'Ymir'


Anyone know how it's supposed to be pronounced?

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E-meer

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Why is it called Ymir? That name is not used in the movie, the creature is never named.

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It's out of Norse mythology i think. Just a name harryhausen picked rather than calling it the 'creature' to help give it personality..

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Ymir was the name of the primordial frost giant in Norse mythology. He came into existence when the original fire and ice met in the middle of empty space, and dripped down a poisonous fluid, which formed itself into a humanoid shape. The story just gets weirder from there, but eventually Odhinn and a couple of other dudes come along, destroy Ymir, and create the world out of his body parts: the earth was made from his flesh, the sky is his cranium, the waters of the earth are his blood, and his bones and teeth are what we call rocks.

It's a bit difficult to get our minds around such ideas, but it's not that different from the tohu w'vohu, "chaos and emptiness", that Yahweh destroyed when he created an ordered universe in the Judeo-Christian creation myth. It's just more detailed, and makes a different point.

I just LOVE these Norse stories - what, you can't tell?  They haven't been filtered through half a dozen literary traditions, unless you count modern comic books, which do disservice to the originals the same way Victorian romantic writing did to the Greek and Roman ones. So they still have this bizarre dream-like quality to them, which only a few stories in Classical mythology still have.

Not that any of this is relevant to the Venusian creature in this movie. I suspect that they just picked a cool-sounding name. They might just as well have called it Varuna, Kotoamatsukami, or the Uktena. 
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