Auðhumla was a cow. That should be said first, because people have a tendency to make her into more, and she was not more. She was a cow. Big as a mountain, with a coat white as new snow and four teats dripping milk that never ran out, but a cow.
She came from the ice. No one created her. No one asked for her. The ice melted and she stood there, the way cows do, and the first thing she did was lick. Not because she knew what she was licking. Because the salt tasted good. Cows lick salt. That is what cows do. That there happened to be a god inside the salt stone was not her plan.
Ymir drank her milk. He was the other one who had come from the meeting of ice and fire, enormous and sweating and hungry the way only someone who has just begun to exist can be hungry. He drank and drank and Auðhumla let him, because she had milk and he needed milk, and that was the whole transaction. No conditions. No agreement. A cow and a giant and a salt stone in a void with no name.
She licked. Day after day. First hair emerged from the stone. Then a forehead. Then a face. Búri. The first god. Licked free from ice by a cow, and it was the most undramatic birth in history, and that suited Auðhumla perfectly, because Auðhumla did not care for drama.
Búri had a son. The son had three sons. Odin, Vili, Vé. And the three brothers killed Ymir and built a world from his body. The blood became sea. The flesh became earth. The bones became mountains. They did it with the kind of determination that only gods have, the kind of determination that does not stop to ask whether what you are doing is reasonable.
No one asked Auðhumla.
She stood nearby and chewed. She had nothing to chew on, because this was before grass, but she moved her jaws anyway, because that is what cows do. She watched them butcher Ymir, who had drunk her milk, and she felt nothing in particular, because cows do not feel things that way. But she stopped giving milk that day. No one noticed, because no one needed her milk any longer. There were seas and rivers and rain now. There was so much liquid that a cow's teats were nothing.
After that she is never mentioned again.
That is the strange part. All the Icelandic manuscripts, all the poems, all of Snorri's chapters - she appears in three sentences and then she is gone. Auðhumla, who fed the first giant, who licked free the first god, who was present at the moment everything began, vanishes from the story as if she had never existed.
She did not die. Nothing in the sources says she died. She simply is not mentioned. And that is worse, in its way, because the one who dies at least gets an ending, and the one who is not mentioned gets nothing at all.
You can imagine that she wandered. Away from the void, away from the blood and the bone meal and the new world's first days, east or west, it does not matter, away. That she found grass somewhere, the grass the gods had sown in the soil they had made from Ymir's flesh, and that she stood there and ate. That she is still standing there, somewhere at the edge of the world, chewing, and remembering nothing, because cows do not remember.
Or you can imagine that she lies buried beneath a mountain the gods forgot to name. That her bones became stone and her coat became snow and that the mountain gives milk in spring, white water running down the slope in May, and that farmers for a thousand years have called it meltwater without knowing.
The gods built nine worlds. They built Asgard and Midgard and Hel. They created sun and moon, day and night, humans and dwarves. And in the whole vast construction there is no room for a cow.
That is the oldest pattern in history. The one who is needed at the beginning is not needed in what follows. The one who gives milk when there is nothing else becomes surplus when there is everything else. Auðhumla was the first mother and the first forgotten, and there is no difference between the two.