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Updated: June 17, 2025
If we will go from our forest vigil to the hearth in any home we will find the world-ash, no longer weird and awesome with the fates sitting silent at its foot, but transformed into the very symbol of light and happiness and cheer, the Christmas tree. In the light of twenty centuries around the Yule log we have forgotten to be afraid and have made out of our weird dreams friendly fancies.
The meeting-place of the Gods is by the World-Ash, Yggdrasil, on whose well-being the fate of Gods and men depends; at its root lies the World-Snake. The Gods have foreknowledge of their own doom, Ragnarök, the great fight when they shall meet Loki's children, the Wolf and the Snake; both sides will fall and the world be destroyed. An episode in the story is the death of Baldr. The Aesir.
Their song is of no frivolous matter, but as if we should entertain ourselves recounting the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge. Of the World-Ash they tell, in whose shade a well flowed, murmuring runes of wisdom; of a daring god who came to drink at the well, paying in toll one of his eyes. From the World-Ash, he, Wotan, broke a branch and fashioned it into the shaft of a spear.
As to the legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction of Valhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though, allegorically, the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god's spear is the end of Wotan and of Valhalla, those who do not see the allegory, and take the story literally, like children, are sure to ask what becomes of Wotan after Siegfried gets past him up the mountain; and to this question the old tale told in Night Falls On The Gods is as good an answer as another.
Thus the Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree.
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