Hnituo is the celestial bride of the Nuosu Book of Origins, youngest daughter of the sky god Ngeti Gunzy. When the flood survivor Jjumu Vuvu ascends to the heavenly palace, she is given to him in marriage, and through her the divine and human realms are joined: their descendants become the ancestors of the Nuosu clans whose genealogies fill the latter half of the epic. The match is fraught, for the bride-wealth owed to her father and the couple's departure to earth set the gods and the earthlings at odds, and the children of the union are at first mute, gaining the gift of speech only when it is fetched down from the sky. Hnituo thus stands as the divine ancestress at the head of the human genealogies the bimo recite.