Donar’s Oak

Also Known As: also Thor’s Oak, Jove’s Oak and the Oak of Jupiter; Latin robor Iobis, the tree of Jove, in the one text that records it
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Germanic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: The oak was a tree of enormous size held sacred by the Hessians, a living thing that belonged to the thunder god and was thought to stand under his protection.
Role in Mythos: It is the sacred tree whose felling by the missionary Boniface, in about 723, became the set-piece story of the conversion of the Germans.
Relation to Humans: The people of Hesse honoured the oak as part of a religion that also made offerings to trees and springs, and a crowd of them came to watch it cut down. When it fell and no god struck the man with the axe, the record says they gave up their anger and accepted baptism.

The axe had barely bitten. One shallow notch in the bark, a few pale chips on the ground, and the crowd on the hillside holding its breath for the thunder. Then the wind came down out of a clear sky, took the old oak by its crown and threw it flat. That is how the story goes, and the story has only ever had one teller.

The tree stood at a place called Gaesmere, somewhere in the country of the Hessians, in what is now central Germany. Its neighbours had a name for it in their own tongue. The priest who wrote the story down put that name into Latin as the tree of Jove, and Jove’s name is the only one the page gives. Nobody at the time recorded what the Hessians themselves called their god.

The link to Donar is a piece of later detective work, and a sound one. When Germanic speakers borrowed the Roman week they turned the day of Jupiter into the day of their own thunderer, which is why German has Donnerstag and English has Thursday. A Latin writer who met a great oak sacred to a Germanic sky god with a hammer would reach for Jupiter without a second thought. So scholars read Jove and write Donar, the continental cousin of the Norse Thor, and the tree has gone by Donar’s Oak or Thor’s Oak ever since. It is an inference. It is a good one.

What the oak was like on an ordinary day has to be pieced together from a single sentence. Hesse in the early eighth century was half converted. Some people had been baptised and meant it. Others, openly or on the quiet, still carried offerings out to certain trees and springs, read the future in the entrails of animals, and watched the flight of birds for signs. The oak at Gaesmere was the largest thing in that landscape of small holy places. A farmer walking out to it on a cold morning with something to give would have come under a spread of branches wide enough to darken the ground, the bark rough as a ploughed field under his hand, last year’s leaves soft and wet underfoot. What he said there, and what he left, nobody wrote down.

The man with the axe was an Englishman from Wessex, born Wynfrith, renamed Boniface by the pope and sent north with a commission to convert the Germans. He did not act alone or on impulse. The record says he took the advice of local converts, the steadier sort, and they told him to go for the oak. He went with a party of his own clergy. A large crowd of unbaptised Hessians turned out to watch, cursing him under their breath as an enemy of their gods and waiting, presumably, for the god to deal with it.

He made the first cut. Then the blast came from above, the crown smashed as the tree went over, and the trunk burst apart into four pieces of equal length, lying there as neat as sawn timber though no saw had touched them. The cursing stopped. The same people who had come to see a foreigner struck dead blessed his God instead and came forward to believe. Boniface, a practical man, talked it over with his companions and had the wood made into a small chapel on the spot, dedicated to Saint Peter. Then he left for Thuringia.

All of this comes from one book: the Life of Boniface, written by an English priest named Willibald at Mainz, some time between 754 and 768, a generation after the event and shortly after Boniface was killed in Frisia. Willibald gives no date. The usual figure of 723 or 724 is worked out from the order of events in his narrative. No letter of Boniface mentions the oak, and no other writer of the time confirms it. Willibald was writing the life of a martyr, and a great tree toppled by the breath of heaven is exactly the picture such a book wants.

Even the spot is argued over. Hesse has several places called Geismar. Most historians settle on the one beside Fritzlar, a short walk from the Frankish hill fort of Büraburg, which would have given a nervous missionary some soldiers within shouting distance. On that reading the oak chapel was the seed of the church and monastery of Saint Peter at Fritzlar, and the cathedral that stands there now is its descendant. Others have held out for Hofgeismar or for a Geismar near Frankenberg, and one modern historian simply called the place unidentified.

The oak was not a lone curiosity. Fifty years later Charlemagne’s army cut down the Irminsul, the great pillar of the Saxons. Three centuries on, a German churchman described a holy tree beside the temple at Uppsala in Sweden. Behind all three, one line of thinking sees the same idea that the Norse poets called Yggdrasil, the tree that holds the world up. Hessian evidence for that is nil. The pattern is still hard to ignore.

The oak’s power lay in what people thought would happen to anyone who harmed it. It stood for a god who threw lightning, and for generations no one had dared test him. That power was real for exactly as long as the tree stood. An oak is wood. It can be cut, and once it lay in four pieces on the grass with its attacker alive and unsinged, there was nothing left to be afraid of. Its timber went on to hold up another god’s roof.

The story kept growing after Willibald put down his pen. In 1897 the American writer Henry van Dyke published a tale in which Boniface stops a child sacrifice at the oak on Christmas Eve and points the crowd to a young fir standing behind it, and from that tale comes the popular claim that the Christmas tree began at Geismar. None of it is in the eighth-century account. Willibald has an oak, a wind, four logs and a chapel, and not a word about a fir.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Donar’s Oak?

Donar’s Oak was a very large oak tree held sacred by the pagan Hessians of central Germany. The missionary Boniface cut it down in about 723, and its fall became the best-known story of the conversion of the Germans. It is also called Thor’s Oak, Jove’s Oak and the Oak of Jupiter.

Who cut down Donar’s Oak?

Donar’s Oak was cut down by Boniface, an English missionary from Wessex whose birth name was Wynfrith. According to the Life of Boniface by Willibald, he had made only a shallow cut when a great wind blew the tree over and it split into four equal pieces. He then used the wood to build a chapel dedicated to Saint Peter.

Where did Donar’s Oak stand?

Donar’s Oak stood at a place the only source calls Gaesmere, in Hesse. Most historians identify this with Geismar beside Fritzlar, close to the Frankish fort of Büraburg. The location is not certain, because Hesse has several places named Geismar.

Why is it called Donar’s Oak if the source says Jupiter?

The only early account, written in Latin, calls the tree the tree of Jove. Germanic peoples matched Jupiter with their own thunder god when they adopted the Roman week, which is why Jupiter’s day became Donnerstag in German and Thursday in English. Scholars therefore read the Jove of the Latin text as Donar, the continental form of Thor.

Did the Christmas tree come from Donar’s Oak?

The Christmas tree story is not part of the original account of Donar’s Oak. It comes from a tale published in 1897 by the American writer Henry van Dyke, in which Boniface points to a young fir behind the fallen oak. Willibald’s eighth-century Life of Boniface mentions no fir tree.