Ymir (Post Office) adopted 2 March 1948 on 82F/6. Form of name changed to Ymir (community) 15 March 1983 on 82F/6.

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office

Named in 1897 by D.C. Corbin, president of the Nelson and Fort Shepherd Railway, after the nearby Ymir Range, in turn named by geologist G.M. Dawson after the Norse god, Ymir. "When I built this road the locality was called Quartz Creek, I think, and with a desire to shorten the name and localize it, I called it Ymir, the name of a high mountain lying to the east..." (4 September 1905 letter from D.C. Corbin, Spokane, WA, to James White, Chief Geographer, Ottawa)

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office

"Ymir's original name was Quartz Creek, and its first post office was in a hollow cedar log where Quartz Creek emptied into the Salmo River. The log was near the Nelson-Fort Sheppard water tank and was covered with a board; the baggage man on the morning south-bound train would drop an empty mail sack, and picked it up on the evening train heading north to Nelson.... Ymir was originally spelled Ymier, the name of the claim originally located by Jack Philbert, Joe Petrie and Oliver Blair. Petrie, a Frenchman, stated that he had chosen the name Ymier, after a range of mountains in northern France. When the Nelson-Fort Sheppard Railway built the new station they dropped a letter, and the sigh read "Ymir". A prospector who was walking the ties stopped at the station, and with a piece of chalk wrote beneath the name Ymir "why'm I here? dead broke"." (as told to R.G. Joy by pioneer John Price, reprinted in Nelson Daily News 10 January 1951)

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office

".... the Norse god Ymir [was] the impersonation of chaos and the first created being, produced by the antagonism of heat and cold, and the father of all the Giants. As he slept a man and woman grew out of his left arm and sons from his feet, and these became the race of great giants called Hrimshursur. When Ymir was later slain by Odin and his carcass thrown into the abyss, his blood formed water, his bones became mountains, his teeth turned to rocks, his skull became the heavens, his brain the clouds, his hair plants and trees, and his eyebrows the walls of defence against the Giants......" (The Miner [newspaper], Nelson, Saturday 15 January 1895; transcript provided by historian Innes Cooper, Armstrong). See also Ymir Mountain, for a slightly different interpretation of Norse mythology.

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office