelmir escaped, with his wife and children, on a boat made from a hollowed tree trunk. From them rose the race of frost ogres. Ymir's body became the world we live on. His blood became the oceans.
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Jean I. Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 32-37.