Yggdrasil, the World Tree

At the centre of the Norse cosmos stands a great ash tree, vast enough to hold the Nine Worlds in its branches and deep enough to reach with three roots into three different realms. The Norsemen called it Yggdrasil, a name usually translated as “the steed of the terrible one” or “the bearer of Ygg” — Ygg being one of the many names of Odin. The tree is the spine of the Old Norse universe, the place where fate is decided, where the worlds touch one another, and where the slow destruction of Ragnarök will at last be felt as a great shudder through the trunk.

The Tree at the Centre

The Norse cosmos was a tree, and the worlds were positions in it. The highest branch reached to Asgard, the citadel of the gods; one root reached down to Midgard, the world of humans; the third root reached to Niflheim, the cold realm of the dead. Other worlds — Jotunheim of the giants, Vanaheim of the fertility gods, Alfheim of the elves, Svartalfheim of the dwarves, Muspellheim of fire — were also positions in the tree, hung like lanterns in its branches.

The name “Yggdrasil” appears in the Poetic Edda and is interpreted in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written in the thirteenth century. The Völuspá, the first poem of the Edda, opens with a vision of the tree: “I recall the mighty tree, born of ages, / Yggdrasil, washed by the dew, / from it fall the dews in the dalles, / ever green it stands over the well of Urd.” The image goes back into the pre-literate memory of the Norse and other Germanic peoples. The ash tree, in particular, is the great northern tree — tall, pale-barked, and central to the material life of the Scandinavian world.

The Three Roots

The three roots of Yggdrasil reach into three very different places. The first root reaches to Asgard, the home of the gods, and the well of Urd lies at the foot of this root. The well is the source of the white waters that keep the tree alive, and it is the place where the Norns who spin fate — Urd (the past), Verdandi (the present), and Skuld (the future) — sit by the trunk, drawing the water of life and shaping the destiny of gods and humans. The second root reaches into Jotunheim or, in some accounts, into Midgard, where the well of Mimir is found; Mimir is the wise being whom Odin sacrificed an eye to consult. The third root reaches down into Niflheim, the cold land of mist and of the dead, where the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws at the root from below.

The three roots, then, point to three great themes of Norse life: fate, wisdom, and death. The tree is the place where these three are knit together, and it is the structure by which the Norse were able to think about time, knowledge, and mortality at the same time.

The Inhabitants of the Tree

Yggdrasil is not an empty diagram. It is a place. A dragon called Níðhöggr gnaws at the lowest root, his body dripping with the mud of Niflheim, and he is forever trying to bring the tree down. An eagle sits at the top of the tree, sharp-eyed and full of ancient knowledge, and between the eagle and the dragon runs the squirrel Ratatöskr, carrying insults and lies from one end of the trunk to the other. The squirrel is a gossip and a troublemaker, and his chattering is one of the small irritations of the cosmos.

Four stags — Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór — browse the buds of Yggdrasil, and their names mean “the dead one,” “the sleeper,” “the dawn-stag,” and “the lazy one.” They are sometimes said to represent the four winds, the four seasons, or the four ages of life. Their browsing is the slow consumption of the tree, and the buds that they eat are the buds of new life. The tree is at once a being that lives and a being that is being eaten alive, and that double image is at the heart of the Norse sense of the world.

The Norns at the Foot of the Tree

The three Norns who live at the foot of Yggdrasil — Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld — are the weavers of fate. They draw water from the well of Urd to keep the tree alive, and they pour it over the roots. They shape the fated thread of gods and humans, and they decide the length of every life. Their names are not, as they are sometimes translated, “past, present, and future” in the simple sense. Urd is “what has become,” Verdandi is “what is becoming,” and Skuld is “what shall be” — but the three are not separate; they are the three faces of a single act of weaving.

The Norns are older than the gods. In the Völuspá, when the seeress speaks of the beginning of things, the Norns are already at the well. They decide the fate of the gods themselves; even Odin, the All-Father, is subject to their weaving. The image of the three women at the foot of the tree, drawing water and shaping thread, is one of the deepest pictures in the Old Norse tradition. It is the picture of a world that is alive because it is being kept alive by constant labour, and that will end when that labour fails.

The Shudder of Ragnarök

The most famous moment in the life of Yggdrasil comes at the end of all things. The Völuspá describes Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, in terms of the tree shaking: “Yggdrasil shudders, the great tree, / and groanings are in the ancient trunk.” The shudder is the warning and the destruction at once. The dragon Níðhöggr, who has been gnawing at the root since the beginning, finally breaks through, and the tree cracks. The world that the tree holds up falls, and the new world that will come after — a green and gentle earth, the field of Ida, where the surviving gods will meet — is born of the destruction of the ash.

The image of a world that ends with the fall of a tree, and a new world that grows out of the fallen trunk, is one of the great pictures of northern mythology. It is the picture of a cosmos that is not eternal in itself but that continually renews itself through the destruction of its own form.

Yggdrasil and the Wider Tradition

The Norse image of the world-tree is a particular case of a much wider pattern. The cosmic tree appears, in different forms, in nearly every mythology of the Old World: as the Bodhi tree of the Buddha in the Indian tradition, as the ashvattha of the Hindus, as the ceiba of the Maya, as the world-pillar of the Siberian shamans. The Celtic sacred tree tradition takes a different form — not a single cosmic tree but a sacred grove, an oak at the centre of a clearing — but the underlying idea is the same: that the tree is the place where the worlds meet.

The Norse version, with its roots in three realms and its population of dragons, eagles, and squirrels, is one of the most fully imagined of these cosmic trees. The image of the great ash at the centre of the world, shuddering at the end of time, is still alive in the way we picture the cosmos, and the name “Yggdrasil” still carries, for those who have read the Eddas or the modern retellings of the Norse myths, the weight of an entire cosmology in a single word.

Sources and Further Reading

The Poetic Edda. Translated by Carolyne Larrington. Oxford World’s Classics, 1996.
Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Everyman’s Library, 1987.
Davidson, H. R. Ellis. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. Routledge, 1993.
Turville-Petre, E. O. G. Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964.