The World Tree

The world tree Yggdrasil is central to the Heathen cosmos, encompassing the nine worlds of gods, men, giants and all the other beings who exist. Exactly which are the nine worlds depends on who you listen to, but nine is a magical number and should not be taken literally. Those most often advanced as the nine worlds are Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim (or Ljóssalfheim), Midgard, Jotunheim, Svartaflheim, Niflheim, Muspellheim and Hel (or Helheim). In Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda, Yggdrasil is described like this:

Then spoke Gangleri: ‘Where is the chief centre or holy place of the gods?’

High replied: ‘It is at the ash Yggdrasil. There the gods must hold their courts each day.’

Then spoke Gangleri: ‘What is there to tell about that place?’

Then said Just-as-high: ‘The ash is of all trees the biggest and best. Its branches spread out over all the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Æsir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. But under the root that reaches towards the frost-giants, there is where Mimir’s well is, which has wisdom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. He is full of learning because he drinks of the well from the horn Giallarhorn....

‘The third root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root is a well which is very holy, called Weird’s well. There the gods have their court. Every day the Æsir ride there up over Bifrost. It is also called As-bridge....’

High said: ‘…There stands there one beautiful hall under the ash by the well, and out of this hall come three maidens whose names are Weird, Verdandi, Skuld. These maidens shape men’s lives. We call them norns.…

‘…There is an eagle sits in the branches of the ash, and it has knowledge of many things, and between its eyes sits a hawk called Verdfolnir. A squirrel called Ratatosk runs up and down through the ash and carries malicious messages between the eagle and Nidhogg. Four stags run in the branches of the ash and feed on the foliage. Their names are: Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, Durathor. And there are so many snakes in Hvergelmir with Nidhogg that no tongue can enumerate them. As it says here:

The ash Yggdrasil suffers hardships more than people realise. Stag bites above, and at the sides it rots, Nidhogg eats away at it below.

‘… It is also said that the norns that dwell by Weird’s well take water from the well each day and with it the mud that lies round the well and pour it up over the ash so that its branches may not rot or decay. And this water is so holy that all things that come into that well go as white as the membrane … that lies round the inside of an egg.…

‘The dew that falls from it on to the earth, this is what people call honeydew, and from it bees feed. Two birds feed in Weird’s well. They are called swans, and from these birds has come that species of bird that has that name.’¹

‘Yggr’ means ‘Terrible One’, that is, Odin:

Odin I am called now, Terrible One I was called before,
I was Thund before that...²

The word ‘Yggdrasil’, then, means ‘Steed of the Terrible One’. On Yggdrasil Odin sacrificed himself to himself, hanging wounded from the great tree in his search for knowledge:

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

No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.

Nine mighty spells I learnt from the famous son
of Bolthor, Bestla’s father,
and I got a drink of the precious mead,
poured from Odrerir.

Then I began to quicken and be wise…³

According to Kevin Crossley-Holland, The image of Odin ‘riding’ the ash is appropriate, for Old Norse poets often spoke of a gallows tree as a horse.⁴ Odin’s sacrifice wins him the knowledge of the runes, eighteen of them (as detailed in the following stanzas of the Hávamál) which give him great power; he learns from his maternal uncle — a very close relationship in ancient Germanic societies — nine mighty spells, and he obtains (the story is told more fully in the Skáldskaparmál) a drink of the mead of poetry.

The Norse seem to have visualised the cosmos as being in three levels, sometimes this is visualised something like those old-fashioned cake stands in which three plates are held one above another with space between to hold cakes. This is simplistic, though, and ignores uncomfortable facts (such as the river boundary between Jotunheim and Asgard). According to Gylfaginning, quoting the Völuspá, it is stated that at the beginning there was nothing but the great gap (Ginnungagap). There was no sand or sea, no earth or sky, and nothing grew. The first world, according to Third in Gylfaginning, was Muspell:

But first there was the world in the southern region called Muspell. It is bright and hot. That area is flaming and burning and it is impassible for those that are foreigners there and are not native to it. There is one called Surt that is stationed there at the frontier to defend the land. He has a flaming sword and at the end of the world he will go and wage war and defeat all the gods and burn the whole world with fire.⁵

The interraction between the fire of Muspellheim and the icy cold of Niflheim in the north sets the creation process going, they meet in the Ginnungagap and from their meeting comes life: the frost-giant Ymir and the primeval cow, Audhumla. The cow licks a man from the ice, and this man’s grandsons were the brothers Odin, Vili and Ve. The brothers kill Ymir and from the body of the slain giant they create the nine worlds; his blood formed the seas encircling the earth.

On the top level are Asgard, Vanaheim and Alfheim. Asgard is the realm of the Æsir, the gods; here is where Valhalla, where the Einherjar fight each day and feast each evening as they await Ragnarok. Vanaheim is the land of the Vanir, another tribe of gods with whom the Æsir have a war; but the Vanir seem to be undefeatable so peace terms are made and hostages exchanged: the fertility deities Niord and his children Freyr and Freyja go to live with the Æsir, and Hænir and Mimir go to live with the Vanir (but Ynglinga saga relates how Hænir, because he always refuses to answer any difficult question in a Thing when Mimir is not present, but instead calls for others to give their advice, raises suspicions that the Æsir had deceived the Vanir in the exchange and so Mimir’s head gets sent back to the Æsir). I’ve seen the Æsir described as warrior gods and Vanir as fertility gods, but that seems to me a little over-simplified in light of all the above.

Alfheim is the home of the light-elves:

There live the folk called light-elves, but dark-elves live down in the ground, and they are unlike them in appearance, and even more unlike them in nature. Light-elves are fairer than the sun to look at, but dark elves are blacker than pitch.⁶

The second level, the middle level, is Midgard, the world inhabited by humans. It was seen as being surrounded by a sea so vast that it would seem impossible to cross. The world-serpent Jormungand lay in this great ocean, encircling Midgard and biting his own tail. On this level was also Jotunheim, the giants’ realm; this was either in mountains at the eastern edge of Midgard or across the ocean. In the north of Midgard lay the home of the dwarfs, Nidavellir, where they lived in caves and potholes; beneath somewhere was Svartaflheim, the land of the dark-elves. Although Jotunheim is on the middle level and Asgard on the top, the river Iving, which never ices over, forms a boundary between them, and there are tales of gods and giants travelling overland between Asgard and Jotunheim without passing through Midgard. The Heathen cosmos is not one which can simply be mapped. Linking Asgard and Midgard is the flaming rainbow bridge Bifrost, described in Gylfaginning as being very strong.

The bottom level is where Niflheim, the world of the dead, lies nine days’ ride north and down from Midgard. Niflheim is bitterly cold, a land of unending night. Here lies the citadel of Hel, a female monster, half black and half white. Evil men end up in Niflheim when dead. Down here, near the spring Hvergelmir, Nidhogg gnaws on Yggdrasil’s roots.

At the centre of all the worlds is Yggdrasil, which seems to have no origin and exist timelessly (and will survive Ragnarok). Ragnarok sustains and suffers from, as we’ve seen already, the animals living in and on it; and the Norns Urð (Wyrd — what has gone before), Verðandi (what now is) and Skuld (what should be) in turn sustain it. As ‘Odin’s Horse’ it carries the All-Father on his quest for knowledge. All the worlds are encompassed by Yggdrasil, it holds and protects them all.

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