Yggdrasil

Odin's Horse, Odin's Gallows

First attested
13th centurySnorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning, composed c. 1220–1235 but surviving only in manuscripts from about 1300, and the poems Völuspá and Grímnismál in the Codex Regius of c. 1270 — the earliest surviving evidence for the name, all of it written in Christian Iceland two centuries after the conversion
Claimed
around 800 CEasserted by Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835), which read the Eddic tree as a surviving pre-Christian Germanic cosmology, and the popular and Heathen writing downstream of it, which dates the world-tree to the Viking Age or earlier

The claim runs about 400 years ahead of the evidence.

Yggdrasil 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.

The immense sacred ash tree in Norse mythology whose branches and roots connect the nine cosmic realms.

Yggdrasil is named in Völuspá 19 and Grímnismál 29–35 in the Codex Regius of c. 1270, and systematised by Snorri Sturluson in Gylfaginning c. 1220. The name is the finding: on the accepted reading Yggr is Odin, drasill 'horse', and a hanged man's horse is his gallows — so the world-tree carries a gallows-name, the main argument for reading Odin's unnamed hanging-tree in Hávamál 138–139 as this one. No source calls it a yew; every one naming a species says ash. The yew argument is modern: Schröder's etymology, and Völuspá 19 calling this ash ever green. The sources disagree elsewhere: Grímnismál 31 sets Hel, frost-giants and humankind beneath the three roots, Snorri the Æsir, the frost-giants and Niflheim. Völuspá 2 counts nine worlds and never lists them; no medieval source arranges them around the tree — that diagram is modern.

Light

A cosmology whose centre is a living thing that suffers: Grímnismál 35 says the ash endures more hardship than men know — a hart biting above, rot at its side, Níðhǫggr tearing below — and it still stands.

Shadow

The name is a gallows-name. Adam of Bremen, hostile and writing around 1075 about a place he never saw, reports men, dogs and horses hanging in the grove at Uppsala; the tree beside it, green winter and summer, is a marginal scholion, not his sentence.

Sources and verification6 sources · 8 links

Primary source

  • Adam of Bremen; trans. Francis J. Tschan, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, 1959, Book IV, chs 26–27 and the accompanying scholiaAdam reports, writing about 1075 at second hand, the nine-yearly sacrifice at Uppsala with the bodies of men, horses and dogs hanging in the grove beside the temple. The very large tree there, green winter and summer, of a kind nobody knew, is not in Adam's main text but in a scholion — a marginal addition of contested authorship, numbered 134 in some editions and 138 in others. Cited as Adam's report: he never saw the place, wrote as a hostile churchman, and no temple answering his description has been excavated at Gamla Uppsala.
  • Snorri Sturluson; trans. Anthony Faulkes, Edda, 1987, Gylfaginning 15–16Snorri makes the ash Yggdrasil the gods' court and gives it three roots — one among the Æsir over Urd's well, one among the frost-giants over Mimir's well, one over Niflheim over Hvergelmir — then adds the eagle, Ratatoskr, the four harts and Níðhǫggr. His arrangement of what lies beneath the roots differs from Grímnismál 31, which he is otherwise paraphrasing. Chapter numbers follow Faulkes's division, which varies between editions of Snorri.
  • Carolyne Larrington (trans.), The Poetic Edda, revised edition, 2014, Völuspá 2, 19; Grímnismál 29–35; Hávamál 138–139Völuspá 19 names an ash called Yggdrasil standing ever green over Urd's well; Völuspá 2 counts nine worlds without naming any of them; Grímnismál 29–35 describes the ash, its three roots under Hel, the frost-giants and humankind (31), Ratatoskr, the harts, the serpents, and the tree's suffering (35); Hávamál 138–139 has Odin hang nine nights on a windy tree, wounded with a spear, given to himself, and take up the runes — the poem does not name that tree Yggdrasil and says no man knows from what roots it runs.

Scholarship

  • Rudolf Simek (trans. Angela Hall), Dictionary of Northern Mythology, 1993, s.v. YggdrasillThe competing derivations of the name are surveyed rather than settled — alongside 'Odin's horse' stand Detter's 'tree of terror' and F. R. Schröder's reading of it as a 'yew-pillar', the last being where the modern yew argument originates. Both leading derivations yield a gallows sense.
  • John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, 2001, s.v. YggdrasilThe generally accepted reading of the name is 'Ygg's horse', Yggr being a name of Odin and drasill a poetic word for horse; since 'the horse of the hanged' is a kenning for gallows, the name ties the tree to Odin's hanging, and is the main argument for identifying the unnamed tree of Hávamál 138 with Yggdrasil — an inference, since the poem names no tree.

Further reading

  • Edward Pettit (ed. and trans.), The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition, 2023, Open Book Publishers, DOI 10.11647/obp.0308; free open accessAn open-access facing-page Old Norse and English edition, which lets a reader check every stanza number cited here against the text rather than against a translation's renumbering.

Linked entries

  • Set againstOghamA modern connection

    Ogham's letters acquired tree names in medieval Irish glossaries and Robert Graves turned those into a tree calendar in The White Goddess (1948); both Ogham and Yggdrasil are cases where the tidy tree-scheme a reader knows is later than the sources said to contain it.

  • Set againstThe KojikiAttested

    The Kojiki was compiled by Ō no Yasumaro in 712 and Gylfaginning by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, and in both the orderly system later readers quote as ancient belief is the compiler's arrangement of older material.

  • Set againstPerunAttested

    Perun's evidence is thinner still — the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1113, lists Vladimir's idols of 980 and little else — so both figures reach us only through Christian writers describing a religion their own church had already displaced.

  • Set againstThe Trial of Anders PoulsenAttested

    Snorri set down the world-tree around 1220, a Christian Icelander systematising two centuries after conversion and from outside the practice; Knag set down Poulsen's drum in 1692 from the practitioner's own mouth — and the second witness was the less free of the two, because he was answering a capital charge.

  • Set againstThe GāthāsAttested

    Both bodies of verse reached surviving parchment in the same span and no earlier: the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda was written in Iceland about 1270, the oldest Yasna manuscripts carrying the Gāthās in Gujarat in 1323. Neither gap argues against antiquity, but in both cases everything before the manuscript is inference.

  • Set againstThe Descent of InannaA modern connection

    Inanna hangs three days and nights as a corpse on a hook; Hávamál 138 has Odin hang nine nights on the windswept tree. Popular writing files them together as one initiatory pattern, but the Hávamál survives only in the Codex Regius of about 1270 and no transmission between them is attested.

  • IncludesThe NornsAttested

    The three sit at Urðr's well beneath the ash, and Snorri has them draw water and white clay from it every day so the tree's limbs do not rot.

  • Set againstThe World TreeAttested

    Yggdrasil is the tree this category recruits most often, and its evidence runs the other way: Völuspá 19 and Grímnismál 29–35 in a manuscript of c. 1270, written in Christian Iceland, with nothing in them reaching beyond Scandinavia.

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