VR Vetting

Ask & Embla: You Were Made Vǫluspá 17–18. Three of the gods come down along the shore & find two shapes lying there, lítt megandi, empty of might. Askr & Embla, ash trees, driftwood in the form of a man & a woman. The poem calls them ørlǫglausa — without ǫrlǫg. Not merely fateless; ǫrlǫg is the primal layer, what has been laid down beneath a life & from which the rest follows. They had none. Nothing had been set for them because nothing had been given to them: Ǫnd þau né áttu, óð þau né hǫfðu, lá né læti né litu góða. No breath, no mind, no warmth, no voice, no living hue. And then, in the very next lines, each lack is answered by name: ǫnd gaf Óðinn, óð gaf Hœnir, lá gaf Lóðurr ok litu góða. Óðinn gives ǫnd: breath, & the spirit carried on breath. Hœnir gives óðr; mind, thought, the fury that stirs in a man. Lóðurr gives lá, læti & litr: the blood's warmth beneath the skin, the voice & the movement, the hue of a thing that lives. Three gods, three gifts, & only then are we at all. Look at the structure of it. The poem does not say the shapes woke, or stirred, or came into themselves. It lists what they lacked & then names who supplied each lack. Our forebears built the first hour of mankind entirely out of giving & receiving (the gift cycle) & they left no room in it for self-creation. There is no line in which Askr does anything. The modern age holds the reverse as its highest teaching: that a man authors himself, defines himself, owes nothing for what he is & may remake it at will. This isn't to say a man's effort counts for nothing. What you do with what you were given is yours, & you will answer for it; however, the gifts themselves were handed to you, by name, by specific Gods, before you had any say in the matter. Breath, mind, blood, voice, form. Not one of them self-made. It's not about what you made of yourself, but what was made of you first. What follows from that is debt, & the paying of it is called loyalty. In other words, you are a gift, and use that gift to live for that which is greater than yourself. ~ Folcweard