Northern European Folk · Norse & Germanic
Symbol · 13th century
Yggdrasil
Odin's Horse, Odin's Gallows
The immense sacred ash tree in Norse mythology whose branches and roots connect the nine cosmic realms.
What it meansThe name means Ygg's horse, and Ygg is Odin — a horse being a kenning for a gallows, which one rides. Odin hung on this tree nine nights, wounded by his own spear, sacrificed to himself, and took the runes. The world's centre is a gallows, and the god is what hangs there.
The FindingYggdrasil is read as 'Ygg's horse', and a hanged man's horse is his gallows — the Norse world-tree carries a gallows-name, which is the main reason scholars take Odin's unnamed hanging-tree in Hávamál to be this one.
Being · the 1270s
The Norns
Old Names, Borrowed Tenses
Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld at the well beneath the world tree: the maidens Snorri named norns, who shape lives.
Who they wereThey sit at the well beneath the tree and water its roots daily with the white clay, which is what keeps the world alive — so the shaping of fate and the maintenance of the cosmos are the same job. The names have been read as past, present and future since Snorri.
The FindingPast, present and future is in neither Völuspá nor Snorri: the gloss has been traced no further back than Paul-Henri Mallet's French Edda of 1756, and Thomas Percy carried it into English in 1770.