The gods themselves dwelt not on the earth, but above the top of Olympus, a mountain peak of Greece; and thus the entire Earth was uninhabited. However, it was not allowed to remain so, for Jupiter appointed Prometheus, a Titan, who had helped him in his war against Saturn, to make an inhabitant for the Earth. Prometheus accordingly moulded a man out of clay, and taking him before the gods, persuaded each one to bestow upon him some gift. A woman was made later, and from these two were descended all the peoples of the earth. THE NORSE MYTH As the Norse peoples, in their land which for so large a part of the year was ice-bound, dreaded the long, hard winter, and looked forward to the blessings brought by the summer, they imagined that the evil forces in the world worked through cold and darkness, the good forces through warmth and light. Thus they feared and hated the "frost giants," while they loved and reverenced the gods, whom they pictured as living in a world of brightness and warmth. According to the Norse religion, or mythology, the world began in a contest between heat and cold. At first there was no earth; nothing existed except the yawning abyss, Ginungagap, which separated the world, or spacer, of mist and cold and darkness, on the north, from the world of fire and brightness, on the south. The mist world was called Niflheim; the fire world, Muspelheim. From a great fountain in the mist world there sprang twelve rivers, which after flowing far from their source tumbled their waters into the Ginungagap. Here the water was all turned to ice, with which in time the huge abyss was filled. Sparks and warm winds from Muspelheim, coming into contact with this ice, melted it, so that there hung always over the ice chasm a dense vapor. This, in turn, gradually took shape, and formed the giant Ymir and the cow Audhumbla; and for a season these were the only two creatures in all the expanse of space. Ymir fed upon the cow's milk, and she, in turn, got what nourishment she could by licking the salt and the hoarfrost from the ice. One day as the cow licked a huge ice block, there appeared the hair of some being, and as she remained persistently at the same lump, within a short time she had set free a beautiful, strong god--the god Bori. Bori was the ancestor of all the gods, as Ymir was the ancestor of all the giants; and since the gods were as good as the frost giants were evil, it was plain enough to both that they could not live together.