Voluspo 17-18 (Bellows)

Stanzas seventeen and eighteen of the Voluspo describe the making of the first human beings out of driftwood found on the shore. Three gods come forth from the company of the gods, strong and gracious, and find two beings without fate lying on the land, empty of might, called Ask and Embla, ash and elm, the trees their bodies had been before the gods reached them. The stanzas list what each god contributes in turn rather than describing a single unified act of creation. Othin gives soul, Hoenir gives sense, and Lothur gives heat and goodly hue, three distinct gifts from three distinct givers, layered onto driftwood that had no soul, no sense, no heat and no color before the gods arrived. Henry Adams Bellows, whose translation is used here, notes that the connection to the stanzas immediately before this pair appears to be broken, so something has likely been lost from the poem at exactly this seam. Lothur, the third of the three gods named, is generally identified by scholars with Loki under an older name, though the poem itself gives no further explanation of who he is beyond the gift he gives. The stanzas describe the pair before the gods' gifts arrive in strikingly negative terms, without fate and empty of might, language that treats driftwood shaped like a human body as a real but incomplete beginning, a form waiting on gifts it cannot supply for itself before it can properly be called a person.

The names Ask and Embla, and the picture of humanity beginning as ordinary driftwood given soul, sense and warmth by three visiting gods, became one of Norse mythology's most durable images, cited often enough that a recent general history of the Viking Age takes the pair's own names as its title. Scholars reading the myth alongside other traditions of a first human pair fashioned from inert matter have noted how sparse this version is compared to many others, no clay shaped by hand, no single creator god, no elaborate ceremony, only driftwood found lying on a beach and three gifts given in sequence. That sparseness has not stopped the story from carrying real theological weight in how the tradition is read today, since the poem states plainly that humanity begins as raw material with nothing of its own, entirely dependent on gifts it did not ask for and could not have given itself. Modern practitioners of reconstructed Norse religion return to Ask and Embla as the tradition's founding statement about what a human being fundamentally is, three received gifts built onto wood that started with none of them. Historians of the Viking Age have also read the choice of tree species, ash and elm rather than any other available wood, as unlikely to be arbitrary, since both trees carried practical and symbolic importance in the everyday life of the societies that told this story, though the poem itself offers no explanation for the choice beyond naming the two trees directly.