Ask and Embla

• 1. Introduction

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  Ask and Embla were the first man and woman ever to exist, according to Norse mythology. Three gods, one of them Odin, came across these two figures and gave them everything a human being needs: breath, movement, intelligence, shape, speech, hearing, and sight. From that moment, the pair became the progenitors of all humanity. But the questions their story raises have occupied scholars for centuries. Where did their names come from, and what do those names tell us about the origins of the myth? What do comparable traditions from ancient Iran or the Vedic world share with this Norse account? And what are those two towering wooden figures pulled from a peat bog in Germany doing in this conversation at all?

• 2. What the Names Carry

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  Old Norse askr means "ash tree" with no ambiguity. Embla is a different matter entirely. Two leading possibilities have circulated among scholars, and neither has fully won out. The first reading, "elm tree", is considered problematic by those who have traced the derivation from almr through the intermediate form almilōn. The second reading, "vine", reaches back to the Proto-Germanic form Ambilō, which may connect to the ancient Greek word ampelos, itself meaning vine or liana.

  Linguist Gunlög Josefsson proposed a third path. She argued that Embla breaks down into the roots eim and la, yielding a meaning of "firemaker" or "smokebringer". Her analysis tied the name to the fire plough, an ancient technique for producing flame through friction that retained a reputation as a magical and holy method of fire-making in Scandinavian folk belief well into modern times. Josefsson also identified something symbolically loaded in that gesture: the emergence of fire through ploughing, she argued, was linked in folk imagination to the moment of orgasm and so to fertilization and reproduction.

  A further gloss comes from the 19th century scholar Benjamin Thorpe, who recorded Jacob Grimm's view that embla or emla signifies a busy woman, derived from a root cluster meaning assiduous labour. Grimm himself drew a parallel to the ancient Persian names Meshia and Meshiane, the first man and woman in Iranian tradition, who were also said to have been formed from trees.

• 3. Two Tellings

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  Stanza 17 of Völuspá, the Poetic Edda poem narrated by a seeress, names three gods who found Ask and Embla on land: Hœnir, Lóðurr, and Odin. The seeress describes the two as capable of very little, lacking in ørlög, and then records that the three gods gave them gifts. Exactly what those gifts were has been a matter of sustained scholarly disagreement, and translations continue to vary on this point.

  The Prose Edda version, found in chapter 9 of Gylfaginning, recasts the scene. There the three gods are named as the brothers Vili, Vé, and Odin. They were walking along a beach when they discovered two trees. From that wood they made the first human beings. One brother gave breath of life, the second gave movement and intelligence, and the third gave shape, speech, hearing, and sight. The gods then clothed the pair and gave them names. Ask and Embla were settled within the walls of Midgard, the realm designated for humankind.

• 4. Fire, Vines, and Indo-European Parallels

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  Jaan Puhvel observed that ancient myths contain many first couples of the same type as Ask and Embla, and he placed them in direct company with the Vedic pair Yama and Yamī and the Iranian Mašya and Mašyānag, all traditions where trees or rocks figure as the raw material for human creation. His remark that the pair belongs to a range of Indo-European first couples, with trees or rocks as preferred raw material, underlines how widely the pattern travels.

  The etymology of Embla as "vine" opened a particular analytical path. In Indo-European societies, the drilling of fire was understood through an analogy with sexual intercourse. Vines served as the flammable wood placed beneath a drill made of harder wood to produce fire. A stone plate from a Bronze Age grave at Kivik in Scania, Sweden, has been theorised as depicting exactly this kind of ritual fire-making.

  Anders Hultgård's comparative study found that myths deriving human origins from trees or wood are especially associated with ancient Europe and Indo-European-speaking peoples of Asia Minor and Iran. He noted a sharp contrast with the cultures of the Near East, where the anthropogonic story type is almost exclusively one of creation from clay, earth, or blood through a divine act.

• 5. Traces in Germanic Memory

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  Two wooden figures of more than human height were pulled from a peat bog at Braak in Schleswig, Germany. They depict a nude man and a nude woman. Scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson suggested the figures may represent a Lord and Lady of the Vanir, a group of Norse gods, and she proposed that another memory of those wooden deities may survive in the tradition of Ask and Embla themselves: the man and woman founded the human race, created from trees on the seashore.

  The Anglo-Saxon genealogy for the kings of Kent includes a figure named Æsc, which is Old English for ash tree, listed as the son of Hengest. That connection has generated theories about an earlier basis for the Ask figure in pre-Norse Germanic mythology.

  A further thread runs to the Vandal kings Assi and Ambri, recorded in Paul the Deacon's 7th century AD work Origo Gentis Langobardorum. In that text, the two approach the god Godan, who is Odin, and ask for victory. Scholars noted that the name Ambri, like Embla, likely derives from the same Proto-Germanic root Ambilō.

• 6. Dwarfs, Trees, and Metaphor

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  A stanza in Völuspá that comes just before the creation account offers a catalog of dwarfs, and stanza 10 of that poem has been read as describing the creation of human forms from the earth. This raises an interpretive possibility: that the dwarfs were responsible for shaping the human body, while the three gods contributed life itself.

  Carolyne Larrington theorised that the tree-origin of Ask and Embla explains a broader pattern in Old Norse poetic language. Humans in those works are regularly called trees in a metaphorical sense: women appear as trees of jewellery, men as trees of battle. Larrington's reading connects those kennings back to the founding myth, suggesting the metaphor stayed alive because the origin story stayed alive with it.

• 7. Lasting Presence

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  Stig Blomberg created a sculpture of Ask and Embla in 1948. It stands today in Sölvesborg in southern Sweden. Two of the sixteen wooden panels by Dagfin Werenskiold on Oslo City Hall depict the pair alongside other scenes from Norse mythology.

  A. S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance features a poem titled Ask to Embla, attributed to a fictional character named R. H. Ash, one of the protagonists. Parts of that poem are quoted in the novel.

  The Nintendo and Intelligent Systems phone game Fire Emblem Heroes draws its main story from Norse mythology, and Ask and Embla are among the figures who shape that narrative. The survival of their names in a globally distributed mobile game, centuries after the Poetic Edda was compiled from earlier sources in the 13th century, tracks an unbroken line of transmission from bog and stone plate to touchscreen.