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. Everything that can be said of him fits in a paragraph; what makes him worth a long look is not the quantity of his story but the position he holds in it. He stands at the exact seam where the Norse picture of origins stops being a tale of ice and devouring giants and begins to be a story of gods.

Auðumbla licks Búri out of the salty rime as four rivers of milk pour from her udders, from the Icelandic manuscript SÁM 66 (1765–1766), illustrated by Jakob Sigurðsson — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Gylfaginning passage

The account given is spare and strange, and the manner of its telling is part of its meaning. Gylfaginning is framed as a catechism: the wandering king Gylfi, under the name Gangleri, puts questions to three enthroned figures — High, Just-as-High, and Third — and they answer with the matter of the cosmos. Búri arrives as the answer to a question about what came before the gods. Out of the yawning emptiness of Ginnungagap, where the heat of Muspell met the rime of Niflheim, the frost congealed into the giant Ymir, and from the melting rime there formed also a cow, Auðumbla. Ymir fed on her milk; she fed on the salt locked in the rime-ice, and she fed by licking it. As she licked, a figure began to be disclosed from the salty stone over three days. In Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s 1916 translation of Gylfaginning, the cow licks the ice-blocks, “and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man’s hair; the second day, a man’s head; the third day the whole man was there.” This was Búri, described as fair of feature, great, and mighty.

The primeval giant Ymir feeds at Auðumbla’s udder while the cow licks Búri free from the rime, painted by the Danish artist Nicolai Abildgaard (c. 1777) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The strangeness of the image repays attention. The first god does not arrive by the routes the rest of the cosmos uses. Ymir is generated from the meeting of heat and cold, spontaneously, as ice sweats into shape; the later gods are born, in the ordinary way of fathers and mothers. Búri alone is neither congealed nor begotten. He is uncovered — present already inside the stone, and brought out of it not by a craftsman or a parent but by the slow tongue of an animal who is herself older than he is. The sequence over three days, hair then head then the whole man, is the language of something being revealed rather than something being built. He emerges complete, an adult and a man, with no infancy and no maker. The verbs the tradition uses for him are verbs of appearing, not of making.

The lineage he begins

Búri’s whole narrative function is genealogical. He had a son, Borr — the name is also given as Burr — and Borr married Bestla, the daughter of the giant Bölthorn. From that union came three sons: Odin, Vili, and Vé. These three are the makers of the ordered world. They killed the elder giant Ymir, and out of his vast body they built the cosmos — his flesh the earth, his blood the seas, his bones the mountains, his skull the dome of the sky held up at its four corners. The drowning of the frost-giants in Ymir’s blood and the raising of the world from his corpse is the central creative act of the mythology, and the three who perform it are Búri’s grandsons.

This places him with precision: two generations above the chief of the gods. The genealogy also folds the giants into the divine line at its root, for Borr’s wife is a giant’s daughter, and so Odin himself is half of the kindred his own sons will spend the world’s history fighting — the giants whose final assault is named Ragnarök, where the wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jörmungandr come against the gods. Búri sits above this whole future of war and reciprocity, before any of it, the single unmixed term from which the mixed lineage descends. He is the only figure in the upper genealogy who has no giant in him and no quarrel with anyone.

What is striking about so foundational a figure is how little he is given to do. He fathers Borr and then disappears from the record entirely. He fights nothing, makes nothing, rules nothing, speaks no recorded word, and meets no end the sources trouble to report. The mythology has him for exactly one purpose — to be the point at which a line of descent can begin — and once that point is set he is done. His name carries the same economy: in Old Norse, Búri is glossed as “producer” or “father,” the begetter, a name that is very nearly the abstract noun for his function. He is a first cause with a name attached, and the name says what the cause is for.

The single witness

What can be established about Búri is narrow, and the narrowness is itself a fact worth stating plainly. He appears by name only in Snorri’s prose. The older mythological poems gathered as the Poetic Edda — Völuspá, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, the poems that preserve the most archaic stratum of the cosmogony — do not mention this Búri at all. They know Ymir, they know Auðumbla’s stratum of the creation, they know Bestla and the slaying of the giant and the building of the world from his body; but the figure standing between the cow and Borr is absent from them. He surfaces only in the thirteenth-century systematizer who set out to give the whole tradition a single connected shape.

A second 18th-century Icelandic manuscript image of Auðumbla and Búri, from NKS 1867 4to, now held by the Danish Royal Library — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The resemblance of the name to a dwarf called Búri — one of the names in the Dvergatal, the catalog of dwarfs embedded in Völuspá and generally treated by editors as an interpolation — is taken as coincidence. The two are different referents in different registers of the mythology; that they share a name, and even a root sense of begetting, is the kind of overlap a name-rich tradition throws up by chance, not evidence that the first god is hiding in the dwarf-list.

The harder question is whether Búri the first being is ancient tradition that Snorri faithfully recorded, or a tidy genealogical link he supplied to give his cosmogony a clean beginning. The surviving evidence does not settle it, and the shape of the problem is the shape of the whole field. Snorri Sturluson, who lived from about 1179 to 1241, wrote as a Christian — a lawspeaker, chieftain, and historian working more than two centuries after the conversion of Iceland around the year 1000, inside a learned Latinate framework.

Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), the Icelandic scholar whose Prose Edda is the sole source naming Búri, drawn by Christian Krohg for an 1899 edition of Heimskringla — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His Prose Edda is at once the fullest account of this mythology that exists and a reshaping of it. In the Prologue to the same work he derives Odin and the Æsir from Troy and presents the gods as deified human kings, an obvious medieval gloss rather than anything a pre-Christian poet held; yet elsewhere in the same book he preserves details corroborated by skaldic verse composed two and three centuries before him. Disentangling the inherited from the invented is the constant labor of Old Norse scholarship, and Búri sits squarely on the fault line. A figure attested in one late, learned, Christian source and nowhere in the older poetry is exactly the kind of figure who may be either a genuinely archaic name Snorri happened to be the only one to write down, or a join he made himself to keep the chain of descent from breaking off in mid-air.

A first cause among first causes

It is here that the spare figure becomes interesting beyond his single paragraph. No cult of Búri is attested — no temple, no offering, no skaldic invocation, no place named for him — and he plays no part in any surviving story beyond beginning the line. That makes him less a god who was honored than a first cause given a name, and a first cause of an unusual kind. The cosmogonies of the wider world tend to put a shaping intelligence at the start: a maker who orders raw matter into a world. The Edda’s ordering god is not Búri but his grandsons, the three who cut Ymir into a cosmos. The careful first-cause comparison, then, is not between Búri and a demiurge — the craftsman-figure of Platonic and Gnostic cosmology who fashions the world from pre-existing material — but between the demiurge’s role and the role the Norse scheme assigns elsewhere, to Odin and his brothers. Búri occupies a position the demiurge traditions do not separately name: not the shaper, but the first term the shapers descend from, the one who must already exist before any making can begin and who himself neither shapes nor is shaped.

He thus answers a question most origin-stories leave folded into their first sentence — where did the maker come from? — and answers it not with another maker but with a disclosure. The world’s eventual builders are three generations of ordinary begetting back from a being who was simply found, fair and whole, inside the salt of the primeval ice. In the Edda’s long chain from emptiness to ordered world, Búri is the link that is neither void nor giant nor god-as-maker: the threshold across which the cosmogony 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.

→ Related: Odin · Edda · Yggdrasil · Fenrir · Jormungandr · Thor · Freyr · Demiurge