Anyone who chooses to be laid to rest beneath a tree reaches for an image that looms large in Norse tradition: Yggdrasil, the ash that holds the worlds together. A Germanic tree grave in today's sense, however, appears in no source. This article walks through the evidence in order: the Eddas and Snorri, Tacitus on groves and turf mounds, the tree coffins of Oberflacht, Charlemagne's ban on mound burial, and the story of the burial forest since 1999. That makes it possible to separate what is tradition, what is archaeology, and what is a modern interpretation that holds together on its own terms.
"Under all roots is rest." The line captures why people prefer the forest to the churchyard: no maintenance plan, no stone, no rows. Instead, leaf litter, light, and a tree with a number and a name tag. Anyone interested in Germanic religion quickly hears an echo in this. In Norse poetry the tree is no backdrop; it is the axis of the world.
This is where a sober look pays off. Between the ash-tree mythology of the Edda, written down by an Icelandic Christian in the thirteenth century, and the burial forest of our own day lie some eight hundred years and not a single source that connects the two. That does not make tree burial undignified. It makes it what it is: a present-day form that draws on old ideas. The sections below show which of those ideas rest on evidence.
The world-ash appears in three texts that are best kept apart. The Völuspá, the opening poem of the poetic Edda, mentions the ash and the well at its foot in stanzas 19 and 20, the well of Urd where the Norns shape fate. The Fjölsvinnsmál knows stags in the branches and a tree called Mimameid. And Snorri Sturluson builds the familiar panorama out of these in the Gylfaginning (chapter 16): an eagle in the crown with the hawk Vedrfölnir between its eyes, the squirrel Ratatoskr running between above and below, four stags browsing the shoots, and below, the dragon Nidhöggr with serpents at the roots.
Two details show how closely the tree is tied to fate and law. The Völuspá has the Norns pour water and white clay over the tree every day so that it does not wither. And Snorri writes in the Gylfaginning that the gods hold court daily at the well of Urd. That is mythology of order and time; none of it concerns graves.
What matters for our subject: in none of these passages is a dead person laid to rest under the tree. Yggdrasil is world axis and place of fate, not a cemetery. Where the tree does touch death, it is about Odin. In the Hávamál the god hangs on a tree for nine nights:
"I ween that I hung on the windy tree, hung there nights full nine; with the spear I was wounded, and offered I was to Othin, myself to myself, on the tree that none may ever know what root beneath it runs."Hávamál, stanza 138, tr. Henry Adams Bellows, 1923 (public domain)
This is self-sacrifice and the winning of knowledge, not a burial. And whether it is the world-ash is not stated outright; the stanza does not use the name Yggdrasil. Scholars also debate whether the tree was originally a yew. The idea goes back to Läffler in 1911 and leans partly on Adam of Bremen, who around 1075 mentions an evergreen tree at Uppsala whose species nobody knew. Against it: the Uppsala tree may be shaped by mythology, and a world-tree need not be any particular species. Nothing is known about a cultic role for Yggdrasil.
Trees do play a role in Germanic cult, but as places of worship, not of burial. Tacitus writes around 98 AD in the Germania (chapter 9) that the Germans thought it unworthy to confine gods within walls or to give them human shape; they consecrated "woods and groves." In chapter 39 he describes the grove of the Semnones, which no one may enter unless bound, and from which a person who falls must roll out rather than get up. In chapter 40 a grove of the goddess Nerthus stands on an island in the ocean. The Annals (2.25) mention a grove where the Marsi kept a legionary eagle from the Varus disaster, and Cassius Dio (60.8.7) reports a Chaucian grove holding another eagle.
From a later period we know the Donar Oak at Geismar, which Boniface is said to have felled, the Irminsul of the Saxons, which Charlemagne had destroyed, and the tree by the temple at Uppsala. What unites all these sources: they are outside views, written by Roman and Christian authors who sometimes knew the cult only by hearsay. Cult sites in woodland are rarely tangible archaeologically. One example is the sanctuary at Oberdorla in Thuringia, an offering place by a spring and a bog that was used over centuries. A grove with graves in it cannot be shown from any of this evidence.
The best brief description from Roman times is in Germania 27, and it reads remarkably soberly:
"Their funerals are without parade. The only circumstance to which they attend is to burn the bodies of eminent persons with some particular kinds of wood. [...] The tomb is a mound of turf. They contemn the elaborate and costly honours of monumental structures, as mere burthens to the dead."Tacitus, Germania 27, Oxford Translation, revised (public domain)
Two things stand out. First, wood here is fuel and a mark of rank: it is about "particular kinds of wood" for the pyre, and Tacitus does not say which. Second, the grave is earth and grass, not a monument. Weapons and sometimes the dead man's horse went into the fire. The same passage notes that tears and lamentation are soon over, grief and regret last longer; wailing is for women, remembering for men.
Roughly eleven hundred years later Snorri writes in the Ynglinga saga (chapter 8) that Odin decreed that all the dead be burned with their belongings on the pyre; for men of consequence a mound was to be raised, for other distinguished warriors a standing stone. That is a law from a story, not a legal text, and Snorri wrote as a Christian looking back. Archaeology shows a wider picture: cremation and inhumation side by side, mounds, flat graves, ship graves, depending on time and region. More in Burial among the Germanic peoples and Honouring the dead.
There is one body of finds in which trees and burial do meet: the tree coffin. A trunk is split lengthwise and hollowed out, the dead person lies in one half and the other covers them. The best-known early example has nothing to do with Germanic peoples: the Egtved Girl in Denmark was found in 1921 in a barrow in such a coffin, buried in 1370 BC according to dendrochronology. Her origin was long disputed: a strontium isotope study in 2015 pointed to the Black Forest, a reanalysis in 2019 showed that modern agricultural lime had skewed the comparison data and holds that she most likely lived in the Egtved area.
For the early Middle Ages, the cemetery of Oberflacht near Seitingen in the district of Tuttlingen is the key. People of the sixth and early seventh centuries were laid there in elaborately carved tree coffins or wooden chambers. The waterlogged soil preserved what normally perishes: turned and coopered vessels, beds, chairs, tables and chests, shields and bows, shoe lasts, remains of beeswax candles and food, and in the "Singer's Grave" (grave 31) a nearly complete lyre. Over 300 graves have been investigated, probably only part of the cemetery. First finds came to light around 1810; in 1846 Wolfgang Menzel dug with Ferdinand von Dürrich, and Walther Veeck worked systematically in 1933/34, though his documentation was lost in the Second World War. Siegwalt Schiek and Peter Paulsen evaluated the finds in the 1990s. Those buried were Alemanni; more in Alemanni.
With the mission, what changed was not only belief but the place of death. The Capitulary for Saxony, issued by Charlemagne in the years of his Saxon wars (dated somewhere between about 775 and 790, usually placed around 782 to 785), lays down in clause 7 that anyone who has a dead body burned according to pagan rites is to be put to death. Clause 22 orders that the bodies of Saxon Christians be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans. The numbering follows D. C. Munro's translation from Boretius.
It is worth not shrinking this: the state drew a line through burial custom. The churchyard became the rule, the mound in the field the exception and a cause for suspicion. For the question of trees this means that anyone in early medieval Saxony who wished to be buried beneath a tree was doing something forbidden, and we hear almost nothing of it because the sources are silent. That line reaches into our own time. The Friedhofszwang of German state laws, under which burials must in principle take place on dedicated ground, is its late relative. More on the consequences of the mission: Christianisation of the Germanic peoples and Widukind.
Where does the dead person go? The answers are many and contradict one another. Snorri knows Valhalla for the fallen in Odin's hall and Helheim for the rest, and the sagas let the dead live on in the burial mound: they sit in the hill, give warnings and drink, as gathered in Viking ideas of death. That a person passes into another creature or into a tree is not attested for the Viking Age. The first humans of the myths, Ask and Embla, do have to do with trees: in the Gylfaginning Snorri has the gods find two logs on the shore and make the first pair from them, and the Völuspá (stanzas 17 and 18) calls the two powerless and without fate until the gods give them breath, understanding and warmth. But that is a creation image, not a belief about the dead.
Well attested is a different thought, one that also fits the forest: living on through one's name. In the Hávamál we read:
"Cattle die, and kinsmen die, and so one dies one's self; but a noble name will never die, if good renown one gets."Hávamál, stanza 77 (Bellows numbering), tr. Henry Adams Bellows, 1923 (public domain)
This is a stance, not a doctrine of the afterlife: what remains is what one has done and what those closest keep. In the same run of stanzas comes the remark that memorial stones by the road "seldom stand" unless a kinsman raises them for a kinsman (stanza 72). Whoever lights a candle at the tree of a loved one today stands, in spirit, within that stance, even if the place is a different one.
Trees have a history of their own in everyday life, outside cult. The folklore scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gathered for instance in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, documents house trees (linden, elder) as protection for the farmstead and trees planted at the birth of a child. Caution is needed here: most of these records are early modern. They show how stubbornly tree ideas persisted, but they prove no Viking-age or Germanic practice. Anyone who wants to draw a line does well to label it a hypothesis. For further reading on the veneration of trees see Sacred trees.
What folklore does support is a pattern: trees and graves often lay close together, and churchyard lindens and yews can still be seen in many regions. Why they were planted is only partly known; practical reasons (shade, a gathering place) stand beside symbolic ones. There is no single, documented origin.
Forest burial is an invention of the turn of the millennium. The Swiss Ueli Sauter was the first, in 1999, to obtain official approval for a burial forest; a year later he sold the rights to the FriedWald brand to Germany. The funeral researcher Reiner Sörries calls the opening of the first German FriedWald in 2001 a "turning point in funeral and cemetery culture." Today FriedWald and RuheForst are the largest providers; by their own account they ran 142 sites together in 2020 (74 and 68). Switzerland had around 70 burial forests in 2019, and in Austria the provider Klosterwald runs six. Municipalities and some parishes operate their own.
The rules are set not by the federal government but by the states: cemetery and burial law is a matter for the Länder in Germany, so conditions differ from state to state. Usually these points are shared. The ashes are laid to rest in an urn that must be biodegradable (wood or stainless steel are possible depending on the protection status of the forest); scattering is permitted only in some states. The burial is made in the root zone, as a rule at least 80 centimetres deep. Planting, soil work and grave decoration are prohibited, and nature takes over the upkeep. The operator is usually a municipality or a recognised religious community, and the designated purpose is often secured by a 99-year easement. Minimum rest periods are regulated by state law.
Remembrance at the tree works differently from remembrance at a churchyard grave, and that is intended. There is no stone, no border, no planting bowl. Depending on the operator, a small tag with name and dates hangs on the tree or nearby; other providers keep a register. What kind of mark is permitted is decided by the forest's own rules, which is why it should be clarified with the operator before a burial. Candles, flowers and figures are expressly not allowed in many forests.
For anyone seeking a quiet mark at home, there are alternatives that change nothing in the forest: a photograph on the windowsill, an engraved memorial plaque of natural slate in the garden or indoors, a sentence spoken on an anniversary. The old saying about the memorial stone by the road is not affected: it stood for the visibility of remembering, not for a particular place. For this form too, whether a mark may be set up outdoors is decided by the owner of the ground.
Forest burial has critics, and their arguments belong in an honest account. In 2019 the German Environment Agency confirmed heavy metals in cremation ash and recommends, among other things, keeping distance from groundwater and being careful with acidic or alkaline soils. Whether interventions in protected forests and the removal of deadwood are justifiable is disputed. The association of cemetery administrators warns that municipalities compete with themselves if burial forests weaken their own cemeteries financially. In 2005 the Catholic bishops criticised the anonymity and the absence of a Christian grave culture; other church voices take a calmer view. The geographer Jürgen Hasse accuses the movement of a romanticised, pantheistic outlook and sees commercial motives; supporters reply that a fixed place eases mourning, while anonymous burials can lead to a "placelessness of grief." Studies and polemics exist on all of this, and they are worth reading before deciding for or against the forest.
The finding has only an indirect link to the Germanic worldview, and that is the point: the decision for the forest is a present-day decision with present-day arguments. Old images can accompany it, but they do not justify it.
Heathen communities of the present have no uniform funeral liturgy. What exists are practices that individual groups and families have assembled over recent decades from sources and from their own ideas: a toast to the dead, the shared recital of a Hávamál stanza, remembrance on an anniversary. An overview of how such rituals arise and how to assess them critically is given in Heathens today: blót and sumbel; for the celebrations of a life see Heathen life celebrations.
A word of caution: some providers and authors tie forest burial very closely to "Germanic heritage." The sources do not bear that out. Anyone who wants to tell the subject honestly says: the tree is a strong but unattested grave symbol of the Germanic peoples. Ancestor veneration is attested (see Ancestor veneration at Yule); the link to trees as burial place is an interpretation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where that is said openly, both can be discussed calmly.
Finally, a look at what is missing. Our knowledge of Germanic burial rests on four pillars: grave finds, Roman reports such as the Germania, late heathen poetry (skaldic verse and Edda) and Christian records in sagas, laws and capitularies. Each pillar has gaps. Graves keep only what lasts; the rest decays. Romans saw with Roman eyes. Poetry is not a manual. And Christians wrote down what they fought or remembered.
For our subject this means: there is no secure source for tree burial as a rite before the twentieth century. There are attested tree coffins, attested groves as places of cult, attested world-tree poetry and attested ancestor veneration. Joining these parts is possible, but it is a bridge people build today, not one they found. Whoever knows this can step onto it more calmly.
Did the Germanic peoples practise tree burial? Burial at living trees is not attested for the Germanic period. Attested are tree coffins, that is, hollowed trunks used as coffins, for instance in the cemetery at Oberflacht in the sixth and seventh centuries, as well as cremation graves and mounds. Tacitus names the turf mound as the grave.
What role does Yggdrasil play in death? In the Edda, Yggdrasil is world axis and place of fate. Death appears there only at the edge, for instance in Odin's self-sacrifice on the tree (Hávamál 138). A burial at the world-tree is described in no source.
Since when have there been burial forests in Germany? The first German FriedWald opened in 2001; the brand goes back to the Swiss Ueli Sauter, who obtained approval for the first burial forest in 1999. In 2020 FriedWald and RuheForst together ran 142 sites by their own account.
May ashes be buried at home or in the garden in Germany? In most federal states, no. Cemetery law is a matter for the states, and Germany largely applies a cemetery requirement for burials. Burials take place in cemeteries and in designated burial forests. Details are set by state laws and local statutes.
Which urn is permitted in a burial forest? A biodegradable urn is usually required. Depending on the protection status of the forest, wood or stainless steel may also be possible. The burial is made in the root zone, as a rule at least 80 centimetres deep, and grave decoration is prohibited.
Did the Church ban burial beneath trees? For the early Middle Ages it is attested that Charlemagne's Capitulary for Saxony banned burial at the mounds of the pagans and required burial in churchyards. In the present, Catholic bishops criticised the anonymity of forest burial in 2005; other church voices see it less strictly.
Für Mut. Für Erinnerung. Für Legenden, die weiterleben.
How do heathens celebrate today? · Yggdrasil – the world tree · What comes after Ragnarök · Seiðr – the magic · The Germanic feasts.
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