Búri

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Búri is the first being of Norse cosmogony: the primordial figure whom the sources name as ancestor of the gods, brought into existence at the opening of the world. He is known almost entirely from a single text — the Prose Edda of the Icelandic scholar and statesman Snorri Sturluson, compiled around 1220 — and within it from one short passage in the section called Gylfaginning, the beguiling of Gylfi.

The account given there is spare and strange. After the cosmic void Ginnungagap brought forth the frost-giant Ymir, it also produced a cow, Auðumbla, on whose milk Ymir fed. The cow in turn nourished herself by licking the salty rime-ice, and as she licked, a figure began to emerge from the stone over three days: on the first the hair of a man, on the second his head, and on the third the whole of him. This was Búri — described as fair, large, and powerful. His son was Borr (Burr), who married Bestla, daughter of a giant; and the sons of Borr and Bestla were Odin, Vili, and Vé, the three who would slay Ymir and shape the world from his body. Búri stands, in this scheme, two generations above the chief of the gods.

What can be established about him is narrow. He appears by name only in Snorri’s prose; the older mythological poems of the Poetic Edda do not mention this Búri, and the resemblance of the name to a dwarf called Búri in one poem’s list is generally taken as coincidence. Whether the figure is ancient Norse tradition that Snorri recorded, or a genealogical link he supplied to give his cosmogony a clean beginning, is not something the surviving evidence settles. Snorri wrote as a Christian, more than two centuries after the conversion of Iceland, and his work is at once the fullest account of this mythology and a reshaping of it.

No cult of Búri is attested, and he plays no further part in any surviving story; his entire role is to begin a lineage. That makes him less a god who was honoured than a first cause given a name — the point at which the Norse picture of origins turns from ice and giants toward the gods who govern the world. The detail that carries the most weight is the manner of his coming: not born and not made, but slowly disclosed, licked free of the rime by an animal older than himself.