Prose Edda book Gylfaginning. According to Gylfaginning, the first being was the giant Ymir, who was followed by the cow Auðumbla, eventually leading to the birth of Odin and his two brothers. The brothers kill Ymir and make the world out of his body, before finally making the first man and woman out of trees (Ask and Embla). Some scholars suspect that Gylfaginning had been compiled from various contradictory sources, with some details from those sources having been left out. Besides Gylfaginning, the most important sources on Nordic creation myths are the Eddic poems Vǫluspá, Vafþrúðnismál, and Grímnismál. The 9th-century Old High German Wessobrunn Prayer begins with a series of negative pairs to describe the time before creation that show similarity to a number of Nordic descriptions of the time before the world, suggesting an orally transmitted formula. There may be a continuity between Tacitus's account of Tuisto and Mannus and the Gylfaginning account of the creation of the world. The name Tuisto, if it means 'twin' or 'double-being', could connect him to the name of the primordial being Ymir, whose name probably has a similar meaning. On the other hand, the form "Tuisco" may suggest a connection to Tyr. Similarly, both myths have a genealogy consisting of a grandfather, a father, and then three sons. Ymir's name is etymologically connected to the Sanskrit Yama and Iranian Yima, while the creation of the world from Ymir's body is paralleled by the creation of the world from the primordial being Purusha in Indic mythology, suggesting not only a Proto-Germanic origin for Ymir but an even older Indo-European origin (see Indo-European cosmogony). Myth of the end of the world There is evidence of a myth of the end of the world in Germanic mythology, which can be reconstructed in very general terms from the surviving sources. The best known is the myth of Ragnarök, attested from Old Norse sources, which involves a war between the gods and the beings of chaos, leading to the destruction of almost all gods, giants, and living things in a cataclysm of fire. It is followed by a rebirth of the world. The notion of the world's destruction by fire in the Southern Germanic area seems confirmed by the existence of the word (probably "world conflagration") to refer to the end of the world in Old High German; however, it is possible that this aspect derives from