Odin, Vili, and Ve, dissatisfied with the disorder Ymir and his giant offspring represented, turn on the primordial giant and kill him. So much blood pours from Ymir's wounds that it floods the world and drowns nearly the entire race of frost giants in it, all but the giant Bergelmir, who manages to escape the flood with his wife by climbing into a hollowed-out log or boat, and from that pair the surviving lineage of frost giants descends. With Ymir dead, the three brothers drag his enormous corpse to the center of Ginnungagap and set about building the ordered cosmos directly out of his body.
His flesh becomes the earth itself, and his blood the encircling seas, lakes, and rivers. His bones are raised as the mountains, and his teeth and the fragments of his shattered bones become the boulders and loose stones scattered across the land. His hair is planted as the trees and other growing things, and his skull, lifted up and set over the earth, becomes the dome of the sky, held aloft at its four corners by four dwarves named for the cardinal directions. His brain, thrown up into the air, becomes the clouds, and sparks and glowing embers gathered from Muspelheim are fixed in their places to become the sun, the moon, and the stars, completing a world built entirely from the body of the being the gods had just destroyed.