“
Solar Eclipse
Each morning
I wake invisible.
I make a needle
from a porcupine quill,
sew feet to legs,
lift spine onto my thighs.
I put on my rib and collarbone.
I pin an ear to my head,
hear the waxwing's yellow cry.
I open my mouth for purple berries,
stick on periwinkle eyes.
I almost know what it is to be seen.
My throat enlarges from anger.
I make a hand to hold my pain.
My heart a hole the size of the sun's eclipse.
I push through the dark circle's
tattered edge of light.
All day I struggle with one hair after another
until the moon moves from the face of the sun
and there is a strange light
as though from a kerosene lamp in a cabin.
I pun on a dress,
a shawl over my shoulders.
My threads knotted and scissors gleaming.
Now I know I am seen.
I have a shadow.
I extend my arms,
dance and chant in the sun's new light.
I put a hat and coat on my shadow,
another larger dress.
I put on more shawls and blouses and underskirts
until even the shadow has substance
”
”
Diane Glancy
“
live for your own sake
”
”
Hajime Isayama (Attack on Titan #10)
“
People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.
”
”
Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Norse Myths)
“
The three sons of Bor had no liking for Ymir... At last they attacked Ymir and killed him. His wounds were like springs; so much blood streamed from them and so fast, that the flood drowned all the frost giants except Bergelmir and his wife. They embarked in their boat and rode out on a tide of gore
”
”
Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Norse Myths)
“
Where the ice and the fire met the ice melted, and in the melting waters life appeared: the likeness of a person bigger than worlds, huger than any giant there will be or has ever been. This was neither male, nor was it female, but was both at the same time. This creature was the ancestor of all the giants, and it called itself Ymir.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Norse Mythology)
“
The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
“
All of us exist because someone meant for us to exist. Even the subjects of Ymir.
”
”
Hajime Isayama
“
Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.
”
”
Guillermo del Toro (Trollhunters)
“
The general picture was that Ymir would not be anything like the traditional idea of a spaceship, in the sense of an orderly, symmetrical piece of architecture. It would be more like a flying robotic anthill, constructed out of a natural found object. The robots crawling around on and in it had general instructions as to what they were supposed to be doing, but could make their own judgments from moment to moment to avoid collision with other robots, or from hour to hour as to when they needed to recharge their batteries.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
Odin and his brothers made the soil from Ymir’s flesh. Ymir’s bones they piled up into mountains and cliffs. Our rocks and pebbles, the sand and gravel you see: these were Ymir’s teeth, and the fragments of bones that were broken and crushed by Odin and Vili and Ve in their battle with Ymir. The seas that girdle the worlds: these were Ymir’s blood and his sweat. Look up into the sky: you are looking at the inside of Ymir’s skull. The stars you see at night, the planets, all the comets and the shooting stars, these are the sparks that flew from the fires of Muspell. And the clouds you see by day? These were once Ymir’s brains, and who knows what thoughts they are thinking, even now.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Norse Mythology)
“
They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the all-father to bring them safely to land once more. A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the rime had frosted their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time. Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the West. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.” Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
“
On the sixth floor, he hallucinates. The host droid tells him the reason the lifts are down is because he tossed a small urchin's thieving tool into traffic, and that the Ledger of Universal Suffering is always balanced at Southern Urbanite Memory.
”
”
Rich Larson
“
It was Atali, the daughter of Ymir, the frost-giant! To fields of the dead she comes, and shows herself to the dying! Myself when a boy I saw her, when I lay half-slain on the bloody field of Wolraven. I saw her walk among the dead in the snows, her naked body gleaming like ivory and her golden hair unbearably bright in the moonlight. I lay and howled like a dying dog because I could not crawl after her. She lures men from stricken fields into the wastelands to be slain by her brothers, the ice-giants, who lay men’s red hearts smoking on Ymir’s board.
”
”
Robert E. Howard (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan the Cimmerian, #1))
“
Four rivers of milk flowed from her teats which sustained Ymir, who fell asleep after drinking large quantities of her milk. As he slept, two giants, one male and one female, grew from the sweat under Ymir’s left armpit. Some versions of the myth say that one giant came from each armpit. Even more startlingly, his legs parted, creating a son called Thrudgelmir or “Strength Yeller.” In one version it was actually a six-headed son that grew out of his feet. However it happened, this was the first of the Frost Giants or the Jotuns. Audhumbla,
”
”
Robert Carlson (Norse Mythology: A Concise Guide)
“
Ymir’s body is divided so that everything, even his eyebrows, were used in the creation of the world; the four dwarfs who hold up the sky; the wolves that chase the sun and moon; the giant’s eyes that are tossed up into heaven and turned into stars: these and a host of other particulars become narrative elements within the cycle.
”
”
Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings)
“
Ymir,” Luisa said, pronouncing it as she’d heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean’s code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back. “Yeah.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
The hasty shake-and-bake nature of the Ymir expedition, which had stirred up so much controversy, had been forced by the implacable timeline of celestial mechanics. Time, tide, and comets waited for no man.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
Here again, we’re reconstructing the past based on shared myths across cultures—these are instances where the same story appears with slight changes. Obviously, the names are changed, but the shape of the narrative is the same. One common belief is that there were two progenitors of mankind: brothers, sometimes twins. For the Indic, it was Manu and Yemo; the Germanic have tales of Mannus and Ymir. These mythologies were eventually incorporated into histories. For the Romans, Remus and Romulus; the Hebrews, Cain and Abel. Another common myth is that of the Great Flood—it appears in some form in every PIE culture. But overwhelmingly, the most common myth is that of an epic battle ending with the slaying of a serpent, usually a dragon of some sort.
”
”
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
“
According to an idea that was wide-spread among the Germans and Celts, all wisdom dwelled in the lower world, which is often cited as the source of knowledge and art. This notion goes hand in hand with another idea that maintains that death precedes life. Because death is identical to night and life is identical to day, these peoples counted time in nights rather than days. We can compare this to Scandinavian cosmology: The giant Ymir is the originator of creation. In Nordic mythology, the giants are the keepers of the science of runes, and one of them, Sutting, is the keeper of poetic knowledge. As the world's first inhabitants, they [the giants] knew all its secrets. They thus maintained many close ties with death and the otherworld with, for instance, dwarves and elves.
”
”
Claude Lecouteux (The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind)
“
From the meeting of Order and Chaos there came a giant being called Ymir, the father of the Ice Folk, and a cow, Audhumla, which licked at the salt that was in the ice and brought out the first man, Buri. From this I think we can all conclude that the cow was the primary instigator of everything that followed — War, Tribulation, the End of the Worlds. Lesson One: Never trust a ruminant.
”
”
Joanne M. Harris (The Gospel of Loki)
“
Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.
”
”
Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings)