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Yggdrasil — Description

Today is the dreaded prophesied day when Ava Spainhower, community lunatic and insufferable poet, shares her theological thesis with unsuspecting bystanders: that the Universe is, of all things, an instrument.
The religious motif of a World Tree, i.e. some kind of cosmic bramble with all the foundations of Creation suspended in its foliage, is one of those human storytelling concepts that's just sort of inevitably universal, right? The Hadza people of Tanzania for example believe that the first humans used the neck of a cosmic giraffe to climb down from their origins in a giant baobab tree, while as far afield as Mexico you find carvings of the great ceiba which defines the four cardinal directions. We're monkeys, of course we'd assume reality is just one big tree house. This monkey is a Heathen though, so today I'm focusing on the name I assign to this cosmic web, Odin's Gallows, Yggdrasil. That's not me being poetic, that's what the word “Yggdrasil” actually means. “Yggr”, meaning “Terrifier”, is one of Odin's many aliases, while “drasil” is a poetic term for horses, roughly equivalent to English “steed”. The tree is Odin's “ride”, as in he “rode” it like a horse when he hung himself by the neck until dead on its branches. More on that later.
The Eddic poems Vǫluspá and Grímnismál strangely enough take this one step further by referring to this plant as “Askr Yggdrasil”, literally meaning “Yggdrasil's Ash”. Grammatically odd in English, but it does line up with the casting of Yggdrasil as a primordial ash tree. Exactly how far back this concept remains recognizable is, like most things in ancient Heathen studies, hard to ascertain due to the scarcity of our sources. Vǫluspá, like most complete Heathen poems, was only written in the 10th century, pretty late into the game, and here Yggdrasil is clearly a fully developed concept already. We can get further back, albeit with caveats, by examining the Roman author Tacitus, writing his Germania in 98 CE as a catalog of the peoples the Romans were actively trying to suppress and conquer. He records an affinity that multiple German tribes seemed to have had for forest clearings and the singular trees often growing at their center as sacred spaces. The Semnones tribe, for example, are described as holding a council gathering of geographically related tribes (medieval generations would probably call this a “thing”) in a grove that can only be entered if you bind yourself in chains as a sign of subservience to the god that made this crater in these otherwise unbroken woods. Individual groves would be considered the nexus of their own distinct gods, the broader Suebi confederation having a particular fondness for the goddess Nerthus, for example. This is why destroying these trees was such a devastating moral blow to any invading army or radical missionary. In the 8th century, for example, an English monk named Saint Boniface destroyed an oak tree which the Hessians dedicated to Thor, while Charlemagne made no friends by hacking down Irminsul in 783, a tree which was central to the Saxon worship of Odin.
This ritual function does seem to have some parallel in Vǫluspá, where a location called “Iðavöllr” (the “lush plain”, i.e. like a sacred grove) is named as the meeting place of the gods’ council. This strange nook in Yggdrasil is where they first laid the city plan of Asgard, and where the survivors of Ragnarök will return to restore cosmic order. This location is, however, geographically separate from Asgard. The poem Grímnismál explains that in order to reach this council room at all, the gods must mount their horses (their names are Glath and Gyllir, Gler and Skeithbrimir, Silfrintopp and Sinir, Gisl and Falhofnir, Gulltopp and Lettfeti for the handful of pedantic nerds who care) and ride over the Bifröst bridge. Thor meanwhile takes the unnecessarily difficult route, because he's Thor, wading by foot over the four rivers Körmt, Örmt, and two rivers both called Kerlaugar for some unparseable reason. No wonder it always takes him so long to show up when the gods need him.
While interesting to note, we should be careful not to conflate the historical tree cult with a worship of Yggdrasil specifically. They could root into the same theological soil, but we lack the runic stone that would confirm that explicitly. Tacitus's sacred groves could just simply be divine in their own right, completely separated from what we're biased to see by our surviving puzzle pieces. Honestly, for such a (literally) universal concept in this religion though, we're actually pretty spotty on lore for this son of a birch. Even Odin is frustrated by this lack of clarity. Vǫluspá is told from the perspective of the raving zombie witch whom he has raised from the dead to pester her with cosmological questions. Despite clearly being there when it happened, the witch has little to say on the “canon” origin of Yggdrasil, elusively opening the discussion on the matter with, “I remember nine worlds, nine jotun women, and the seed from which the Fate-Tree sprang”.
What that means and who the “nine jotun women” are supposed to be is a finicky chestnut to crack. There's a shorter alternative Vǫluspá which… is uncreatively called the Vǫluspá in skamma, literally the “Short Vǫluspá”, on account of it being an extremely abridged telling of the creation and destruction of the world, this time narrated to the goddess Freyja by a batshit old hag she raised from the dead. After discussing the origins of jotun from Ymir, this necromanced völva then spends a stanza relating that, “There was one born in ancient times, a very powerful son of the family of the gods. He had nine mothers, those nine jotun women gave birth to the noble spearman at the edge of the world”. This can really only be referring to Heimdall, the sentry at the gate of reality who was born of nine jotun mothers (ask your parents, kids). However, both that weirdly specific cosmology and what the next stanza describes, “The earth gave him strength to grow, as did the cold sea, and the blood of a son”, are… seemingly complete nonsense, missing its proper contextualization. We're missing a story here, which is irritatingly par for the course with Heimdall. It almost seems like it's trying to imply that Heimdall was intrinsically linked to Yggdrasil since birth in some way, that his nine mothers are some completely lost reference to a story about the connection of the Nine Realms to the tree. Then there's a curious coincidence that one interpretation of his name's etymology could be “heim”, meaning world (cognate with English “home”), plus “dallr”, referring to a type of tree. Heimdall may… somehow?... just literally be the World Tree (though I should caution that “World Tree” a modern scholarly term for this motif, not something any Old Norse manuscript calls Yggdrasil). He's the thing's sanctioned guardian at the very least.
We know for a fact that Heimdall has at least one secret stashed in those branches, his “hlojð” which… earlier translators tried to parse as his hearing but more literally it means “sound” as a noun, like how your mix tape is your “sound”. Poetically this refers to Heimdall's trumpet Gjallarhorn, the one he'll blow at the end of days, being, as the psycho bitch in Vǫluspá puts it, “buried under the heaven-bright holy tree”. She then immediately follows this with “I see a river poured from the muddy waterfall where Odin's eye hides,” referencing a similar situation which Odin is in. To get there, we first have to map out the three roots of Yggdrasil. The first is embedded into the nether realms of Hel…according to Grímnismál. The Prose Edda says it's connected to Niflheim but those two realms often get conflated in the source material because they're both dark, cold, and spooky. There's also one in Asgard, duh, and finally there's one anchoring into the realm of the gods’ archnemeses, Jotunheim. Under the crags of this last root is the wellspring Mímisbrunnr, where (Vǫluspá again), “Mimir can drink every morning from those waters where your own eye drowns”, referring to Odin gouging out one of his own eyes in exchange for a single sip from Mímir's waters. Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning clarifies that Mímir gets his wisdom by drinking these waters with Gjallarhorn, insinuating that Mímir is the one responsible for keeping the horn hidden in the first place. Whether or not this relates in some way to the passage in Hávamál about Odin hanging on a tree for nine days as a sacrifice to himself, and then emerging with the secrets of runes, is unknowable, but very artsy to explore visually.
The other two roots sprout ponds of their own. Hvergelmir (“Boiling-Cauldron”), the one in deepest Niflheim, is so overrun with snakes that “No fool has ever guessed how many serpents lie beneath Yggdrasil. I think that Goin and Moin, Grabak and Grafvolluth, Ofnir and Svafnir, sons of the snake Grafvitnir, will always gnaw that tree's branches.” Their hagfish king is Nidhogg, the slime dragon with corpses dangling in his oil spill wings, simply waiting to assume his kingship after all is drenched in his poison breath. Nidhogg receives his daily news from the eagle who sits at the very top of the tree with (because Snorri has to have his sources taken literally, both ways, at cost of being nonsensical) a tinier hawk named Veðrfölnir perched between its eyes. That news is delivered packaged in the rage of a tiny squirrel named Ratatoskr, informing the chaos snake that he's a jessie oaf-lookin’ stauner. Nidhogg smiles, it's gross I'm sure, and tells Ratatoskr to shimmy a message of the eagle's descent from a hamster and a man who smells of elderberries. I choose to believe that Nidhogg and the bird are actually good friends and they just kinda get a chuckle at how this squirrel can go off like he, a squirrel, is gonna pick a fight. There's actually a whole damn ecosystem in this tree. There's four deer named Dain and Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathror who just kinda hang out and eat the budding leaves fresh off the canopy of Yggdrasil. The dew that sprinkles down from the leaves of Yggdrasil meanwhile is a mythological origin for honeydew, which in reality is projectile aphid shit, but in imagination land is apparently where bees spontaneously generate from.
It's the well of Asgard which intrigues me the most with its existential secrets though, the one called Urðarbrunnr, after the leader of the three Norns who dwell in this evergreen grove where the gods call council. These indecipherable women are the eponymous Urðr (“Has Happened"), Verðandi (“Is Happening”), and Skuld (“Should Happen”), who emerge from the waters of the well every day to plaster the rotting bark of Yggdrasil with fresh regenerative clay. Once time is again held at bay, they set to work carving the destiny of every man, every worm, every god, into the wood, a song of misery and woe and pride and folly. They are the ones who set the lifespan of every extinguished existence, decide which children get to live and which do not. They sing prophecy of days that will only get worse, of the last humans, Lif and Lífþrasir, taking shelter from Surt's fire in “Hoddmímis holt”. Most people gloss this otherwise unattested term as a synonym for the battered Yggdrasil, but a “holt” is more literally a forest of trees, so maybe there's other World Trees out there to jump ship to while the old one burns and dies. The life of this tree, you see, was designed from the start to be sad and torturous. “The old tree sighs when the jotun shakes loose,” predicts the völva. “Yggdrasil's ash tree still stands, but it trembles.” As Odin more succinctly pities in Grímnismál, “The tree Yggdrasil endures more pain than any men guess. It's eaten from above by the deer, on the side by the rot, from beneath by serpents.” Existence simply is agony, unfair, emotionless agony. Life sucks, your loved ones abandon you, and then you die, what a brutally honest religion I follow. This, at last, sets up the academic context for the existential meltdown I've had pent up for so long.
This is the section you're free to tune out. The following delirious rant is both my personal theology and an interpretation I've crafted for my fictional setting. It's no secret that I'm Heathen, but I am first and foremost a scientist and I prefer to draw a distinct line between my religion and my academia when opening public discussion. Do not take anything I'm about to say seriously, I am not a völva and from here on out I will be writing under the influence of substances which are legal in the state of Indiana.
So, now that this shit's finally hit, why do I believe that the Universe is, of all things, an instrument? Well it all stems from one frustratingly simple conclusion: reality, at its most fundamental level, so far as quantum physics has experimentally demonstrated, is made of music. It's not noise, it's specifically music. It is structured noise. The fabric of our reality is strung out on at least 17 rippling ethereal fields, one for each fundamental particle. That's all a particle is, the plink of a pebble in a great lake, a flick on a big stretched out slinky. When physicists say that particles “disappear”, it's not that they're magically teleporting somewhere else, it's just that the atom is “canceled” by opposite charge. If you know how sound waves work, this is intuitive, peaks and troughs of equal height flatten the heartbeat monitor when they overlap. Consider then what the periodic table actually is, it's an octave chart. Gold is simply one electron, one unit of a musical wave, higher than platinum. It's 118 distinct notes which only “harmonize” into certain molecules based on their lego stud configuration, which are analogous to other elements in its vertical columns. If carbon, for example, is a low C note, then silicon is a middle C, germanium is a high C, etc. They work the same mathematically, but musically they would be “out of tune” if you tried to play those notes for a lower pitched molecule and thus exhibit different characteristics. Reality, life as we understand it, is a song being played on some kind of… eleven-dimensional harp with seventeen strings, which overlap, intersect, and pluck one other, as a grand waltz.
The way I see it there's two hypotheses we can conclude from this: either the Universe is some kind of autonomous music box, or its a grand orchestra conducted by an indescribable master musician. Both are valid, neither is experimentally testable, but I'm Heathen so I'm biased towards the latter when I look out into the night sky, and I see ancient days where nine suns shone on battlegrounds and baritones. There's a concept in physics known as a “Boltzmann Brain”, after physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (who fun fact, killed himself, so just be aware this is about to get too woo-woo even for me). See this instrument we're on seems to have a base hum even when there's not any song playing. The Universe has… radio static. The thing about static though is that if you give any system of randomness infinite time (which as far as we can tell, it will be), any and all configurations of pixels that are physically possible will eventually arrange themselves accordingly. If a TV is left on for infinite time, eventually, like monkeys writing Shakespeare, it will light the pixels up in a way so as to reproduce every episode of I Love Lucy ever aired, in frame by frame order. The DVD logo will eventually hit the corner perfectly. Even after the heat death of our universe, when the song has diminuendoed its last ripple, that inherent resonance which empty spacetime possesses will eventually configure itself into an entire observable universe, complete with atoms in their places and memories invented that align perfectly with testable reality. I've heard this jokingly referred to as “Last Thursdayism” because you can't prove that the Universe as we see it wasn't just snapped into existence last Thursday. Boltzmann's big revelation was that it is significantly more likely, statistically, that a disembodied human brain floating in nothingness with only the illusion of external sensation could be formed by random chance than an entire real Universe for them to inhabit.
Now that keeps me up at night not just because of the obvious hoooly shit but also because of what we see when we zoom out to the largest scale structures in our actual Universe, the grand lattice of every galaxy cluster mappable in our otherwise voided sky. We call it the Cosmic Web. Google it, we have pictures. Those are just neurons, you can't convince me otherwise, that's just a tree. Our entire existence is encoded and executed on some weird kind of… quivering… boombox… bonsai. I don't know how to feel about that, I don't like how many unknowns that raises about what's playing this radio, but I guess… that's just the way it's always been. That's the Universe I got born into. I certainly didn't ask for this. There's not exactly any good implications here, but also none that you could probably do anything about. I still have to go to work in the morning, what a fuckin’ rub.
Design notes, okay. So. All that being said, this is my interpretation of Yggdrasil for the Drake Hero Universe. This is the Drake Hero Universe. She's a giant floating nervous system made from the reality-rippling scream of a grieving mother, aimlessly adrift in complete isolation, dreaming history as it's come down to us into existence. Like Lovecraft's Azathoth, she is a blind, tortured goddess, trapped in a nightmare of perceptions who only exist so long as she is too afraid to wake up. Her brain is meant to be encased in a squishy, translucent myelin sheath (here canonically the “white clay” the Norns are repairing her with). A Penrose diagram is embedded in her chest, granting any batshit D&D party who's somehow gotten to this layer of reality a direct portal to any point in all of space and time within the Drake Hero Universe. When my buddy Jacob saw me coloring this, he told me that he imagines it feels like “flurp” when you wave your hand through her nebula branches, and that actually helped me a lot with finding my feet with this texture. It's not comfortable to be her. I'm a big fan of H.R. Giger, I use him as inspiration for all my cosmic horrors. He has this very specific qualia, which I find so juicy, to create lifeforms which look to be in agony, yet are functioning exactly as their cruel god intended from the start. As someone whose existence has been nothing but discomfort her entire life, I relate to that terror a lot. I've always thought that being a tree, while majestic, looks absolutely miserable to experience. They don't… look happy. I'm not sure they ever were.