Gap

Although I have both editions of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, I have not been reading them in parallel. However, I wanted to check whether that anachronistic term, "dimensions," had been in the original text so here goes:

"Skafloc thought that the lands of the ice giants, like those of gods and demons, must not lie on earth at all, but in strange dimensions reached only by spells, out near the edge of all things where creation plunged into primal chaos."

-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 2014), 22, p. 167.

"...strange dimensions..." is there but the rest of the sentence has changed. 

"...the edge of all things where creation plunged into primal chaos..." became "..the edge of everything, where creation plunged back into the Gap whence it had arisen."

"...primal chaos..." (my emphasis) must be the chaos which preceded creation, thus by implication the chaos from which "creation," an ordered cosmos, arose. In the revised text, creation arose from a (capitalized) "Gap." A gap between what? Anderson refers to the Ginnungagap of Norse mythology which was a gap between extremes of heat and cold. Somewhere in that Gap, ice melted and moistened and life began. Of course, in a mythological narrative, the first life was not single cells but giants and gods! Nevertheless, this is a materialist account. Consciousness is not primary but emergent. The creation of a world with earth, sky and sea came later when gods killed a giant and made the world from his body - 

flesh: earth; 

skull: sky; 

brain: clouds;

hair: trees;

bones: mountains;

eyebrows: Midgard;

blood: sea; 

teeth: stones;

eyes: sun and moon;

maggots: dwarves.