Why are giants so cruel? Because they are made of ice and poison.

Before the earth was created there was Niflheim, a dark and cold place from which poisonous rivers flowed and which had existed forever.

Far to the south was Muspellsheim, a land of light and fire.

The cold rivers of Niflheim flowed slowly from their source, their noxious waters gradually hardening into frost as they entered a region even colder. This place of ice became known as “Ginnunga Gap” or “The Greatest of Voids”. It is difficult for the human mind to imagine a place emptier. It was utterly devoid of life.

Slowly the ice moved further south, and the fires that burned in Muspellsheim sometimes reached far north enough that they licked the ice in those regions, and melted it, and the cold poison from the ice rose up, and hardened again as the fires receded. And later the fires approached again, and the ice melted and rose before hardening again, and on it went. Hot battling cold for countless millennia. Until finally a great tower of poison ice stood just south of the centre of the void.

And more ages passed beyond counting, the ice dripping, then hardening, and dripping again, until the tower was shaped into something strange and complex and utterly unique.

So intricate the twists and runnels and flows of melting ice on this tower became that it was a whole world unto itself, of liquid flows and hard ice blockages and rising and falling – a system of pure primordial machinery and barren of life.

Until the tower of ice began to move of its own accord, moving the strange and many legs that had formed, and shaping the ice around it with its many arms, and the poison water moved around its great many frozen brains, carrying its dreams and plans around its body as it began to think its own thoughts.

The first giant, Ymir, had come into being.

(I’ve been reading The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson and John Lindow’s Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs.)