The Making of Askr and Embla

After the world was built but before it had witnesses, three gods walked the beach — Odin, Hœnir, and Lóðurr in Völuspá's version; Odin, Vili, and Vé in Snorri's — and found two trees, or two pieces of driftwood: Askr ('Ash') and Embla (perhaps 'Elm', perhaps 'Vine'). The poem's description of pre-human material is oddly tender: 'they had no breath, no spirit, no warmth, no voice, no good looks; fateless they were.'

Each god gave what he was: Odin breathed önd, breath-spirit-life; Hœnir gave óðr, mind and feeling — inspiration, the very substance of Odin's own name; Lóðurr gave lá and litr goðr, warmth of blood and the bloom of living colour. Fatelessness ended immediately: to be alive, in this cosmology, is to be assigned a thread at the norns' well. From these two, the whole of humankind descends, dwelling in Midgard behind the wall of Ymir's eyebrows.

Humans made from trees is very old northern furniture — and the myth never quite left the language: Old Norse poetry routinely calls men 'ash of battle' and women 'birch of gold.' Wood that breathes: the skalds took the creation story as a standing invoice, and paid it in kennings for a thousand years.

Three gods on a beach

The scene is the quietest in the mythology. The world has just been made — earth raised from Ymir's flesh, sky pitched from his skull, sun and moon set running — and it is empty. Völuspá says three of the Æsir, "mighty and loving" (öflgir ok ástkir — the poem's adjectives, and note the second one), came to the house, to the world, and found on the land two of little strength, Askr and Embla, ørlöglausa — fateless. Snorri stages it more concretely: the three sons of Borr were walking along the sea-strand and found two trees — in his telling almost certainly driftwood, sea-worn logs thrown up by the surf. To an Icelandic audience that detail glowed: on a treeless volcanic island, driftwood was a gift the sea delivered from unknown forests, the raw material of houses, boats, and (the myth says) people.

What the gods found was potential without ignition. The Völuspá stanza describing the pre-humans is a catalogue of absences as careful as the poem's famous description of the void before creation: they had no önd (breath), no óðr (mind, spirit), no lá (vital warmth; the word is obscure and debated — blood? sap? the sea's wetness?), no læti (voice, manner of moving), no litir góðir (good colors, the bloom of the living). Two shapes, human-ready, waiting on the tide-line. The mythology's tenderness here is easy to miss and worth pausing on: nothing is conquered, nothing killed. The world was built from a murder; its people were built from a rescue.

The three gifts

Each god gave what he had to give — in Völuspá's version:

• Odin gave önd — breath, and with it life and spirit. The word later served Christian translators for "soul," but its root sense is the drawn breath itself: what Odin gives is the thing you notice missing in the dead. The god of inspired frenzy starts humanity's engines with wind.
• Hœnir gave óðr — mind, feeling, ecstasy, inspiration: the untranslatable word at the root of Odin's own name (Óðinn is the master of óðr). It is one of the mythology's better ironies that the god who delivers the faculty of thought and inspiration is Hœnir — famous elsewhere as the hostage who could not decide anything without Mímir, the handsome chieftain whose every answer was "let others decide." The giver of mind is the god who never used his own. (He gets a redemptive coda: Hœnir is among the survivors in the world after Ragnarök, choosing the lot-twigs of prophecy at last.)
• Lóðurr gave lá and litr góðr — vital warmth (or blood) and good color: the flush of the living, the difference between a face and a carving. Of Lóðurr almost nothing else is known — he appears here and in a couple of skaldic tags, and then the tradition loses him. Because Loki is elsewhere Odin's old walking-companion and blood-brother, some scholars have proposed Lóðurr is Loki under another name — a fascinating possibility (the trickster giving humanity its blood and beauty) that remains unproven and much argued.

Snorri, telling the story in Gylfaginning, gives the trio as Odin, Vili, and Vé — the same three brothers who killed Ymir and built the world — and distributes the gifts a little differently: the first gave breath and life; the second, wit and movement; the third, face, speech, hearing, and sight. The gods then gave them clothes and names. Ash for the man; for the woman, Embla, a name whose meaning is genuinely uncertain — "elm" is the traditional guess, "vine" a strong scholarly contender (a vine twining an ash makes an old image of the couple), with other candidates offered and none certain. The first woman's name is the oldest unsolved word in the story.

From fateless to fated

Völuspá makes one consequence explicit by making its absence explicit: before the gifts, Askr and Embla were fateless. To live, in this cosmology, is to have ørlög — a laid-down destiny — and the very next stanzas of the poem introduce the beings who administer it: the three norns at the well beneath Yggdrasil, who carve on wood-slips the fates of everyone. Breath, mind, and blood switch a person on; fate is what a person is switched on into. The myth is precise about the order: first the gods make you alive, then the norns tell you what it will cost. From Askr and Embla descend all people, given Midgard to dwell in — the middle-yard the gods walled for them with the eyebrows of the world's first murder victim, Ymir. Humanity lives, in other words, inside the gods' guilt and under their protection at once, which is as good a one-sentence summary of the Norse human condition as exists.

Wood that breathes: the myth in the language

The tree-origin of humans never became a mere backstory; it stayed live in the poetry for a thousand years. Skaldic verse routinely builds its kennings for people out of trees: a warrior is an "ash of battle," an "oak of the helmet," a "tree of weapons"; a woman is a "birch of gold," a "linden of the necklace," a "prop of the mead-horn." The convention is so pervasive that reading skaldic poetry means walking through a forest of metaphorical people — every one of them a quiet reprise of the beach at the world's beginning. The idea has deep and wide roots besides: an old Germanic tradition of tribes descended from trees, and cousins elsewhere in the Indo-European world where the first people grow from ash-trees or rocks and timber. And there may be an architectural echo at the myth's other end: at Ragnarök, the two survivors of humankind, Líf and Lífþrasir, shelter in Hoddmímis holt — most naturally read as the wood of the world-tree — and step out afterward to repeople the earth. Humanity comes from the trees twice: once at the world's making, once after its burning. The species' relationship to timber is, in this mythology, round-trip.

In the primary sources

Völuspá (stanzas 17–18, in the Poetic Edda) is the older and stranger witness: the trio Odin–Hœnir–Lóðurr, the catalogue of absences, the three gifts in the terse original terms (önd, óðr, lá ok litr góðr). Gylfaginning (Prose Edda) integrates the episode into Snorri's connected creation account with the trio Odin–Vili–Vé and its own gift-list. The disagreement about the gods' names is real and unresolved — Snorri knew Völuspá and chose differently, perhaps to keep his creation story tidy with the same three brothers throughout, perhaps following another source. The disagreement about which gifts map to which god matters less than the shared skeleton: three divine donors, three registers of gift (life, mind, body's bloom), two trees, all of us. On the meanings of lá, of Embla, and on Lóðurr's identity, the scholarship remains cheerfully unfinished; the stanzas are among the most commented-on in Old Norse.