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.