Égig érő fa

A boy of seven stands at the foot of a fruit tree with an axe in his hand. The bark in front of him is as wide as a wall. Above him the trunk goes up through the morning haze, through the low cloud, and on past the place where a tree ought to stop. Nobody at the king’s court has ever seen the top of it. Nobody is certain it has one.

Hungarian storytellers call this the égig érő fa, the tree that reaches the sky, or the tetejetlen fa, the tree without a top. It is the opening picture of a wonder tale that folklorists have collected dozens of times across the Hungarian-speaking lands, and the tale nearly always starts in the same place: the garden of an old king. The tree is an apple, a pear or a cherry, depending on who is telling it. Where it came from is never explained. No god plants it and no seed is named. It is simply there when the story begins, as old as the garden and a good deal taller.

The king wants fruit from the top of it. In some tellings the fruit will make him young again. In others the trouble is worse, because a dragon has carried his daughter up into the branches and keeps her there. Either way he makes the usual royal offer of his daughter’s hand and half the kingdom to whoever can make the climb. Princes try, and knights, and they slide back down with skinned palms.

Then the little swineherd comes forward, the kiskondás, on the advice of a piglet who knows more than most courtiers. He asks for seven suits of iron clothes and seven pairs of iron shoes. He swings his axe into the trunk, cuts a notch, steps into it, and cuts the next. The chips fall a long way. He climbs for days, then for weeks, and the iron wears through at the knees and elbows, suit after suit, until the last pair of shoes is thin as paper. Some tellers say the trunk bends seven times under the sky, or thirteen, because it cannot break through. The storyteller Lajos Ámi said the sky up there was made of pure gold.

What the boy finds at the top is a second country. A branch runs out sideways from the trunk, broad as a road, and he walks along it onto an open plain. There are huts among the leaves where three old women live, the mothers of the sun, the moon and the wind, and they point the way. There is a castle that turns on a bird’s foot. There are palaces of copper, silver and gold, each with a horse to match. And there is the dragon’s house, where the princess sits, and where the boy quietly takes a job as a servant.

From there the tale moves into the old dragon-killer story. The dragon’s strength is hidden outside his body, the princess coaxes the secret out of him, and the swineherd wins a ragged horse that turns out to be the best in the stable. He kills the dragon and brings the princess home. In many versions he has completely forgotten the fruit.

The tree is not only a wonder-tale prop. It turns up in Hungarian joke tales and tall tales, where a liar climbs a poplar into heaven and then down its roots into hell, or scales a tree that grew out of a stag’s antler. Shepherds carved a tree with the sun and the moon in its branches onto horn salt cellars. In the picture of the world that ethnographers assembled from all this, the tree stands on a mountain at the centre of everything. Its roots go down into a dark underworld full of snakes, frogs and worms. Its trunk passes through the world where people live. Its crown holds up seven skies, or nine, and birds perch there, eagles and falcons and the turul.

That picture has authors, and they can be named. In 1922 the folklorist Sándor Solymossy argued that the tale preserved a memory of the shaman’s notched pole, the kind Siberian shamans climbed to reach the sky. Vilmos Diószegi, who had done fieldwork in Siberia, built the case out in books of 1958 and 1967. On his reading the swineherd is a táltos, the Hungarian wise man born with teeth or an extra finger, the tree is the pole, and the story is a relic of the religion the Magyars carried west before they became Christian. Linda Dégh studied about seventy versions and judged the tale to be distinctively Hungarian, and the American folklorist Christine Goldberg later agreed that it is barely known beyond the country’s borders. For most of the twentieth century this was the accepted account, and the világfa, the world tree, became a fixture of Hungarian national imagery.

It may be wrong. In 2023 the folklorist Éva Pócs went back through the evidence and concluded that a world tree and a tree-climbing initiation most likely had no place in the beliefs of the conquering Magyars at all. The idea, she argued, grew from a few respected scholars leaning on one another’s guesses, helped along by the appeal of an ancestry that set Hungarians apart from their neighbours. The tale is real and old. The pagan cosmology hung on it is a modern reading.

So the tree does what the tellers say it does. It lifts a boy with an axe out of the pig yard and sets him down in a country of gold palaces and talking horses, and it lets a princess come home. It can be climbed only by someone small, stubborn and well advised. Princes fail on it every time.

Its limits are plain enough. The climb ruins seven suits of iron. The top is a dragon’s country and no safer than the bottom. And the tree itself never changes anything. It grows no wiser, grants no wish and speaks to no one. Whether it once held up the heavens of a people on horseback, or only ever held up a very good story, the trunk goes up out of the king’s garden and out of sight.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Égig érő fa?

The Égig érő fa is the sky-high tree of Hungarian folklore, a fruit tree in a king’s garden whose top cannot be seen. Its name means the tree that reaches the sky, and it is also called the tetejetlen fa, the tree without a top, and the világfa, the world tree. It is the centre of a well-known Hungarian wonder tale and a common motif in Hungarian folk art.

What happens in the Hungarian tale of the sky-high tree?

A king promises his daughter and half his kingdom to anyone who can climb the sky-high tree, either to fetch its fruit or to rescue the princess from a dragon living at the top. A seven-year-old swineherd climbs it by cutting steps in the trunk with an axe, wearing out seven suits of iron clothes on the way. At the top he finds another land, takes service with the dragon, learns where its strength is hidden, kills it and brings the princess home.

Who can climb the Égig érő fa?

In the tale, only the little swineherd, the kiskondás, can climb the Égig érő fa, after princes and knights have failed. In Hungarian folk belief as ethnographers recorded it, only a táltos knows where the tree stands, and only a chosen person may go up it. Twentieth-century scholars connected the two and read the swineherd as a táltos.

Is the Hungarian world tree an ancient pagan belief?

That is disputed. Sándor Solymossy in 1922 and Vilmos Diószegi in 1958 and 1967 argued that the Égig érő fa preserves the world tree and the climbing pole of ancient Magyar shamans. In 2023 the folklorist Éva Pócs concluded that a world tree and its initiation rite most likely did not exist in the beliefs of the conquering Magyars, and that the idea is a construct of modern scholarship.

What lives in the Égig érő fa?

The tale places a dragon’s house, a castle turning on a bird’s foot, and palaces of copper, silver and gold on the upper branches of the Égig érő fa, along with the mothers of the sun, the moon and the wind. In the world picture drawn by ethnographers, snakes, frogs and worms live among its roots, and eagles, falcons and the turul perch in its crown. Folk carvings show the sun and moon in its branches.

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