The Tree at the Centre of Everything

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — Uppland, Sweden, deep winter

There is a particular kind of cold that comes off flat Swedish farmland in January, and it was in that cold, outside Uppsala, that I first stood under an ash old enough to have lost its lower branches to lightning twice over. It is not the tree. There is no candidate anywhere for the tree. But the farmers here still plant one, still call it something close to guardian, and the habit runs so deep and so quietly that it is easy to miss it is folklore at all.

Yggdrasil, as the medieval sources give it, is not a single specimen so much as an argument about scale. Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland in the thirteenth century, describes an ash whose branches spread over all nine worlds and into the sky, and whose three roots reach into three distant places: one to the well of Urd, where the Norns sit and shape the fates of gods and men; one to Mimir's well, where wisdom is kept and where Odin left an eye in pledge to drink from it; and one down into Niflheim, to the roaring spring called Hvergelmir, gnawed at constantly by the serpent Nidhogg. An eagle sits in the topmost branches. A squirrel, Ratatoskr, runs the trunk's full height carrying insults between the eagle and the serpent, which is as good a description of cosmic maintenance as any culture has produced.

The tree is also where Odin hangs. The Hávamál gives an account, in the god's own voice, of nine nights on a windswept tree, wounded by his own spear, given to himself, in order to seize up the runes from the roots below. Scholars argue about how old that image is and how much of it is shaped by later Christian retelling, and I will not pretend the argument is settled. What is not in doubt is that the tree in this story is a place of ordeal as much as shelter, something you suffer on your way to knowledge rather than simply admire.

Whether the tree was imagined as ash or something evergreen is its own small scholarly quarrel. Snorri calls it askr, ash, but the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, writing earlier and describing the sacred grove at old Uppsala itself, records a great tree there that stayed green through winter and summer alike, a species nobody among his informants could name. It is tempting to fold the two together, the mythic tree and the one Adam heard about at the temple only a short walk from where I was standing, but the versions disagree on enough details that I think it more honest to hold them apart and let the resemblance sit unresolved.

What has clearly outlasted the myth, in this part of Scandinavia at least, is the smaller custom. Farms across Sweden and Norway have long kept a named tree near the house, a vårdträd, a guardian tree, understood to hold something of the household's luck and occasionally given small offerings, a bit of milk or beer poured at the root. Cutting one down without cause was, and in some places still is, considered a bad way to invite misfortune. It is not Yggdrasil. But it is the same instinct working at a domestic scale: that a tree can be load-bearing in ways that have nothing to do with wood, that roots reach further than soil, and that the health of a household, or a cosmos, might genuinely depend on one old trunk being left alone.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.