Ask

Ask is the first man in Randolph Henry Ash’s poetic retelling of the Norse creation story, fashioned from a tree and brought to life alongside Embla. His creation gives the old myth a distinctly relational ending: the first humans become fully present not in isolation, but as they see and recognize one another, clasp hands, and walk together beside the sea. Through Ask, the poem also joins human beginnings to the persistence and transformation of natural forms, a concern that recurs in Ash’s reflections on trees, fossils, and crafted objects.

Identity and Mythic Origins

In Ash’s account, the gods make man and woman from senseless tree-stumps and call them Ask and Embla, names that preserve the identities of their woody origins: ash and alder. Their human life is therefore not a clean break from the nonhuman world. They begin as matter that has been shaped, but the poem keeps their former life legible in their names and in the account of their making.

Odin breathes a soul into the new beings; Honir gives them sense, understanding, and the power to stand and move. The sequence distributes human capacities among the gods rather than presenting them as innate from the outset. Ask’s humanity emerges through gifts: soul, intelligence, and bodily agency. The poem’s focus on these bestowed powers makes the first man a figure of becoming, not simply a finished emblem of creation.

Recognition and the First Meeting

The poem’s account of creation culminates in the meeting of Ask and Embla. Ask steps forward on the printless shore and touches Embla’s hand; she clasps his. Their first contact is mutual rather than possessive: one reaches, the other answers, and the gesture marks the beginning of companionship. They then walk together along the sea, listening to its roar. The scene gives human life a social and sensory beginning, placing shared movement and attention after the gods’ acts of making.

Recognition precedes their departure together. The poem describes the first man’s eyes seeing answering lights in Embla’s eyes, and presents the pair as meeting in recognition and sympathy. Ask is thus not only one half of the first couple but a participant in the poem’s account of mutual regard: humanity becomes visible to itself through another person. The sea-shore setting, where their feet leave no prior prints, reinforces the sense of a beginning, while their joined hands turn that empty ground into the start of a shared path.

The Tree and Ash’s Ideas of Form

Ask’s name connects the myth directly to the ash tree. In a letter to a child, Ash describes that tree as common and magical, recalling the Norse belief that it held the world together, rooted in the underworld and touching Heaven. He also calls it useful for spear-shafts and climbable, bringing mythic scale together with ordinary practical knowledge. The account offers an illuminating companion to the poem: the tree is at once material, useful, and cosmological, just as Ask retains a link to the stump from which he is made while becoming a human being.

Ash’s attention to the transformation of matter also appears in his letter to Ellen about Yorkshire’s jet industry. He describes ancient ammonites fashioned into brooches and fossil remains displayed in polished tabletops, then identifies the persistent shape-shifting life of things long dead as a subject of his writing. Jet, once living material, preserves traces of growth in its compressed structure. These reflections do not describe Ask’s fate, but they clarify the broader imaginative pattern around his creation: forms change, and the earlier life of matter remains present within what it becomes.

Narrative Significance

Ask belongs to a myth within Ash’s poetry, not to the novel’s contemporary plot as an independently acting character. His importance lies in what the creation scene makes visible: human life is assembled from the natural world, endowed through successive gifts, and completed in relation to another. The movement from tree-stump to living man, and from solitary creation to clasped hands, gives the myth a compact structure of transformation and companionship.

The scene also resonates with the novel’s interest in how stories and objects carry earlier lives forward. Ask’s name preserves the ash tree within a human identity; Ash’s letter to Sophia makes the tree’s mythic associations available through a small drawing and an explanation offered as a reciprocal gift. Elsewhere, his reflections on fossil material being remade into ornament give the same theme a material counterpart. The novel does not equate these instances, but together they place Ask within a sustained attention to continuities between past and present, nature and art, and inherited forms and new lives.