Yggdrasil is the great ash tree at the center of Norse cosmology. Its branches reach over the nine worlds and its roots drink from three springs: the well of Urd, which the gods guard, the well of Mimir, source of wisdom, and the spring Hvergelmir in the realm of the dead. The main sources are the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda.
The creatures of the tree
A serpent, Nidhogg, gnaws at the roots, and a squirrel called Ratatoskr runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between Nidhogg and the eagle at the top, who has a hawk, Vedrfolnir, between its eyes. Four stags eat the leaves, and the Poetic Edda names them Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathror. Beside the well of Urd live the three Norns, who tend the tree and shape the fates of gods and humans.
Odin on the tree
In the poem Hávamál Odin tells how he hung on a windswept tree for nine nights, wounded by a spear, “given to Odin, myself to myself,” and as he looked down he seized the runes and fell back with new knowledge. That story is why Yggdrasil is a central image for people drawn to Norse paganism and runic magic.
The tree at the end of the world
The seeress of the Völuspá describes the tree shuddering at Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, but it does not fall. Two humans, Lif and Lifthrasir, shelter in a wood and repopulate the renewed world. Cosmic trees appear in cultures around the world, from the Tree of Life of Kabbalah to the world tree of the Maya and the shamans of Siberia, and Richard Wagner opened his Götterdämmerung with the Norns weaving the rope of fate beside the world ash.
The painting
The tree grows inside a glowing sphere, with a serpent wound around the trunk and deer in its branches. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- The name probably means “Odin’s horse.” Yggr, “terrible one,” is a byname of Odin, and drasill is a word for horse. Gallows were called the horse of the hanged, which links the name to Odin’s self-sacrifice.
- The Eddas mention nine worlds but never give a neat list of them. The familiar roster of nine realms is a modern reconstruction.
- About 1075 the chronicler Adam of Bremen described a huge evergreen tree beside the temple at Uppsala in Sweden, next to a sacrificial well.
- In 772 Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul, a sacred tree-like pillar of the Saxons that some scholars compare to Yggdrasil.
- The plate’s caption reads the three roots as spirit, organization and matter, an esoteric reading rather than a Norse one.
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