Yggdrasil
The world tree of Norse myth: an evergreen ash that stands at the centre of the world, its branches spreading over everything and its three roots reaching into the realms of gods, giants and the dead.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon describes Yggdrasil as an ash that stands in the middle of the world, always green, with branches over the whole world. Its three roots reach to Asgard, where the three norns water the tree from Urd’s well to keep it fresh; to the frost-giants, where Mimir’s well of wisdom lies; and to the spring Hvergelmir in the deepest part of the land of the dead, where the serpent Nidhogg gnaws at the root. A squirrel, Ratatosk, runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between Nidhogg and the eagle at the top. The Eddic poem Völuspá says the tree grows “green by Urth’s well”. In English the name is said ig-druh-sil, Dictionary.com gives.
Origin and history
The name is a riddle. Store norske leksikon splits it into Ygg, “the terrible one”, and drasill, “horse”; the Danish encyclopedia Lex explains that Yggr is a name of Odin, and that the “horse” is probably the tree on which Odin hanged himself to win secret knowledge, as told in the Eddic poem Hávamál. Lex also reads a rite behind the myth: a tree at a cult site, such as Old Uppsala, tended and cared for as though the whole world were renewed each day. It notes a detail of the texts: the tree is evergreen only if it is watered.
A tree on the Mammen axe
One side of the ceremonial axe from the Mammen grave in Denmark, buried in the winter of 970–71, carries a tree. The National Museum of Denmark says it “may symbolise the Christian Tree of Life or the pagan tree Yggdrasil”: the grave dates from the years when Denmark was becoming Christian, and the museum reads the axe both ways.
How many realms are in Yggdrasil?
Nine, in the Eddic poem Völuspá, whose seeress remembers: “Nine worlds I knew, the nine in the tree”. No poem names all nine. Henry Adams Bellows, translating the Edda in 1923, listed the worlds of the gods, the Wanes, the elves, men, the giants, fire, the dark elves and the dead, and presumably the dwarfs, but called the ninth uncertain. Nordiska Asa-samfundet, a Swedish Heathen community, says the Old Norse sources tell neither which worlds make up the nine nor how they lie around the tree, and calls the maps of them found online “speculative at best”.
The roots are counted out differently too. In the poem Grímnismál they run to Hel, to the frost-giants and to the lands of men; the account Store norske leksikon gives puts the first in Asgard instead.
The tree in Heathenry today
The Troth, an American organisation for what it calls inclusive Heathenry, uses as its logo a tree with three knotwork roots and nine branches.
The pictures of the tree that Heathens use are modern. The Norse Mythology Blog notes that they seem to be based on illustrations from the 1800s and 1900s, or on modern Pagan art. The World-Tree Project at University College Cork, which gathers depictions of the tree, finds the Vikings unconcerned to picture the cosmos; artists have tried since the 17th century, with schemes that “bear little resemblance to anything surviving from the Viking Age”. The commonest modern form, Nordiska Asa-samfundet says, is a tree with a large crown and roots forming a circle.
The likeliest Yggdrasil in early art is the tree on the Överhogdal tapestries from Jämtland in Sweden, with a bird perched at the top. Their date is disputed: the World-Tree Project says radiocarbon dating places them in the Viking Age, while Asa-samfundet dates them to the late 11th or 12th century.
Asked who owns the tree and the other Norse symbols, Henrik Williams, professor of Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University, answered: “Nobody and everyone.”
Read next
- Next in Norse and Viking symbolsValknutThree interlocked triangles carved on Viking Age picture stones from Gotland. Store norske leksikon reads it as a sign of Odin; today it is called the valknut, “knot of the slain”.
- In Animal symbolismDeer symbolismIn Christian legend a stag with a crucifix between its antlers turned the hunters Eustace and Hubert to God; in Buddhist art two deer beside the wheel of the teaching recall the Deer Park where the Buddha first taught. Cherokee hunters asked pardon of the Little Deer, chief of the deer, for every deer they killed.
See also
Tree of life, Odin, Hel, Heimdall, The Norns, Axis mundi.
Sources
- Yggdrasil (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
- Yggdrasil (Lex), Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
- The Poetic Edda (Bellows translation), Henry Adams Bellows (trans.), 1923, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Project Gutenberg), Voluspo, stanza 19
- An axe with double meaning, National Museum of Denmark
- The grave from Mammen, National Museum of Denmark
- The Troth, The Troth
- Yggdrasil (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com
- “Articles of Faith”: American Heathenry and Cultural Appropriation, The Norse Mythology Blog (norsemyth.org), 6 September 2021
- Nordiska Asa-samfundet: Symbol lexicon, Yggdrasil, Nordiska Asa-samfundet
- World-Tree Project: Early Depictions of Yggdrasill, World-Tree Project, University College Cork, University College Cork
- World-Tree Project: Modern Illustrations, World-Tree Project, University College Cork, University College Cork
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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