Yggdrasil

Every morning three women climb up from the well with water and white clay and pour it over the roots, because without them the tree would rot. The axis of the Norse cosmos is not a serene pillar propping up a tidy sky. It is a wounded organism under permanent maintenance, chewed at the crown, going soft along the trunk, torn at the root, and kept standing by the daily labour of the Norns.

The name is a confession. *Yggr*, the Terrible One, is one of Odin’s many by-names, and *drasill* means horse, so Yggdrasil reads as Odin’s horse. Norse poets called a gallows the horse of the hanged, since a hanged man rides the beam the way a rider sits a mount, and the tree earned that kenning honestly. Hávamál has Odin describe what happened in his own voice: nine nights on a windy tree, wounded with a spear, given to himself, no bread and no horn of drink, peering down and down until he snatched up the runes screaming and fell back. Writing was not a gift in the north. It was salvage from a hanging.

Grímnismál puts the tree’s proportions past measuring. Its limbs spread over every land and reach above the sky, its dew falls into the valleys, and it stands forever green above the well of Urd. The wood is called an ash, *askr*, and readers have argued about that for a century and a half, because the European ash drops its leaves every autumn while the poems insist this tree keeps its foliage through winter. The Old Norse word used for that foliage, *barr*, is the word for conifer needles. F. R. Schröder proposed reading the name itself as “yew pillar” rather than “Odin’s horse”, from a root meaning yew and a root meaning support. The yew is evergreen, outlives any human reckoning, and still grows in the churchyards that were planted over the old sacred groves. The question has never been settled.

Three roots go down, and the sources do not agree about where. Grímnismál sends one to Hel, one to the frost giants, one to mankind. Snorri Sturluson, writing in thirteenth-century Christian Iceland two centuries after the conversion, tidies this into three roots over three wells: Urðarbrunnr, where the gods hold court; Mímisbrunnr, where wisdom is drunk and where Odin left an eye; and Hvergelmir, the roaring kettle from which every river in the world runs. Völuspá knows only one well. Snorri is the most quotable authority on Norse cosmology and also the least safe, and a good deal of what everyone knows about the tree is his organising hand rather than the older verse.

The tree is crowded. An eagle sits at the top with a great deal of knowledge in it, and a hawk called Veðrfölnir perches between the eagle’s eyes. Beneath the roots the dragon Níðhöggr lies among more serpents than a fool could count, chewing. Between the two runs the squirrel Ratatoskr, carrying slander up and down the trunk all day, the only creature in Norse myth whose entire vocation is making a bad situation worse. Four harts, Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór, move along the branches with their necks craned back, stripping the new growth. Above the hall roof the goat Heiðrún crops the limbs of a tree called Læraðr and gives mead instead of milk, while the hart Eikþyrnir stands beside her with water running off his antlers down into Hvergelmir.

Grímnismál states the consequence without softening it: the ash suffers more hardship than men know, a hart bites it above, the sides rot, and Níðhöggr tears at it below. Everything alive on the tree is eating the tree.

Underneath it, all the same, the gods do their governing. Every day they ride to the well of Urd to hold assembly, Thor going on foot because the rainbow bridge would burn beneath him, and the Norns cut fates into wood there and lift the well over the bark again. The dew that comes off the limbs into the valleys is sweet, and the bees take it. The nourishment and the ruin run at the same speed.

Nobody says who planted it. The Norse creation account is unusually concrete about everything else, the world built out of the giant Ymir’s corpse, his skull for the sky, his blood for the sea, his brains flung up as clouds, and yet the tree simply stands there already, older than the arrangement it holds together. Völuspá’s seeress remembers nine worlds and the glorious measuring-tree below the ground, and leaves it there. The silence is not carelessness. An axis has to predate the thing it centres.

At the end it goes badly for the tree without going fatally. When the wolf breaks loose and Surtr rides up from the south with fire, the old ash shakes and groans and the standing wood cries out. Then the worlds burn. But two people, Líf and Lífþrasir, lie hidden in a wood called Hoddmímis holt and live on the morning dew, and when the water goes down they walk out onto a green earth to start the human race over. Whatever else is lost, the tree keeps its two.

There is reason to think the image had a physical counterpart. Writing in the 1070s, Adam of Bremen described a very large tree beside the temple at Uppsala with wide branches, green in winter and summer, its species unknown to anyone, and a spring beside it where a living man was pushed under to see whether the prayers had worked. Charlemagne cut down the Saxon column called the Irminsul in 772, and Boniface felled Thor’s oak at Geismar. Ken Dowden reads one mythic prototype behind all three, and Olof Sundqvist has argued that the temple, tree and well arrangement at Uppsala reflects a real cultic layout rather than a literary borrowing. Scandinavian farms kept a *vårdträd*, a warden tree, well into modern memory, and it was not to be cut down.

One famous idea about Yggdrasil is not in the sources at all. Nine worlds are mentioned, by the seeress in Völuspá and again by the giant Vafþrúðnir, but no Old Norse text lists which nine or arranges them in stacked tiers around the trunk. That diagram, with its labelled discs and its neat vertical order, is a modern reconstruction that hardened into common knowledge through repetition.

What the tree can do is endure and connect. It joins the realms of gods, giants, the dead and the living into one structure that can actually be travelled, its roots reach the three sources of fate, wisdom and water, and it carries a memory that outlasts the burning of the world. What it cannot do is get free. It cannot heal itself, which is why it needs three women and a bucket of clay. It cannot shake off its parasites, and the eagle at the crown and the serpent at the root have been at odds so long that the quarrel requires a full-time courier. It cannot stand outside fate, because it stands directly over the well where fate is made. It comes through Ragnarök in agony rather than triumph. The oldest living thing in the Norse world is also the most patiently eaten.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Yggdrasil?

Yggdrasil is the immense world tree at the centre of Norse cosmology, usually called an ash and described as forever green. Its branches spread over every land and rise above the sky, and its three roots reach down to the wells of fate, wisdom and the source of all rivers. It connects the realms of gods, giants, the dead and the living into a single structure.

What does the name Yggdrasil mean?

The accepted reading is “Odin’s horse”, from *Yggr*, “the Terrible One”, a by-name of Odin, and *drasill*, “horse”. Norse poets used “horse of the hanged” as a kenning for a gallows, so the name effectively means Odin’s gallows, referring to the nine nights he hung wounded on a windy tree to win the runes. A minority scholarly reading, proposed by F. R. Schröder, takes the name instead as “yew pillar”.

What creatures live on Yggdrasil?

An eagle sits at the top with a hawk named Veðrfölnir between its eyes, and the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws the roots below among countless serpents. The squirrel Ratatoskr runs the trunk carrying insults between the eagle and the dragon. Four harts named Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór graze the branches, and the goat Heiðrún and the hart Eikþyrnir feed nearby.

Does Yggdrasil survive Ragnarök?

Yes, though not unharmed. When Surtr brings fire and the worlds burn, the old ash shakes and groans and its wood cries out, but it is not destroyed. Two people, Líf and Lífþrasir, shelter in a wood called Hoddmímis holt, live on the morning dew, and come out afterwards to repopulate the earth.

Are there really nine realms hanging on Yggdrasil?

The Old Norse sources mention nine worlds but never list which nine, and never describe them arranged in tiers around the trunk. The familiar diagram of nine labelled realms stacked on the tree is a modern reconstruction rather than a medieval one. What the poems actually give is a tree with three roots, several wells, and a great deal of hungry wildlife.

Related Entries

Odin, Norns, Urd, Ratatoskr, Níðhöggr, Vedrfolnir, Eikthyrnir, Ymir, Heimdallr, Sleipnir, Huginn and Muninn, Surtr, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Askafroa