we are told that ‘dark Earth put him forth (qνδωκεν) in the wooded
mountains, so that there might be a mortal race’. There are other references in
Greek sources to human origins from ash or other trees.^1 I mentioned in the
last chapter the Iranian cosmogony in which mankind’sfirst parents Mahryaγ
and Mahrya ̄naγ grew in the form of a rhubarb plant from the earth fertilized
by the seed of Gayo ̄mart. In the old German poetic genealogy reported by
Tacitus (Germ. 2. 2) Tuisto, the father of Mannus from whom all the Germans
descended, was terra editus, ‘put forth from the earth’. In Eddic myth the first
man and woman were Askr and Embla; the woman’s name is obscure
(possibly ‘Elm’), but the man’s certainly means ‘Ash-tree’.^2 His Old English
equivalent Æsc appears as the eponymous ancestor of the Æscingas.
Mannus is a form of the common Germanic word for ‘man’.^3 He must have
been conceived originally as the progenitor of all mankind, not just of the
German peoples. The same root exists in Sanskrit: mánu- means a man, or
mankind, and Manu(s) is a mythical divine ancestor. Here too he must
have begun as the forefather of mankind as a whole, but he has become the
representative of Aryan culture in opposition to that of the Dasus, India’s
dark-skinned aborigines.^4 He was considered to have been the first sacrificer
and the establisher of the fire-cult (RV 5. 21. 1; 7. 2. 3; cf. 8. 63. 1). The
parallelism between the German and the Indic figure points clearly to a
common prototype, a primal ‘Man’ from whom all men were descended.
There are perhaps traces of him in Iran and Anatolia too.^5
In the Tacitean account Mannus is the son of Tuisto ‘Twin’, whom we have
argued to be an androgynous being corresponding to the Nordic Ymir and
the Indo-Iranian Yama/Yima. Ymir too gives birth to the first human pair.
By analogy we might expect Manu to be the son of Yama. He is not, but the
two are related, each being the son of Vivasvat. (The Iranian Yima is likewise
son of Vı ̄vahvant.)
The fact is that the Indo-Iranian Twin figure had lost his original cosmo-
gonic significance. Withered remnants of it persist in the stories of his incest
(^1) Hes. Op. 145; Asius fr. 8 W.; cf. F. Specht, ZVS 68 (1944), 191–3; West (1966), 221; (1978),
187.
(^2) In the extant version (Vo ̨luspá 17 f.; Gylf. 9) the pair are not represented growing as trees
but are found as logs by gods who endow them with life. Cf. de Vries (1956), ii. 371 f.; Dronke
(1997), 123.
(^3) For morphological analysis see N. Wagner, HS 107 (1994), 143–6; M. E. Huld in EIEC 366b.
The word is perhaps related to *men-/mneh 2 ‘think’; cf. Nagy (1990), 70.
(^4) Cf. RV 1. 130. 8; Oldenberg (1917), 151 n. 1.
(^5) Iran: A. Christensen in Festschrift für Friedrich Carl Andreas (Leipzig 1916), 63–9. The
Lydian proto-king Manes (Hdt. 1. 94. 3, 4. 45. 3; son of Zeus and Ge, Dion. Hal. Ant. 1. 27. 1) is a
plausible counterpart, except that the manuscripts of Dionysius give Μα ́ σνην,Μα ́ σνεω, which
Wilamowitz, Kl. Schr. iv. 63, contends is the true form.
376 10. Mortality and Fame