Yggdrasil

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Yggdrasil stands at the center of everything. Not just the center of the earth, or the sky, but of all nine worlds, all creation, all time. According to the Norse sources that preserve this image, the tree is an immense ash, its branches reaching into the heavens, its roots plunging into wells that hold wisdom, cold springs, and the fate of the dead.

  The gods themselves ride to Yggdrasil every day. Not to pray to it, but to hold court beneath it. It is the site of their governing assemblies, the axis around which divine law turns. A dragon gnaws at its roots from below. A hawk perches between the eyes of an eagle in its branches above. A squirrel runs between them, carrying messages that are anything but friendly.

  The name of the tree itself is a puzzle. The most widely accepted reading translates to something like "Odin's gallows". That single interpretation opens into a dark story: the chief god of the Norse pantheon hanging from this very tree, wounded by a spear, for nine nights, in order to seize the runes. What kind of tree earns that history? And what happens to it at the end of the world?

  Those questions run through every source that mentions Yggdrasil, from the Poetic Edda to the Prose Edda, from medieval Iceland to modern Oslo.

• 2. A Name for a Gallows

  ›

  Old Norse drasill means "horse", and Ygg is one of Odin's many names. Put them together and you get "Odin's horse", which is itself a kenning for a gallows. Odin hangs from a tree in the poem Hávamál, and that tree is widely understood to be Yggdrasil. So the name of the world tree translates, by one reading, to the instrument of the god's self-sacrifice.

  The scholar F. Detter proposed a different reading: that the element yggr refers to the word for "terror", not to Odin at all. On that reading, Yggdrasil would mean simply "tree of terror, gallows". F. R. Schröder went further, arguing that the name derives from words meaning "yew pillar" and "support", making it a structural image rather than a mythological one.

  Anatoly Liberman offered yet another path. He argued that Yggdrasil originally referred to Odin's literal horse, the one later known mainly as Sleipnir. Over time the name migrated from the horse to the ash tree. The formula "the ash tree of Odin-horse" became obscure, was reinterpreted, and eventually settled into "the ash tree called Yggdrasil". On Liberman's account, the name arrived at the tree by a long drift through Old Norse poetic convention.

  None of these etymologies rest on a directly attested form. All of them presuppose a reconstructed compound that never appears in writing, which is part of why the scholarly debate has run for so long.

• 3. Three Roots, Three Wells

  ›

  In the poem Grímnismál, Odin describes three roots growing in three directions. Beneath the first lives Hel. Frost jötnar live under the second. Humanity lives beneath the third. Each root reaches toward a different domain, and each is paired with a source of water.

  One root reaches the well Urðarbrunnr, described in the Prose Edda as lying in the heavens. This is where the gods hold their daily court, riding to it each day over the rainbow bridge Bifröst. The three norns named Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld live nearby. Every day they take water from the well and mud from around it and pour it over the branches of Yggdrasil so they do not decay.

  The second root extends to the spring Hvergelmir, which lies under Niflheim. There the wyrm Níðhöggr gnaws at the root. The Prose Edda adds that Hvergelmir holds so many snakes alongside Níðhöggr that no tongue can count them.

  The third root reaches the well Mímisbrunnr, which holds wisdom and intelligence. The master of that well is called Mimir. In Gylfaginning, Just-As-High notes that the tree both provides dew to the valleys below and feeds the bees of the earth. The dew that falls from Yggdrasil, the text explains, is what people call honeydew.

• 4. Creatures of the Tree

  ›

  Ratatoskr the squirrel runs up and down the length of Yggdrasil carrying what the Prose Edda describes as "malicious messages" between the eagle above and the dragon Níðhöggr below. In Grímnismál, Odin says the squirrel brings "the eagle's word" downward. Whatever it carries, the creature keeps the tree in a state of perpetual internal conflict.

  The eagle at the top has a hawk named Veðrfölnir sitting between its eyes. Grímnismál stanza 34 lists the serpents that lie beneath the tree: Góinn and Móinn, sons of Grafvitnir; Grábakr, meaning "Greyback"; Grafvölluðr; Ófnir, "the winding one"; and Sváfnir, possibly "the one who puts to sleep". Odin says he believes these serpents will gnaw the tree's branches forever.

  Four stags named Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór run among the branches and consume its highest boughs. From above a hart bites it, from the sides it decays, and from below Níðhöggr bites. In stanza 35 of Grímnismál, Odin says that Yggdrasil "suffers agony more than men know".

  Despite this constant assault from above, below, and within, the norns keep the branches from rotting by their daily care. The tree endures.

• 5. Odin's Sacrifice

  ›

  Stanza 138 of Hávamál is one of the most direct and striking passages in the Poetic Edda. In it, Odin speaks in the first person: "I know that I hung on a windy tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run."

  In the stanza that follows, Odin says he had neither food nor drink. He peered downward. Then: "I took up the runes, screaming I took them, then I fell back from there." The runes he seized became magical tools that he later gave to humanity to increase skill in both magic and poetry.

  Yggdrasil is never named in these stanzas. But scholars near-universally identify this as the world tree, partly because the etymology of Yggdrasil itself, meaning "Odin's gallows", points directly back to this event. If the tree in Hávamál is Yggdrasil, then the name is not just a description of what the tree is. It is a record of what happened there.

  The act is described as a sacrifice of Odin to Odin. He dedicates himself to himself. This self-directed sacrifice, performed on a tree no human can trace to its roots, places Yggdrasil at the origin of the runic tradition that runs through Norse culture.

• 6. Ragnarok and Renewal

  ›

  In stanza 45 of Völuspá, the völva describes what happens as Ragnarök begins. Heimdallr blows the Gjallarhorn, Odin speaks with the head of Mímir, and then: "Yggdrasill shivers, the ash, as it stands. The old tree groans, and the giant slips free." The tree that has held everything together begins to tremble as the world moves toward its end.

  Carolyne Larrington points out that the sources never state clearly what becomes of Yggdrasil during Ragnarök. What they do describe is two survivors: Líf and Lífþrasir, who hide through the catastrophe in a place called Hoddmímis holt. Rudolf Simek argues that Hoddmímis holt is simply another name for Yggdrasil, and that the hiding of these two survivors inside the tree reprises the original creation of humanity from tree trunks, from Askr and Embla. The world ends and begins again inside the same structure.

  Simek points to Germanic and Old Norse parallels for this pattern: a Bavarian legend of a shepherd who lives inside a tree whose descendants repopulate the land after plague, and the figure of Örvar-Oddr from Old Norse saga, rejuvenated after living as a tree-man in chapters 24-27 of Ǫrvar-Odds saga. The world tree at Ragnarök may not be a casualty. It may be the vessel through which life survives.

• 7. Real Trees, Sacred Groves

  ›

  The scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson draws a line from Yggdrasil to documented practices in historical Germanic communities. Warden trees were venerated in Germany and Scandinavia as recently as the 19th century, treated as guardians and bringers of luck, sometimes receiving offerings. A massive birch tree atop a burial mound in western Norway had ale poured over its roots during festivals. That tree was felled in 1874.

  Adam of Bremen described a huge tree standing beside the Temple at Uppsala in Sweden that remained green throughout all seasons and that no one could identify by species. Davidson notes that whether or not Adam's informant actually saw this tree, the existence of sacred trees in pre-Christian Europe is confirmed by records of their destruction at the hands of early Christian missionaries. One of the most noted cases is Thor's Oak in Geismar, cut down by Saint Boniface.

  The scholar Ken Dowden writes that behind Irminsul, Thor's Oak in Geismar, and the sacred tree at Uppsala "looms a mythic prototype, an Yggdrasil, the world-ash of the Norsemen."

  The related Irminsul, which Davidson notes may have been a pillar rather than a tree, was also symbolic of the center of the world. Davidson observes that whether a sacred site featured a tree or a pillar likely depended on whether the location was heavily forested, suggesting that Yggdrasil the myth and the actual wooden objects of Germanic worship were intertwined from early on.

• 8. From Carlyle to Marvel

  ›

  Thomas Carlyle adopted "Igdrasil" as a personal symbol and worked it into two books: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1841 and Past and Present in 1843. An unpublished Carlyle manuscript entitled "Igdrasil. From the Norse" later inspired the editor of The Ruskin Reading Guild Journal to add Igdrasil to the journal's name in 1890. John Ruskin referenced the tree in the conclusion to The Laws of Fésole, published between 1877 and 1878.

  In visual art, Yggdrasil appeared in K. Ehrenberg's 1888 painting Die Nornen, in Axel Revold's 1933 fresco housed in the University of Oslo library auditorium, in Dagfin Werenskiold's 1938 wood relief carving on the Oslo City Hall, and in a bronze relief on the doors of the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm made around 1950 by B. Marklund.

  The Japanese light novel series Overlord, written by Kugane Maruyama, uses Yggdrasil as the name of a virtual reality game in which the protagonist becomes trapped at shutdown. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the tree appears as a recurring motif in Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor: The Dark World, and Loki.

  The norns of Urðarbrunnr, who daily pour water over the branches to prevent decay, named their well after Urðr, the figure whose name gives modern English the word "weird" in its oldest sense of fate or destiny.