A Gift on Woden's Day
Gentle dreamer,
Today is Wednesday, Woden's Day, the sixth day of our Yggdrasil celebration, so what could be a more appropriate gift than a link to a reference eBook on Norse mythology by John Lindow? Here is the excerpt on pages 319 - 322, detailing for you a bit about Yggdrasil, just in case you were wondering.
CRM
YGGDRASIL (YGG’S-STEED)
The world tree, located at the center of the universe and uniting it.
The seeress who is the speaker in Völuspá devotes a stanza to the tree, stanza 19 in the usual editions:
I know an ash tree that stands, called Yggdrasil,
A tall tree, sprinkled with white mud;
Thence come the dews that run into valleys,
Forever it stands green over the Urdarbrunn.
Grímnismál has a good deal of information about Yggdrasil, all of it, according to the conceit of the poem, spoken by Odin as a kind of vision of holy cosmography. Stanza 44 calls it the “best of trees.” Stanzas 29–30 say that the æsir go to the ash of Yggdrasil each day “to judge.” Thor goes on foot and the other æsir on horses that are listed in stanza 30; of the ten horse names listed, only one is elsewhere associated with a specific god (Gulltopp, which Snorri says is Heimdall’s horse). Stanza 29 implies that the Ás-Brú, the bridge of the æsir usually called Bilröst or Bifröst, leads to the tree.
The next five stanzas are about the tree itself:
31. Three roots stand on three roads
From under the ash of Yggdrasil;
Hel lives under one, under another the frost giants,
Human beings under a third.
32. Ratatosk is the name of a squirrel who shall run
on the ash of Yggdrasil;
words of an eagle he shall carry down
and say to Nídhögg below.
33. There are four harts who with necks bent back
gnaw on the buds:
Dáin and Dvalin,
Duneyr and Durathrór.
34. Many snakes lie under the ash of Yggdrasil,
and may every witless person consider that;
Góinn and Móinn,—they are the sons of Grafvitnir—,
Grábak and Grafvöllud;
Ofnir and Sváfnir, I think will ever
Eat the branches of the tree.
35. The ash of Yggdrasil suffers difficulty,
more than men may know;
a hart bites from below, yet on the side it rots;
Nídhögg harms it from below.
Beset as the tree is according to this account, it will shake and tremble at Ragnarök, according to Völuspá, stanza 47, which refers to it as “the aged tree.” Snorri uses and adapts these stanzas (Yggdrasil is not mentioned in other sources) to create a unified description of the tree in Gylfaginning, a description that includes information and conceptions not in the eddic poetry. The capital or holy place of the gods is at the ash of Yggdrasil, where the gods pass judgments
each day:
The ash is the greatest and best of all trees. Its limbs stretch over the entire world and rise above heaven. Three roots of the tree hold it up and stretch out widely. One is among the æsir, the second among the frost giants, where Ginnunga gap used to be, the third stands over Niflheim. Under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nídhögg gnaws the roots from below. Under that root which turns toward the frost giants is the Mímisbrunn. . . . The third root [i.e., the first one] of the ash stands in heaven and under that root is that well which is very holy and is called the Urdarbrunn; there the gods have their place of judgment. Each day the æsir ride up there on Bilröst.
Later Gylfi/Gangleri asks whether there is more to say about the tree. Hár responds:
There is much to tell about it. A certain eagle sits in the limbs of the ash, and it knows a great deal, and between its eyes sits that hawk who is called Vedrfölnir. That squirrel which is called Ratatosk runs up and down the ash and carries malicious words between the eagle and Nídhögg, and four harts run in the limbs of the ash and bite the needles. . . . And there are so many snakes in Hvergelmir with Nídhögg that no one can count them.
Finally, Snorri quotes a variant of the verse from Völuspá with which I began this entry:
I know a besprinkled ash called Yggdrasil
A tall tree, holy with white mud.
Thence come the dews, which run into the valley;
It stands ever green over the Urdarbrunn.
Snorri thus somewhat extends the unifying principle of the tree by allowing it to tower over earth and sky, and he moves it from the world of humans suggested by the location of the roots in Grímnismál (humans, giants, and the dead) to the mythological plane (æsir, giants, the underworld). He clarifies the role of the squirrel and eagle, turning the drama that is played out on the tree by these creatures into a duel of words like the ones at which Odin so excels, and he explicitly identifies Nídhögg as a snake or dragon. Unfortunately, he fails to explain the white mud, and that has remained an unsolved mystery.
According to Hávamál, stanza 138, Odin hung himself on a wide windy tree with mysterious roots, in a self-sacrifice that led to an acquisition of wisdom. Nearly everyone thinks this tree must be the world tree, and if so, the name Yggdrasil would refer to this myth: Ygg is an Odin name, and the hanged “ride” the gallows. Certainly Odin has a close connection with the tree, and it has even been suggested that he was born from the tree, that is, that the tree is identical with Bestla, Odin’s mother.
The tree functions on both the vertical axis (trunk) and the horizontal axis (roots), and structural readings of the mythology, such as those of Eleazar Meletinskij, have suggested that these have varying functions: wisdom on the vertical axis and history on the horizontal axis. And the tree brings not just spatia unity to the mythology; Gro Steinsland showed elegantly through an analysis of Völuspá how it also brought chronological unity. Stanza 2 implies its presence in seed; it moves to a symbol of completed creation (stanza 19), gathering place of the gods (27), ancillary to Baldr’s death (31), shaking symbol of the imminent demise of the cosmos (46–47), and finally, in the wooden lots chosen by Hoenir (stanza 63) after Ragnarök, it is the symbol of the new world.
In his description of the pagan temple at Old Uppsala written around 1070, Adam of Bremen says that a large yew tree stands in front of the temple and that it is from the branches of this tree that sacrificial victims are hung. The connection with Yggdrasil is obvious: a large tree at the center of the religious landscape.
The concept of a “world tree” is widespread in Eurasia, and where shamanism is used the tree is often the path taken by the shaman into the worlds of the spirits.
References and further reading: A good general discussion of the tree in English is that of Hilda Ellis Davidson, “Scandinavian Cosmology,” in Ancient Cosmologies, ed. Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), 172–197. Meletinskij’s structural analysis of the mythology is to be found in “Scandinavian Mythology as a System,” Journal of Symbolic Anthropology 1 (1973): 43–58 and 2 (1974): 57–78; see also Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Icelandic Society, vol. 1:
The Myths (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), 50–55. Gro Steinsland’s study is “Treet i Völuspá,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 94 (1976): 120–150. The classic study of the world tree is that of Uno Holmberg (Harva), Der Baum des Lebens, Annales Acadmiæ Scientiarum Fennicæ, B 16:3 (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1922–1923).
Today is Wednesday, Woden's Day, the sixth day of our Yggdrasil celebration, so what could be a more appropriate gift than a link to a reference eBook on Norse mythology by John Lindow? Here is the excerpt on pages 319 - 322, detailing for you a bit about Yggdrasil, just in case you were wondering.
CRM
YGGDRASIL (YGG’S-STEED)
The world tree, located at the center of the universe and uniting it.
The seeress who is the speaker in Völuspá devotes a stanza to the tree, stanza 19 in the usual editions:
I know an ash tree that stands, called Yggdrasil,
A tall tree, sprinkled with white mud;
Thence come the dews that run into valleys,
Forever it stands green over the Urdarbrunn.
Grímnismál has a good deal of information about Yggdrasil, all of it, according to the conceit of the poem, spoken by Odin as a kind of vision of holy cosmography. Stanza 44 calls it the “best of trees.” Stanzas 29–30 say that the æsir go to the ash of Yggdrasil each day “to judge.” Thor goes on foot and the other æsir on horses that are listed in stanza 30; of the ten horse names listed, only one is elsewhere associated with a specific god (Gulltopp, which Snorri says is Heimdall’s horse). Stanza 29 implies that the Ás-Brú, the bridge of the æsir usually called Bilröst or Bifröst, leads to the tree.
The next five stanzas are about the tree itself:
31. Three roots stand on three roads
From under the ash of Yggdrasil;
Hel lives under one, under another the frost giants,
Human beings under a third.
32. Ratatosk is the name of a squirrel who shall run
on the ash of Yggdrasil;
words of an eagle he shall carry down
and say to Nídhögg below.
33. There are four harts who with necks bent back
gnaw on the buds:
Dáin and Dvalin,
Duneyr and Durathrór.
34. Many snakes lie under the ash of Yggdrasil,
and may every witless person consider that;
Góinn and Móinn,—they are the sons of Grafvitnir—,
Grábak and Grafvöllud;
Ofnir and Sváfnir, I think will ever
Eat the branches of the tree.
35. The ash of Yggdrasil suffers difficulty,
more than men may know;
a hart bites from below, yet on the side it rots;
Nídhögg harms it from below.
Beset as the tree is according to this account, it will shake and tremble at Ragnarök, according to Völuspá, stanza 47, which refers to it as “the aged tree.” Snorri uses and adapts these stanzas (Yggdrasil is not mentioned in other sources) to create a unified description of the tree in Gylfaginning, a description that includes information and conceptions not in the eddic poetry. The capital or holy place of the gods is at the ash of Yggdrasil, where the gods pass judgments
each day:
The ash is the greatest and best of all trees. Its limbs stretch over the entire world and rise above heaven. Three roots of the tree hold it up and stretch out widely. One is among the æsir, the second among the frost giants, where Ginnunga gap used to be, the third stands over Niflheim. Under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nídhögg gnaws the roots from below. Under that root which turns toward the frost giants is the Mímisbrunn. . . . The third root [i.e., the first one] of the ash stands in heaven and under that root is that well which is very holy and is called the Urdarbrunn; there the gods have their place of judgment. Each day the æsir ride up there on Bilröst.
Later Gylfi/Gangleri asks whether there is more to say about the tree. Hár responds:
There is much to tell about it. A certain eagle sits in the limbs of the ash, and it knows a great deal, and between its eyes sits that hawk who is called Vedrfölnir. That squirrel which is called Ratatosk runs up and down the ash and carries malicious words between the eagle and Nídhögg, and four harts run in the limbs of the ash and bite the needles. . . . And there are so many snakes in Hvergelmir with Nídhögg that no one can count them.
Finally, Snorri quotes a variant of the verse from Völuspá with which I began this entry:
I know a besprinkled ash called Yggdrasil
A tall tree, holy with white mud.
Thence come the dews, which run into the valley;
It stands ever green over the Urdarbrunn.
Snorri thus somewhat extends the unifying principle of the tree by allowing it to tower over earth and sky, and he moves it from the world of humans suggested by the location of the roots in Grímnismál (humans, giants, and the dead) to the mythological plane (æsir, giants, the underworld). He clarifies the role of the squirrel and eagle, turning the drama that is played out on the tree by these creatures into a duel of words like the ones at which Odin so excels, and he explicitly identifies Nídhögg as a snake or dragon. Unfortunately, he fails to explain the white mud, and that has remained an unsolved mystery.
According to Hávamál, stanza 138, Odin hung himself on a wide windy tree with mysterious roots, in a self-sacrifice that led to an acquisition of wisdom. Nearly everyone thinks this tree must be the world tree, and if so, the name Yggdrasil would refer to this myth: Ygg is an Odin name, and the hanged “ride” the gallows. Certainly Odin has a close connection with the tree, and it has even been suggested that he was born from the tree, that is, that the tree is identical with Bestla, Odin’s mother.
The tree functions on both the vertical axis (trunk) and the horizontal axis (roots), and structural readings of the mythology, such as those of Eleazar Meletinskij, have suggested that these have varying functions: wisdom on the vertical axis and history on the horizontal axis. And the tree brings not just spatia unity to the mythology; Gro Steinsland showed elegantly through an analysis of Völuspá how it also brought chronological unity. Stanza 2 implies its presence in seed; it moves to a symbol of completed creation (stanza 19), gathering place of the gods (27), ancillary to Baldr’s death (31), shaking symbol of the imminent demise of the cosmos (46–47), and finally, in the wooden lots chosen by Hoenir (stanza 63) after Ragnarök, it is the symbol of the new world.
In his description of the pagan temple at Old Uppsala written around 1070, Adam of Bremen says that a large yew tree stands in front of the temple and that it is from the branches of this tree that sacrificial victims are hung. The connection with Yggdrasil is obvious: a large tree at the center of the religious landscape.
The concept of a “world tree” is widespread in Eurasia, and where shamanism is used the tree is often the path taken by the shaman into the worlds of the spirits.
References and further reading: A good general discussion of the tree in English is that of Hilda Ellis Davidson, “Scandinavian Cosmology,” in Ancient Cosmologies, ed. Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), 172–197. Meletinskij’s structural analysis of the mythology is to be found in “Scandinavian Mythology as a System,” Journal of Symbolic Anthropology 1 (1973): 43–58 and 2 (1974): 57–78; see also Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Icelandic Society, vol. 1:
The Myths (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), 50–55. Gro Steinsland’s study is “Treet i Völuspá,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 94 (1976): 120–150. The classic study of the world tree is that of Uno Holmberg (Harva), Der Baum des Lebens, Annales Acadmiæ Scientiarum Fennicæ, B 16:3 (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1922–1923).
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