Ask and Embla

Summary

Askr and Embla are the first man and the first woman of the Scandinavian myths. The gods made them from wood, and the human race comes from them. In Völuspá the seeress tells how three of the Æsir, powerful and loving, came from their company to a house and found on the land Askr and Embla, able to do little, without fate. They had no breath and no spirit, no softness and no movement, no good colour. Odin gave them breath, Hœnir gave them spirit, and Lóðurr gave them softness and good colour.

Snorri tells it another way in Gylfaginning. When Borr's sons had made earth and sky from the body of Ymir, set the sun and stars and divided the days, they were walking along the seashore and found two trees; they took them up and made people of them. The first gave breath and life, the second wit and movement, the third face, speech, hearing and sight, and they gave them clothes and names: the man Askr and the woman Embla, "and from them grew the race of mankind, to whom the dwelling in Midgard was given". Then the gods built themselves a stronghold in the middle of the world, Asgard. Gylfaginning 9.

The idea the story turns on is that a human being is wood given breath. Askr and Embla were there before they were made, lying on the ground, but they could do nothing; what the gods gave was not the body but what makes a body alive: breath, spirit, colour and movement. The poem names one more thing they lacked: they were "without fate". In the next two stanzas that fate arrives. Yggdrasil stands, and the poem calls it an askr, an ash, the very name of the first man; from the lake beneath it come three maidens, the Norns, who "laid down laws, selected lives for the children of mankind, the fates of men". So the first man bears the name of the tree on which the worlds stand, and the fate he lacked comes to him from beside its root. At the end of time people return to the trees: after Ragnarök a man and a woman, Líf and Lífþrasir, hide in Hoddmímir's wood, live on the morning dew, and from them the world is peopled again.

We read the two names in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay reads them. The r of Askr is the nominative ending; it drops in the accusative, and the poem says Ask, leaving s and k. S is s, and k answers Arabic q in the Juthoor correspondences, so the name is Arabic sāq. In Lane the sāq of a tree is its trunk, the part between the root and the place where the branches shoot out, and the sāq of a human being is the shank, between knee and foot. On this reading Askr is the sāq: a trunk that became a man standing on his legs, one Arabic word for tree and human alike, which is what the story makes him. Embla is spelt Emla in the Uppsala manuscript, and its final a is the feminine ending, so the two spellings leave m or b, then l. Arabic has two words for pregnancy that the dictionary says mean the same, ḥaml and ḥabal, and from the second comes ḥublā, a pregnant woman, ending in the feminine ā as the Norse name ends in a. When the ḥ drops, as throat sounds drop in languages that lack them, the first spelling is ḥaml and the second ḥabal with the m before it. On this reading Embla is the ḥublā, the mother of humankind, which is what the story says: "from them grew the race of mankind".

Linguistic Root

Askr and sāq, Embla and ḥabal

Cleasby–Vigfusson gives askr as the ash, then anything made of ash: a spear, properly an ashen spear-shaft, and a small ship, and cites the Völuspá that calls Yggdrasil an askr. Of embla it says that it is "a mythol. word, which only occurs in Vsp. 17" and in the Edda after it, where the gods found two lifeless trees, the ash and the embla, and made man of the ash and woman of the embla; then: "it is a question what kind of tree the embla was". Some suggest a metathesis from álmr, the elm, but the compound emblu-askr in one of Egill's poems "seems to shew that the embla was in some way related to the ash". Faulkes's index makes them the first male and the first female human being.

Lane, under s-w-q: the sāq of a human being is the shank, the part between the knee and the foot; of a tree it is the stem or trunk, the part between the root and the place where the branches shoot out; its plural of paucity is aswuq or asʾuq. Lane also records sāq used figuratively for the soul or self. Under ḥ-b-l: ḥabilat, "she was, or became, pregnant", and "ḥabal and ḥaml signifying the same, or the former applies only to human beings, and the latter to others"; a pregnant woman is ḥublā.

In Askr the comparison keeps the s and sets k against q, as it stands in most words that entered the European languages. The Norse name begins with a vowel that sāq does not have; the plural aswuq does begin with one, but that is a likeness of shape, not an explanation. In Embla the ḥ drops, as the throat letters mostly drop in the Juthoor sound laws, and m, b and l remain; the two Norse spellings keep the letters of the two Arabic words.

Key Mythic Narratives

Two accounts of the making

Völuspá and Gylfaginning differ in the makers and in the gifts. In the poem they are Odin, Hœnir and Lóðurr; in the prose, Borr's sons, Odin and his brothers Vili and Vé. In the poem the three find the trees "on the land" near a house; in the prose they find them on the seashore. The poem has three gifts that turn wood into a living body: breath, óðr, spirit and inspiration, then softness and colour; the prose has seven, breath and life, wit and movement, face, speech, hearing and sight, and adds clothes and names. The word Hœnir gives, óðr, is the one the Germanic dictionary connects with the name of Odin himself.

The sprinkled tree

The stanza after Askr and Embla says that the ash Yggdrasil is "sprinkled with white clay". The poem's translator notes that the verb here is the same one used for sprinkling a baby with water at name-giving. So the tree whose name the first man bears is sprinkled as a newborn is sprinkled when named, and in the prose Askr and Embla receive their names after their breath.

The first and the second beginning of people

Snorri says of Askr and Embla, "and from them grew the race of mankind", and Vafþrúðnismál says of Líf and Lífþrasir, "and thence new ages are born". The verb in both sentences is the same Norse verb, ala, to nourish, in its reflexive form, "to be nourished, to grow up": ólst in the prose, alask in the poem. So poem and prose describe the first and the second beginning of humankind with one word. At the first there are two trees on the shore; at the second, a wood in which the two hide from Surtr's fire; their story is told under Fimbulwinter. Gylfaginning 9 and 53; Vafþrúðnismál 45.

Symbolic Reading

Neither essay reads Askr and Embla. But the Norse rereading essay reads Yggdrasil as a web of life, roots, trunk and branches, on which the whole order of living things stands. On that reading, which applies the essay's view to this story rather than quoting a reading of Askr and Embla, the human being is made from the same kind of trunk on which that web stands, and receives his fate from beside its root. What the text itself gives is wood lying without movement, breath and colour given to it, then a name and clothes.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest account is the Iranian one. The Bundahishn says that the first man and woman, Mashye and Mashyane, grew from the earth in the shape of a one-stemmed rivas plant, a kind of rhubarb, joined so that it was not clear which was male and which female; then they changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of man, and the breath, which is the soul, went into them, and Ohrmazd told them: "You are man, you are the ancestry of the world." In both accounts the first pair come from a plant and become human when they are given breath.

In Genesis the LORD forms man of the dust of the ground, breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, then builds the woman from his rib. Breath is the maker's gift here, as it is Odin's, but the material is dust, not wood, and the woman is made from the man rather than beside him. The Qur'an says: "He created you from a single soul, and created from it its mate, and spread from the two of them many men and women", the sense of "from them grew the race of mankind".

Prometheus moulds people out of water and earth in Apollodorus, Nüwa kneads yellow earth and shapes people by hand, and Khnum forms each person on the potter's wheel. In most accounts the material is clay that is shaped; in the North and in Iran it is a tree or plant that is found standing and then given life.

These accounts are gathered in the making of the first humans, and the link between the first man and the name of the tree on which the worlds stand in the world tree.