Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ask and Embla are the first man and woman in Norse mythology, created by three gods, one of whom is Odin. They are attested in both the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, both compiled in the 13th century, and they became the progenitors of all humanity after being settled within Midgard.
According to the Prose Edda account in Gylfaginning chapter 9, the three brothers Vili, Ve, and Odin gave Ask and Embla breath of life, movement and intelligence, shape, speech, hearing, and sight, as well as clothing and names. The Poetic Edda version in Voluspa records a similar list of gifts but scholars disagree on the precise translation.
The meaning of Embla is uncertain, with two main proposals: "elm tree" and "vine", the latter connecting to the Greek word ampelos. Linguist Gunlog Josefsson proposed a third reading, arguing the name derives from roots meaning "firemaker" or "smokebringer", linking it to the ancient Scandinavian practice of the fire plough.
Scholar Jaan Puhvel placed Ask and Embla in a broader Indo-European pattern of first couples, including the Vedic Yama and Yami and the Iranian Masya and Masyanag, all traditions where trees or rocks serve as the raw material for human creation. Anders Hultgard found that tree-origin myths are characteristic of ancient Europe and Indo-European-speaking peoples, in contrast to Near Eastern traditions that derive humans from clay, earth, or blood.
The Braak Bog Figures are two wooden figures of more than human height depicting a nude man and a nude woman, unearthed from a peat bog at Braak in Schleswig, Germany. Scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson suggested they may represent a Lord and Lady of the Vanir and that they could preserve an early memory connected to the tradition of Ask and Embla as humans created from trees.
Ask and Embla appear in several modern works. A sculpture by Stig Blomberg created in 1948 stands in Solvesborg in southern Sweden, and two of Dagfin Werenskiold's sixteen wooden panels on Oslo City Hall depict the pair. A. S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance features a poem titled Ask to Embla, and the Nintendo and Intelligent Systems phone game Fire Emblem Heroes draws its main story from Norse mythology including Ask and Embla.