{"it":{"id":"TX035","kind":"text","sub":"Norse","name":"Poetic Edda (Völuspá) & Prose Edda (Gylfaginning)","place":"Reykjavík","date":"oral earlier; Codex Regius c.1270; Snorri c.1220","oldest":"c.1270","inst":"Codex Regius GKS 2365 4to, Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavík [institution number…","lang":"Old Norse","src":[233],"lat":64.142,"lon":-21.95,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"In Norse myth three gods made the first humans, Ask and Embla, from two pieces of wood.","why":"The Norse story of the first humans survives in two medieval texts that disagree on the details.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Compare with Popol Vuh's wooden people.","rel":["TX028"],"hook":"Walking the shore, three gods found two trees and shaped the first man and woman from them."},"S":{"233":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla"]},"rec":{"id":"TX035","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA136","a":"Aesir as visiting beings.","who":"AA writers","main":"Christian-era recording of pagan myth.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[{"by":"H.A. Bellows","yr":"1923","t":"The Poetic Edda","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda"}],"mo":[{"v":"giants_hybrids","ev":"jotnar","n":"Norse","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Christian-era recording of pagan myth.","alternative_reading":"Aesir as visiting beings.","alt_proponent":"AA writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Christian influence debated.","key_theme":"Odin, Vili, Vé make Ask and Embla from trees; giants (jötnar) precede gods","language":"Old Norse","physical_object_institution":"Codex Regius GKS 2365 4to, Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavík [institution number unverified this session]","composition_date":"oral earlier; Codex Regius c.1270; Snorri c.1220","oldest_ms_date":"c.1270","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0427","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla"},{"id":"VTX035-2","t":"Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, Brodeur 1916 translation (Mythopedia)","u":"https://mythopedia.com/library/prose-edda-brodeur-1916/gylfaginning/"},{"id":"VTX035-3","t":"Völuspá, Bellows 1923 translation (Mímisbrunnr)","u":"https://www.mimisbrunnr.info/voluspa-bellows"}],"sum":"# Ask and Embla: The Norse Gods Who Made the First People From Two Trees\n\nOn 21 April 1971 a small book came home to Iceland by sea. Air travel was not thought trustworthy enough for cargo this precious, so it crossed from Copenhagen by ship with a military escort, bound for Reykjavik. The book was 45 leaves of vellum, written in Iceland in the 1270s, and it had been in Denmark since 1662, when an Icelandic bishop sent it as a gift to King Frederick III. Its name, Codex Regius, means the King's Book. It is the only source for most of the poems it contains, and those poems are the Poetic Edda, the oldest surviving record of the gods of the Norse world.\n\nThe first poem in it is Voluspa, \"the prophecy of the seeress.\" In it a woman with the sight addresses Odin, chief of the gods, and tells him what she remembers from before the world began, and what she sees at its end. Somewhere in the middle she describes how the first man and woman were made.\n\n## Empty of might\n\nIn Henry Adams Bellows's 1923 translation, three gods come out \"from the home of the gods, the mighty and gracious,\" and find two figures lying on the land:\n\n\"Two without fate on the land they found, Ask and Embla, empty of might. Soul they had not, sense they had not, Heat nor motion, nor goodly hue; Soul gave Othin, sense gave Honir, Heat gave Lothur and goodly hue.\"\n\nThat is all. The poem does not say where Ask and Embla came from, or what they were before the gods found them. It says only that they lacked everything that makes a person alive: breath or spirit, mind, the warmth of blood, movement, the colour of living skin. The Old Norse word Bellows renders \"without fate,\" orlog, means something like a destiny laid down for a life. They had none. They were not yet anyone.\n\nEach god then gives one gift, and between them the three gifts turn the two figures into human beings. Scholars still argue about exactly what each gift was, and translations differ.\n\nVoluspa is usually dated to the tenth century, before Iceland's conversion to Christianity around the year 1000. The full poem survives in the Codex Regius and in another Icelandic manuscript, Hauksbok, of about 1334. It goes on from the first humans to the world tree Yggdrasil, the war between two families of gods, the death of the shining god Baldr, and at last Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, when fire and flood overwhelm heaven and earth and Odin is killed by the great wolf. Then, the seeress says, a new green world will rise from the sea.\n\n## Snorri's version\n\nThe other great source is the Prose Edda, written around 1220 by the Icelandic chieftain, lawspeaker and historian Snorri Sturluson. In its section called Gylfaginning, \"the tricking of Gylfi,\" a Swedish king travels in disguise to question three mysterious figures, and they tell him how the world was made. In Arthur Brodeur's 1916 translation, the gods kill the giant Ymir and make the world from his body: the earth from his flesh, the sea from his sweat, the sky from his skull, set over the earth with four dwarfs holding up the corners, named East, West, North and South. Then the king asks where people came from.\n\n\"When the sons of Borr were walking along the sea-strand, they found two trees, and took up the trees and shaped men of them: the first gave them spirit and life; the second, wit and feeling; the third, form, speech, hearing, and sight. They gave them clothing and names: the male was called Askr, and the female Embla, and of them was mankind begotten, which received a dwelling-place under Midgard.\"\n\nThe scene is the same. The details are not. Snorri's gods are the three sons of Borr, Odin with his brothers Vili and Ve, not Odin, Honir and Lothur. Snorri says plainly that Ask and Embla were made from trees, on a beach. The poem says only that the gods found them lying on the land. Snorri's gifts are different too: form, speech, hearing and sight, where the poem has heat and colour.\n\n## Who was telling the story\n\nSnorri wrote two centuries after Iceland became Christian. He was a powerful and ambitious man, and his Edda was in part a handbook for poets, preserving the old myths so that the traditional language of Norse verse, packed with references to the gods, could still be understood. He also had to make the old gods safe for Christian readers. Gylfaginning frames them as men of the distant past, and Snorri's three storytellers even tell the king that the city of the gods, Asgard, is what \"men call Troy.\" Whatever Snorri inherited, he shaped it.\n\nThe names themselves are open. Askr means \"ash tree\" in Old Norse. Embla is harder. It has often been read as \"elm,\" as Bellows reads it, but that derivation is now considered problematic, and another proposal is \"vine.\" On that reading, some scholars connect the pair to the ancient way of making fire by spinning a hard wooden drill against softer wood, an act long linked in folk belief with procreation.\n\n## The mainstream reading\n\nScholars read Ask and Embla as one of the \"first couples\" found across Indo-European myth. The historian of religion Jaan Puhvel lists them alongside the Vedic Yama and Yami and the Iranian Mashya and Mashyanag, the first man and woman of Persian tradition, who in one old account were also formed from trees. Anders Hultgard has observed that myths of humans made from trees or wood are particularly linked to Europe and the Indo-European peoples of Asia Minor and Iran, while the Near East almost always tells of humans made from clay, earth or blood. Two wooden figures, a man and a woman of \"more than human height,\" found in a peat bog at Braak in northern Germany, may preserve a memory of carved wooden gods behind the same idea. The record marks the modern notion of the gods as visiting beings as unresolved interpretation, with no measurable data.\n\n## What stays strange\n\nThe Voluspa stanza is very short, and that is part of its power. It does not describe the making of bodies. The bodies are already there, complete and inert. What the gods supply is everything else: the breath, the mind, the warmth, the motion, the colour of life, and with them a fate. In the poem's own logic, being human is not a matter of shape. It is a set of separate gifts, given by separate givers, to something that was waiting on the shore.\n\nWhich version did the people who first told this story believe, and why would their gods hand out breath, mind and life as separate gifts?","qs":["Which version did the people who first told it believe?","What does it mean to believe we came from trees?","Why would the gods give breath and sense as separate gifts?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX035-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Poetic Edda (Völuspá) & Prose Edda (Gylfaginning), Reykjavík — The image shows a part of folio 41 recto of the 13th century Icelandic manuscript GKS 2365 4to, also known as the…","by":"The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beginning_of_Atlam%C3%A1l.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"c.1270","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[310]},{"v":"Old Norse","h":"Language","s":[310]}],"hs":{"310":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla"]}}