Popular Poetry of the Baloches
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It is a more satisfactory explanation than to take the phrase to mean ‘yawning gap’, or to assume that Ginnung was a giant. It appears that in the eleventh century Adam of Bremen was familiar with this name for the abyss, for he uses what must be the same term: ghinmendegop. Again in a fragment of an early poem from southern Germany, Wessobrunner Gebet, it is significant to find that the creation of the world is described in language very like that of the Norse poem: There was neither earth nor high heaven, neither tree… nor mountain. … No sun shone, no moon gave light. There was no glorious sea. Although in this poem the creation is given a Christian interpretation the close similarity suggests that a similar tradition to that in Vǫluspá existed among the continental Germans. The popularity of the creation as a subject of Old English poetry may be due to this. It was said to be the subject of the first inspired Christian poem of Caedmon. More surprisingly, it was the subject of the song sung by Hrothgar’s minstrel in the new hall at Heorot, as related in the poem Beowulf (90–8): He who knew how to tell of the creation of men in the far past related the tale of how the Almighty wrought the earth, the bright and radiant expanse encircled by the waters ...