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+276+. Probably, also, it is from this general order of ideas that the conception of the cosmic tree has sprung. The Scandinavian Yggdrasil is the source of life to all things and represents also wisdom; though the details may contain Christian elements, the general conception of the world as a tree or as nourished by a tree is probably old. The same conception appears in the cosmic tree of India.
"He symbolizes a damnthing by three horns, and he symbolizes a rifle by a long thing that points and makes noises. Rifles kill animals. Harpies and damnthings are both animals. If a rifle will kill a harpy, it'll kill a damnthing too." Juan Jimenez had been frowning in thought; he looked up and asked, "What's the lowest known sapient race?" "Yggdrasil Khooghras," Gerd van Riebeek said promptly.
Pleasantly wave the evergreen boughs of the Life-Tree, Yggdrasil, the mythic ash-tree of the old North, whose leaves are green with an unwithering bloom that shall defy even the fires of the final conflagration. Iduna, or Spring, sits in those boughs with her apples of rejuvenescence, restoring the wasted strength of the gods.
In one story he creates man by making a clay image and infusing into it a spark of the fire which he had brought from heaven; in another story he is himself the first man. In the Peloponnesian myth Phoroneus, who is Prometheus under another name, is the first man, and his mother was an ash-tree. In Norse mythology, also, the gods were said to have made the first man out of the ash-tree Yggdrasil.
But though originally gross and rough, he was capable of a smoother polish, of a glossier enamel, than a more superficial, trivial nature. He was ever deeply thoughtful, and capable of profounder moods of meditation than the lightly-moved children of the South. Sighs, as from the boughs of Yggdrasil, ever breathed through his poetry from of old.
In the various regions of gods, giants, dwarfs, and men, in the striking variety of characters, the great and wise Odin, the mighty Thor, the good Balder, the malicious Loke, the queenly Frigga, the genial Freya, the lovely Iduna, the gentle Nanna in all the magnificent scenery of Midgard, Asgard, and Nifelheim, with the glorious tree Yggdrasil and the rainbow bridge, the poet found inexhaustible scope for poetical embellishment, and he availed himself of it all with a genuine poet's power.
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.
But for the most part the northern men were sober and in earnest, praying as they sang and looking upward as if the Star of the East were presently to shed its soft light in the sky; and they tended the torches and lights around the trees devoutly, not guessing that their fathers had done the same long ago, in bleak Denmark and snowy Norway, in worship of Odin and in honour of Yggdrasil, the tree of life.
and it may be added, the Anglo-American's unsurpassed practical energy, skill, and invincible love of freedom. From the fountains of the ash-tree Yggdrasil flowed these things. Some of the greatest of modern Teutonic writers have gone back to these fountains, flowing in these wild mythic wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration thence.
"If anyone would lay an axe to your tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say to him," Emerson wrote, "'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life. Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your Creator."
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