A tree carries the world – but what waters the tree? Beneath the roots of Yggdrasil lie three springs, and each tells a different story: one of fate, one of wisdom, one of the source of all waters. Know the three wells, and you understand how the North imagined its cosmos: as a cycle, not a building.
At the holiest place of the world, beneath the root that Snorri sends up to heaven, lies Urd’s well (Urðarbrunnr). Here the gods ride day after day across the bridge Bifröst to hold council and judgement – only Thor wades on foot through the rivers Körmt and Örmt, for his thunder-tread would endanger the burning bridge. And here dwell the three Norns: Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. Every day they draw water from the well and sprinkle the ash with the white clay (aurr) that lies around the spring, “so that its branches may not wither or rot”. The water is so holy, says Snorri, that everything that enters it turns white as the film inside an eggshell. Two swans swim on the well – ancestors of all swans. And the dew that falls from the tree into the valleys is called honey-fall: on it, says Snorri, the bees feed.
“An ash I know, Yggdrasil its name,
With water white is the great tree wet;
Thence come the dews that fall in the dales,
Green by Urth’s well does it ever grow.”
— Voluspo 19, translation Henry Adams Bellows (1923, public domain)
The Old Norse word urðr is the same word as Old English wyrd and Old High German wurt – the common Germanic name of fate. Urd’s well, then, originally meant simply: the well of fate. In the Hildebrandslied, written down around 830 in the monastery of Fulda, the old warrior groans: “wewurt skihit” – “woe-fate is happening”. The same wurt once invoked at German hearth fires sits in the North as a Norn by the well. And an echo lives on: Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” in Macbeth carry the very same word – it was through these three sisters that English weird came to mean “uncanny”.
The famous trio, by the way, is only half the truth. In the Fafnismol the dying dragon teaches Sigurd: “Of many births the Norns must be, nor one in race they were; some to gods, others to elves are kin, and Dvalin’s daughters some.” Norns born of gods, elves and dwarfs. They come to women “in need” and release the child from the mother: the women of fate are also midwives, and the Sigrdrifumol recommends birth-runes and a call to the dísir. Striking, too: only Urd is old and widely attested – Verdandi occurs exactly once in the whole corpus, and Skuld also rides shield in hand as a valkyrie in the Völuspá. The tidy series “past, present, future” is probably a late, learned arrangement. And no spinning happens at Urd’s well: the Norns of the Edda “laws they made there, and life allotted” – they cut lots and carved staves. The spinning wheel belongs to the Roman Parcae.
Beneath the second root, over among the frost giants, “where Ginnungagap once was”, lies the well of Mimir. In it wisdom and understanding are hidden, and its keeper drinks from it every morning – which is why he knows more than any other being. The most famous guest of this well paid the highest price: Odin laid his eye in it as a pledge for a single draught. But the Völuspá hints at a second pledge: the seeress knows “Heimdall’s hljóð” hidden beneath the holy tree. The word can mean “horn” – or “hearing”. Does the Gjallarhorn lie there in waiting, or did Heimdall, who hears the grass grow, sacrifice his ear as Odin did his eye? The question is open to this day – and it is one of the loveliest riddles of the Edda.
“I know where Othin’s eye is hidden,
Deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir;
Mead from the pledge of Othin each morn
Does Mimir drink: would you know yet more?”
— Voluspo 28–29, translation Henry Adams Bellows (1923, public domain)
Between the wells stands no unscathed pillar, but an organism under permanent strain. Four harts – Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, Durathror – browse the fresh shoots “with necks bent back”. The squirrel Ratatosk races up and down the trunk carrying the eagle’s taunts from the crown down to the dragon Nidhogg – the cosmos comes with a built-in gossip who keeps the quarrel alive. And below lie more serpents “than fools may dream of”: the Grimnismol lists them by name, and two of those serpent names – Ofnir and Svafnir – are also names of Odin. At the tree on which the god once hung gnaw serpents that bear his name. The core stanza puts it starkly:
“Yggdrasil’s ash great evil suffers,
Far more than men do know;
The hart bites its top, its trunk is rotting,
And Nithhogg gnaws beneath.”
— Grimnismol 35, translation Henry Adams Bellows (1923, public domain)
The tree’s very name belongs to this dark picture: Yggdrasil literally means “the steed of Ygg” – of “the Terrible One”, that is, Odin. A “horse” one rides by hanging from it: the gallows. Nine nights Odin hung “on the windy tree, wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself” – thus he won the runes. Tree and well together form the great place of sacrifice of the mythology: at the trunk the self-offering for the runes, at the root the eye-offering for wisdom.
The third spring is the oldest and wildest: Hvergelmir, the “roaring kettle”, in the midst of Niflheim. From it rise the Élivágar, the primal rivers of creation – from whose freezing spray the first giant Ymir took shape in Ginnungagap. Below, Nidhogg gnaws the root; above, on the roof of Valhalla, stands the hart Eikthyrnir, browsing the tree’s foliage: from his antlers the drops fall down to Hvergelmir – “thence come the rivers all”. Beside him the goat Heidrun feeds on the same leaves – from her udder flows the mead of the Einherjar. The same foliage feeds intoxication and life: from the well into the tree, from the tree into the antlers, from the antlers back into the deep and out into every river of the world – the cosmos of the Norse is one great water cycle, modelled on the dew and rain of their own landscape.
The most astonishing part: this ensemble actually stood in the landscape. Around 1075 Adam of Bremen describes the great sanctuary of Uppsala – and a marginal note of his chronicle records: near the temple stands a mighty tree, “evergreen in winter as in summer; of what kind it is, nobody knows” – and beside it a spring where the heathens sacrifice, lowering a living man into it; if he does not surface again, the people’s wish will be fulfilled. An evergreen tree above a sacrificial well: that is Voluspo 19, seen through a chronicler’s eyes. Archaeology supplies the counterpart: at Trelleborg on Zealand, five deep offering wells were found beneath the Viking fortress, holding animal bones, jewellery – and the skeletons of four children. Heavy as such finds weigh, they show that the holy waters of the Edda were no poet’s dream. The holy tree, too, had kin on solid ground – from Donar’s oak at Geismar and the Irminsul of the Saxons to the “warden tree” by the farmstead that Scandinavia knew into modern times.
Yggdrasil – the world tree · The Norns · Odin’s eye at Mimir’s well · Niflheim · The Nine Worlds · The valkyries.
Völuspá 19–20/27–29/30, Grimnismol 25–35, Hovamol 111/139–140, Fafnismol 12–13, Sigrdrifumol 9, Vafthruthnismol 31 (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 4, 15–16, 36, 39; Ynglinga saga ch. 4/7 (Mimir’s head). Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis IV 26–27 with scholion 138; Hildebrandslied v. 49; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (2007); Gerd Wolfgang Weber, Wyrd (1969); François-Xavier Dillmann, “Mímir”, RGA 20 (2001); René Derolez, Götter und Mythen der Germanen (1974); Anders Andrén, Tracing Old Norse Cosmology (2014); “A ritual site with sacrificial wells from the Viking Age at Trelleborg”, Danish Journal of Archaeology 3 (2015); Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1956/57).