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He arrived from the southern countries, no doubt from the Orient, bringing with him the sun, as an indispensable auxiliary in the great taskwhich he had undertaken, to reform this dark and ice-covered world: “For there was a time,” says the Edda, the bible of the Scandinavians, “when the sun, the moon, and the stars did not know the place they were to occupy. It was then the gods assembled and agreed as to the post which was to be assigned to each one of them.”
When the installation of the heavenly bodies had thus been agreed upon, Odin followed the example of all the Hercules of Egypt and of Greece, and began his benevolent career by freeing the earth of all the monsters by which it was infested. Ymer was the first to succumb to his blows, and after him, the other giants of the frost, “a race of evildoers,” adds the Edda. Evildoers? Whom did they aggrieve, I wonder? The complainants must have been the kraken, the griffins, and the serpents.
The world had hardly come into existence and already the right of the stronger had established the doctrine: Væ victis!
Of all the giants of the frost a single one escaped. He must have been a married man, for his descendants became after a while so numerous as to trouble the Ases, that is to say, Odin and his companions, the other gods.
After the giants, came the turn of land and sea monsters, who were almost as formidable as they themselves. In the general destruction two monsters only survived: the wolf Fenris, with his fearful jaws, which enabled him to crush mountains and even to injure the sun, and the serpent Iormungandur, the great sea serpent of world-wide renown. Both these monsters were one day to aid the giants of the frost in avenging themselves on their conqueror.