I am sitting beneath the wisest tree in England. It is an extraordinary and ancient yew, estimated to be about 2500 years old. It lies near the banks of the River Thames, opposite the area known as Runnymede. Runnymede now refers to a specific island, but historical geographers reckon that in medieval times, it may have referred to a scattering of islands surrounded by what was then a wide estuary of the Thames. The river has since been re-routed, making these small islands into riverside land. Runnymede is famous as the site of the signing of the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215 – a document drawn up over nine days of negotiations between the barons – the high-ranking landowners of Norman England – and King John. The Magna Carta gave to the barons a share of the power which they believed was being wielded unethically by the king. It is sometimes proposed that the Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede because the site was near to London and yet open countryside. On those small islands, it would have been difficult to conceal an ambushing army, either on the king’s or the baron’s side. But there may also be a deeper reason, a significance which propels us back deeper into history, beyond the Magna Carta and into the age of Middle-earth.
In Anglo-Saxon times, Runnymede was known as Rune-mede … the area of the casting of the runes. Historians have suggested that, for kings and chieftains, this area may have been a sacred place, significant for divination and auguries. Wizards who specialized in such rituals foretold the wealth of the land in the coming season, the health of kings and princesses, chiefs and warriors, and the likely outcomes of battles. The history of the area as a royal divination site may have been why it was chosen as a location for signing such an important document as the Magna Carta.
Perhaps the most propitious site in Rune-mede, where the signing could have taken place and fortunes told centuries earlier, was at the ancient tree beneath which I am sitting. Now known as ‘Ankerwyke’, it would then have been well over 1,500 years old, and already massive. Also, as if in recognition of its special significance, a nunnery was built a mere thirty yards or so from the tree. Records show that it was constructed there in 1265, not long after the Magna Carta was signed, and possibly on the very spot where the historic agreement was made. The stone walls of the nunnery, the remains of which are still some twenty feet high in places, are built on an alignment which would have afforded a direct view of the ancient tree just outside a fine arched window and door, still present in the ruins. Looming over the kingly rune-castings, the tree must have been ‘witness’ to many secrets.
To visit the tree, I had journeyed a few miles west of the M25 motorway. Here the roar of the great London cityscape fades into the background, giving way to the birdsong of winding country lanes and the soft greenery of countryside. Near the village of Wraysbury, there are pockets of ancient forest stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. From the village, I walked for an hour across ancient fields, along trackways, and over wooden bridges linking ancient islands once separated by the estuary of the River Thames. Over the centuries the river has been re-routed, the water table is lower and the area between the islands drier, but the outlines of the water meadows can still be discerned.
Entering the ancient woodlands, the sensation is one of stepping back in time. All woods evolve with the centuries, but this one has had less human interference than most. Some of the oaks in nearby Windsor Park are still surviving after a thousand years. They are probably only the second generation descendants of trees which stood on this site in the times of Middle-earth. And in those times, the landscape looked different.
From an aeroplane today, the lush green landscape of England looks like a patchwork of farm fields, with scattered settlements connected by ribbon roads, and punctuated by great towns and cities. But if we could have made the same airborne survey two thousand years ago, at the beginning of Middle-earth, the land would have appeared radically different. Then, great woodlands of oak, beech, hornbeam, thorn and ash trees covered up to a third of the island, broken by tracts of open heath and moorland and hilltops ridged with scrub cover.
Already, for many centuries, early people had been cutting down the trees for their needs. This continued throughout the Middle-earth millennium. But the landscape encompassed perhaps a million people on an island that now supports over fifty times that number. Areas cleared for farming that were later abandoned, would have quickly grown back secondary forest of willow, then birch, followed by alder and hazel, then to oak and finally beech and spruce. However, by the Domesday Survey in 1086, forest cover was down to about 15 per cent. Today, surveys show deciduous woodland cover in Britain to be as low as 1.5 per cent, with total forest cover of all species of trees reaching about 7 per cent of the island. Compared with today, much of the landscape of the real Middle-earth lay under an exquisite blanket of foliage, green in summer, multicoloured in autumn, and like a gossamer web of lacy branchwork in the winter.
The shadows of this old world still stretch across modern England, for some woodlands of today retain their ancient names. Sometimes they were named for the tribal peoples who lived in them. In the seventh century an area of one of the large forests was called Inderauuda, meaning ‘in the wood of the Deirans’, and today Wych-wood in north-west Oxfordshire is the modern name of Hwicce Wood, the forest home of the ancient Hwicce clans.
Tolkien says that the Great Wood of The Lord of the Rings, which he called Mirkwood, was not his invention – his researches had led him to the original name for the great mountainous forest regions that had formed a barrier to the south of Germany. Mirkwood was a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations. So the hobbits trekked through forests that once really existed.
Some of the forests of the Real Middle-earth were extensive. For example, those woods called Dean, Morfe and Kinver, west of modern Stourbridge, each once covered hundreds of square miles. One of the most extensive wooded areas was the great Anglo-Saxon Andredesweald, described in the year 892 as ‘thirty miles wide and stretching one hundred and twenty miles from east to west’. Modern geographers reckon that this forest covered over 2,500 square miles, and the fragments that have survived comprise the present wooded area called the Weald, in the south-east of England between the Downs of Kent and Sussex. On the small island of Britain, forests of this magnitude would have dominated the landscape.
Trees also dominated the imagination of these peoples. Because people lived in them, depended on them for shelter, fuel, weapons, building and carpentry, hunting areas, and much more, they were intimately attached to the forest. Furthermore, in the times of Middle-earth the forest was treated like a place of magic and power. The forest was treated like a place of magic and power. It was like a great spirit which had to be befriended. For the Celts, the word ‘nemeton’ denoted a sacred grove of trees. The old Irish word, ‘fidnemed’ referred specifically to a forest shrine. Tacitus wrote that ‘The grove is the centre of their whole religion. It is regarded as the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place of the supreme god to whom all thing are subject and obedient.’
It is hardly surprising, for trees and forests seem to be a natural template for the human imagination. Many ancient folk tales are set in the woods. Perhaps it is the way our neurons are connected, like great entanglements of treetops in a forest of ganglia, that draws us to the image of branches passing messages.
Walking into the Wood
These thoughts primed my perceptions as I walked into the ancient wood near the Thames, to visit the ancient yew. The air was pungent with tree bark and the aroma of the dry ground cover crackling beneath my feet. A few fronds of bracken quivered in the shadows, and the grassy undergrowth was punctuated with delicate white flowering plants. Mosses crept up the lower trunks of trees. Crossing my path were narrow but clear animal trackways. Some of them seemed still well used, worn away by the feet of badgers, weasels, stoats, foxes and hares. The air must have been thick with the smells of territorial markers beyond my human nasal sensitivity.
Eventually the track opened out into a leafy glade, dappled a pale golden colour by the late morning summer sunlight. In the times of Middle-earth this would have been a place where hunters lay in wait for deer, hares and, for the brave, boar. The open ground afforded a clear flight for their arrows, fired from their hiding places in the undergrowth. Ash bows made to replicate those found in bogs of Anglo-Saxon times can shoot goose-feathered arrows hard for 150 yards. But even if an animal could be hit from that distance, it might cause only a glancing wound. Good hunters tried, like the drawings in medieval manuscripts, to shoot their prey from as close as possible. Experts reckon that twenty yards was an ideal distance for impact of the arrow blow, and to give the sharp iron tip a chance to penetrate.
In ancient times, journeys into woods like this were dangerous. Bandits haunted pathways through the large stretches of unowned land. There were also risks from wild animals – especially the great, looming brown bears which were hunted for their pelts, usually with pits of sharpened sticks. They are shy animals, and were probably rarely glimpsed. But if surprised and disturbed by a traveller early in the spring, when they may have just emerged half-starved from winter hibernation, a dangerously hungry bear could move fast and kill with a swipe of its claws.
Boar also ran wild in the woods – and are re-emerging today in some areas of Britain. They would attack humans only if disturbed and startled, but their aggressive charge hurtled a heavy muscular body low down through the undergrowth like an explosion of aggression. Wolves acquired an awesome reputation over the centuries of Middle-earth, and often became an enemy of humans because they hunted the same prey. They rarely attacked people unless they were injured or desperately hungry – but there was always the possibility.
A rabbit hopped across my path further along. It was probably the most dangerous animal I would encounter today.
As I left the main footpaths and ventured under the tree cover, I saw a patch of soft, mossy ground pressed flat, possibly by a deer taking a rest. And a short distance away a deer-nibbled sapling gleamed, freshly stripped of bark a few feet from the ground. The Anglo-Saxons would have tried to protect young saplings from being browsed by deer by digging ditches and piling the earth as ramparts around the boundaries of woodland areas.
A giant willow stood massive and alone at the far end of a clearing, its leaf-laden branches climbing above roots thickly carpeted with columbine and purple garlic. All around me elder and sweet-briar shrubs flaunted petals in colours softened by the filtered sunlight. I breathed their sweet fragrance warmed and wafted by the summer breeze. Chaffinches flitted nervously from bush to bush, chattering to each other in harsh warning notes as I passed. When today we glimpse the breathtaking beauty of a woodland setting, it is hardly surprising to us that the people of the historical Middle-earth imbued nature with a spiritual presence. But, of course, for them it was far more than a matter of aesthetic beauty. Landscapes are taken in by the eye but actually perceived with the brain. That is where interpretation and meaning make sense of the signals from our sensory receptors. And they saw more than we would, gazing at the same scene. They thought of nature not only as an objective world, external to themselves, but as also reaching internally, with magical powers and imbued with the full richness of their imagination. Features of nature had many layers of meaning, levels of significance, allusions and messages. The forest was alive with the chatter of another world. Particular trees, for example, held magical potency.
I came across a huge, fallen giant beech tree, victim of high winds in the south of England in the 1980s. Massive tree rootballs lay exposed, towering fifteen or twenty feet high, ripped from the ground by the weight of the tree crashing down. The roots were truly magnificent. I rested awhile, leaning against the fallen trunk. I could identify the tree as a beech by its shape, its bark and leaves.
In Anglo-Saxon times, this would be just the beginning. Then, strips of beechwood, or even bark, were taken on which runes were carved, and for the making of runesticks for divination. Perhaps this is why beech (‘boc’ in Old English) shares its name with the ancient form of the word ‘book’.
In those times too, houses were sometimes built next to, or even around trees. The tree embodied the destiny of the family living beneath it. The Norse had a concept called ‘barnstokkr’ (barn = ‘baby’; stokkr ‘tree trunk’) which symbolized the eternal unfolding of generations of a family, and linked them with both ancestors and generations to come. The tree sanctified the well-being of these generations.
The Anglo-Saxon word ‘treow’ meant both ‘tree’, and ‘trust’ or ‘truth’. The tree seemed to represent the very essence of spiritual reality in cosmology, and material trees manifested this deepest level of integrity. For this reason, trees were even thought to provide witness for the most serious of contracts between people. Sacred vows, such as marriages or pledges, were carried out in the presence of these spirits of nature – rather like a pre-Christian ceremony equivalent to swearing on a Bible. Not surprisingly, the Church authorities objected: one of their proscriptions admonished ‘No one shall go to trees, or wells, or stones … or anywhere else except to God’s church, and there make vows or release himself from them.’
* * *
As the wood deepened, ahead of me the grassy trackway twisted to the left beneath the huge, spreading canopy of an old ash tree. The base of the trunk was smothered with drooping blue flowers of columbine. As I came closer, I could see the bark had turned dark grey, and was crazed with a network of shallow ridges, like the map of another world. The ash tree produces elegant shoots, tall, straight, strong and clear of branches – ideal for the shafts of spears. The Anglo-Saxon word for this tree, ‘aesc’, meant not only ‘ash’ but also ‘spear’.
But the ash also had an Otherworld dimension. As I stood at the base of the trunk and looked up, from this vantage point, the highest branches seemed to disappear into the sky. And when powerful winter storms raged through the woods toppling trees, the ash tended to stand its ground. In Anglo-Saxon times, this deep-rooted stability encouraged people to imagine that its roots sank into the ground as far as its trunk and branches stretched into the sky. The tree seemed to form a bridge between the spirits of the Lowerworld, and the Upperworld realm of the gods. The Norse identified the ash (or some say the yew … we shall come to that later) as the World Tree, the image that connected all worlds of spirit.
A ‘maiden’ ash like this one – self-sown, rather than planted, and never pruned – was especially powerful. It had magical powers. I picked up a long twig which had dropped down from the branches. It was narrow, strong, whip-like. It whistled when I snapped it through the air. In ancient times, riders would cut sticks of ash to use as crops, whipping or ‘twitching’ their horses. But the whip’s usefulness far surpassed its practical qualities – the ash’s magical powers warded off harmful magic directed towards the horse and rider. The twig or stick must have contained, for the Anglo-Saxons, the potency of the whole tree, stretching between the Worlds. It was like a lightning conductor for unseen forces. Malevolent spirits of the Otherworld may have tried to grip and grasp a rider, pulling him from his horse, or directing the animal to step into a hole, hobbling it. But grasping spirit-fingers were warded off by the slashing stick of ash in the rider’s hand.
In Middle-earth, a central power of spell-casting was to draw energy into the confined and controllable space of a circle. Often the circle was carefully etched into the ground with a wizard’s staff formed from a maiden ash tree, thereby containing and binding unseen forces.
In everyday life, people believed that such a circle drawn with ash could contain snakes, and prevent them from escaping. I picked up an ash wand which was among several that had blown down from the tree, and lay in the undergrowth. It was about four feet long – a little short for a staff – but very straight and smooth. I held it lightly, and concentrated. Then I drew a clear cirle around myself, dragging the end of the wand through the grass of the forest floor. Standing in the circle, I chanted some of the words of the charm in the Lacnunga spellbook: ‘I circle myself with this rod and trust, against the sore stitch, against the sore bite, against the grim dread, against the great horror that is hateful to all, and all evil that enters this land.’ I went to set the stick aside … but then kept the wand with me just in case of snakes. Or Otherworld intrusions.
A stand of six beautiful birches, growing tall and straight, arose right ahead of me. When I reached them, their bark was white and wonderfully stimulating to the touch; rough and textured. The surface was dry, but rain the previous day had still not dried from within the cracks and crevices of the trunk. Its beauty was appreciated in early England. The rune B was called ‘beorc’, a variant of the word ‘birch’. It was a tree which in Anglo-Saxon times was associated with the feminine, and had the connotation of female purity. Perhaps its clean white trunk gave this impression. Where possible, stables built for horses were sited next to a birch, for its purity was protection against a feared feminine energy: witches. A birch hung with strips of red and white cloth outside a stable was believed to protect the horses from hag-riding. This might occur in the dead of night, when witches ghosted into the stable, stole the horses and rode them hard out into the darkness. The horses were later returned by the witches, but the animals were trembling with exhaustion, foaming with sweat, their nostrils flaring and eyes rolling.
Beneath the birches spread a low stand of creamy flowered elder shrubbery, giving off a heavy, fruity fragrance. Their leaves grow on stout twigs which are filled with a thick, white pith. I snapped one off. The pith is easily hollowed out by a finer stick or long blade to make a hollow tube, from which can be constructed pea-shooters or whistles. Elder gets its name from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘hollow tree’, so perhaps they knew how to make pea-shooters and whistles!
The branches of the elder curved over and formed a tunnel, or hole. I crawled through it. Certain trees were regarded as having direct healing powers. Sometimes the way a tree had grown, or been hit by lightning, or rotted out in the centre, provided a space in the trunk through which people could pass. The tree formed its own circular passage, concentrating its spiritual and beneficent energies within the space. Such holes in trees through which people or animals could pass transferred to them some of the wisdom and energy of these sacred, huge growing things. So farmers of ancient times drove their animals through it to bring them good health.
This practice enraged Christian authorities, for it engaged directly with spiritual powers, rather than by grace of priests interdicting with God. In about AD 640, St Eligius was provoked to declare ‘Let no-one … make flocks pass through a hollow tree or an aperture in the earth; for by so doing he seems to consecrate them to the devil.’ He also insisted that, ‘No Christian place fires at the temples or at the stones, or at fountains and springs, or at trees, or at places where three ways meet.’ Placing fires meant lighting wildfires, or flames kindled from scratch, and holding celebrations by their light. Clearly various features of nature also held this magic – not only the wooden ‘temples’, but also stone circles, fountains and springs, and where ‘three ways meet’ – crossroads. Certainly they were consecrated to local spirits, emanations of the sacred essence of the natural features of the landscape.
I climbed over fallen giant trees, some from the hurricane winds of fifteen years previously, left here to rot. One was an oak, hundreds of years old. Its uprooted base jutted jaggedly into the air, probably a victim of the same storms. The underside of the logs where the bark remained moist, had sprung large mushrooms, some white and two red. Here the leaf litter was soft and damp, and twigs bent under my feet. The oak was considered to be sacred to Thor, or Thunor, the thunder god in ancient European and Norse mythology. Celts favoured the oaks for Druidic rites, and these trees were iconic as spirit beings.
The light softened and and the wood became misty as if behind a lens, as the sun warmed the leaf cover high above. A light breeze trembled and the leaves and shafts of light darted about here and there, seeming to illuminate a path across the woodland floor. I was nearing the wise yew tree.
The World Tree
As I approached the site of the ancient tree, I passed by a sweeping plantation of shrubbery. It was bladebrush, which has leaves with razor-sharp edges. The shrubs were originally planted centuries ago by women who lived in the nearby nunnery. They used switches of the shrub for whipping their naked flesh to scourge themselves of sin.
The tree suddenly came into view. It was massive in drawings of the nineteenth century, but is shorter now, for over the years it has lost top branches and trunk to lightning and other environmental hazards. But the tree has an immense presence. It is fronted by a small sign from English Heritage, marking it out as a tree of historical significance.
Yews are male or female, and this is the former. It has a very thick trunk, over thirty feet in circumference. The trunk is fantastically knotted, swirling and twisting all the way up, like the gnarled skin and beard of an ancient giant, which, to the people of the Real Middle-earth, is exactly what it was. But most remarkably, the trunk has, with age, lost much of its bark. It has peeled away to reveal the heartwood. This has the appearance of molten lava, honey coloured, flowing down the trunk of the tree. Its eddies and curlicues make fascinating shapes which appear to take on the form of horses, bulls, elves and other spirit creatures.
Tolkien reflected this image of the wise tree in his character Treebeard, a giant who appears in The Lord of the Rings with a straggly, long face, and a bushy beard bristling like a mass of twigs with mossy endings. His body is two or three times the size of a man. He is supported by strong, thick legs, and his broad shoulders connect directly to the head without any neck. Rough, thick, greeny-grey skin, like the bark of an elm tree, cover his trunk, but his arms have a smooth brown skin. Each of his feet rambles into seven toes, and when he walks, each stride covers about seven yards.
Tolkien personally felt that trees had a special presence: he said that the magical, fantasy realm of Lothlorien was beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere they were represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and his companions dozed under an enormous, ancient willow tree. As they drifted into sleep, they glimpsed the hoary branches stretching across the sky, and heard them creaking in the wind. Words drifted into their minds, words they could hardly hear, words that cast a spell over them and took them to a dream world.
The yew tree was like this – old beyond guessing. Great trailing wisps of twig hung from the heavy branches, drifting and swaying in the light breeze. It is a place for perennial spirits which live forever, peering from the branches at the ever-unfolding passage of time, the shifting landscape and many generations of human life.
For the people of Middle-earth, age conferred knowledge. It was a time where information was preserved only in the experienced heads of people as they matured, so that the wisdom of age was truly venerated – not as a romantic homage to a person who had survived a long time and now needed buttressing in fragile old age, but rather out of pragmatic respect for all that such a person had seen, heard, experienced and knew. So what could be more knowledegable than trees, the oldest living things in the landscape?
The world’s oldest known wooden artefact, dating from the Hoxnian interglacial layer, 250,000 BC, is a yew spear, found at Clacton in Essex. Another yew spear, probably flint-tipped, has been found in Lower Saxony, where it had been deposited in the ground at about 200,000 BC. The spear was still lodged between the ribs of a straight-tusked elephant.
Possibly the two oldest examples of yew bows are from the Somerset Levels dated about 2700 BC. And the neolithic corpse of the ‘Iceman’ discovered in 1991 on the Italian–Austrian border had with him a yew longbow measuring 6 feet, even though the man himself was only 5 feet 2 inches tall. This bow may be even older than the Somerset ones, possibly from about 3500 BC.
So yew trees have played a part in human history since the earliest times. However, surviving yew trees are notoriously difficult to date. Although it is widely accepted that they grow to a great age, the oldest ones lose their centre. Because it rots out, fallen trees become hollow and cannot have their rings counted in cross-section because the tree is hollow. So what experts have done is to calculate the average circumference increase in younger yews, and extrapolate to larger ones. This is an inexact science, of course, for tree growth may slow with increasing longevity. But even allowing for this, the trees are hundreds and in some cases, thousands of years old. The oldest yews are reckoned to be as old as Stonehenge. Most of the stone circles in Britain, about 900 of them including Stonehenge, were built between 2600 and 1500 BC, as were the stone rows at Carnac in Brittany. There are at least half a dozen trees existing now that were in their prime at that time, and probably a dozen or so more that have been recorded but have now gone. By these sort of calculations, the yew tree beneath which I was sitting is at least 2,500 years old.
The special significance of yews is also apparent from the way they were sometimes planted on top of burial mounds. Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire created a sensation when it was investigated by Victorian archaeologists in 1883. A large burial mound, 15 feet high, stood 30 yards west of the site of a ruined church. This was a pagan mound within a Christian churchyard. When the barrow was opened it was found to be the grave of a Saxon warrior, buried with his gold buckles, jewelled studs, drinking horn and arms. These objects date his burial to about AD 600. On top of the barrow was an ancient yew, with a circumference of at least 21 feet. For a yew of that size the most likely origin is that it was planted by the Saxons when they interred their dead chief.
Yew trees in churchyards often predate the church, and it is likely that the trees were sacred for our indigenous ancestors long before the advent of Christianity to these islands. The policy of the early church was to Christianize pagan practices rather than always attempting to combat and destroy them. The missionaries of the ‘new’ Christian religion from the East built some of their churches on existing sacred sites, following advice from Pope Gregory in Rome. A letter he sent to St Augustine in Britain dated 12 July AD 594 bids him
… not to destroy pagan temples, but rather to replace the idols with the relics of saints; to sprinkle the old precincts with holy water and rededicate them, because people come more readily to the places where they have been accustomed to pray. At festivals the people shall be allowed to build their booths of green leaves and to slay their bulls.
He reasoned that it was easier to draw people into a new way of worship if it held a visible and symbolic link with their spiritual life in the past.
I sat down on one of the roots of the yew, resting my back against the trunk. Above me, the branches stretched an unbelievable distance in every direction. Each branch was the size and weight of many entire smaller trees. Gazing up at the branches ranging into the sky, it was easy to see why the tree was such a potent image for the people of our ancient past.
Trees were not just external objects, but also formed a pathway for people to move into the spirit world. Far back, Norse legends tell us, the god Odin, archetypal wizard, climbed into a tree, from there journeyed through the realms of spirit, and came back with a map of the cosmos.
In the creation mythology of the historical Middle-earth, reported in its later Norse form by Snorri Sturluson, the original state of the cosmos was defined by two mighty polarities of force opposing one another. One was composed of fire, the other of ice. Between the two was a region of empty space, which exploded. The ice hissed, and fire spat, and between them they created a seething, swirling mist of potent liquid which filled three wells of wisdom, one of which was called the Well of Wyrd.
The cosmology of Middle-earth also featured, above the well, a central, unifying image: that of an enormous tree which was so high that it reached to the heavens, and with roots so deep that no one knew for sure where they ended. This World Tree formed an unimaginably vast organic map for the realms of the spirit, encompassing the upper worlds of the gods, middle worlds of people, and under world of wisdom within the corresponding parts of the tree: upper branches, lower branches and roots. Sometimes in the literature that surrounds the Norse myths the tree is described as an ash, or even ‘an evergreen ash’. Scholars of this literature have declared that the evergreen yew was also held sacred, and a name for the yew in Old Norse is ‘barraskr’, which means ‘needle-ash’.
We know that the early Germanic tribes, at the beginning of the Middle-earth millennium, had a ‘World Tree’, reflecting their notion that the heavens whirl about a central beam or pivot which pierces both earth and sky. This ‘pillar of heaven’ was known to the continental Saxons as ‘Irminsul’ and was represented by a huge wooden pillar erected as the focal point of their religion. The pillar was destroyed by the Christian Charlemagne. In Norse myth the pillar was known as Yggdrasil, ‘Odin’s steed’, since on it the god Odin journeyed to the heavens. The English likewise venerated both standing stones (as at Stonehenge) and prominent trees. An eleventh century English penitential refers directly to the practice:
Some men are so blinded that they bring their offerings to an earth-fast stone and also to trees and wellsprings, just as witches tell, and they will not understand how stupidly they act, or how the lifeless stone or the dumb tree can help them or deliver health when they themselves never stir from that place.
The ancient cultures of Middle-earth seemed to be based on a shamanically-inspired vision of life, as we shall see later. This means that their notion of the structure of the cosmos, and the spiritual realms, was discovered for them by wizards – people who could enter trance states which they believed could enable them to transcend the earthly realm, ‘fly’ into the Otherworlds of spirit, and return with descriptions of the geographies of those sacred places. In the legends of the Norse, the first such journey was taken by Odin, a figure later revered as a god, and who served as an archetypal template for the initiation of shamans in Middle-earth. His quests for wisdom in the Otherworld are hinted at in Beowulf and later Norse sagas, as we shall see in chapter 14.
The Cosmology
One of the experiences Odin underwent in his quest for knowledge is contained in the lines of an ancient Norse poem called Havamal, written in a form so condensed it is practically a hidden code. Stemming from an oral tradition of sacred poetry from very ancient times, the Havamal was written down by Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth century as a part of his compilation of materials about Norse indigeneous beliefs, folkways and shamanic traditions from many sources.
The Havamal narrates Odin’s own description of his initiation, his exploration of his inner worlds, and the map of the cosmos that he revealed during his spirit journeys. The concentrated core of Odin’s vision quest for magical wisdom is distilled in the following lines:
I know that I hung on the windswept tree for nine full nights,
wounded with a spear and pledged to Odin,
offered, myself to myself;
The wisest know not from whence spring
the roots of that ancient tree.
They did not comfort me with bread,
and not with the drinking horn;
I peered downward,
I grasped the ‘runes’, screaming I grasped them;
I fell back from there.
Nine powerful spells I learned
from the famous son of Bolthor,
father of Bestla,
and I got a draught of the precious mead,
poured from magic Odrerir.
Learned I grew then, lore-wise,
grew and prospered well:
Word from word gave words to me,
Deed from deed gave deeds to me.
Each of these lines refers to a whole world of symbol and significance, but the bare outlines are generally agreed by scholars: in the myth Odin climbed into a sacred tree, and stayed there for nine days and nights without food or water. Under these conditions of privation and intense focus, he entered states of consciousness in which the tree changed into an enormous white, eight-legged horse (who we shall revisit in a later chapter on guardian animals), on which Odin rode through the sky to the Upperworld and down to the Lowerworld, visiting the nine Otherworlds of Knowledge.
During this journey he met, at a magical spring bubbling up by the root of the World Tree, a wisdom giant called Mimir who yielded incantations and powers to help Odin in his quest. He then journeyed to far-off realms where he had to fight, using his wits, trickery, shapeshifting and other powers from Mimir to acquire the source of sacred inspiration which was stored in three vast cauldrons of mead hidden in a cave in the centre of a mountain. It was guarded by fearsome giants, and Odin nearly died in the mountain. But triumphantly he fulfilled his quest, and brought back to his fellow gods, and the human inhabitants of Middle-earth, the secrets of life contained in the mead of wisdom.
At the centre of his visionary journey was the tree. In Norse legend it is called Yggdrasil. This name is a compound of two words: the stem of yggr is ygg-, the ‘frightening’ or ‘awe-inspiring one’, which was one of Odin’s nicknames; drasill is a literary word meaning ‘horse’. So the name identifies the tree as the means of Odin’s ‘ride’ to the spirit world, his transportation for the quest. I believe that the name Ygg is Odin’s identity before he undertook his initiation in the World Tree. The name Odin is so close to the root meaning of the word ‘shaman’ that I suspect that Odin is a title acknowledging his new status.
I know that I hung on the windswept tree …
The wisest know not from whence spring
the roots of that ancient tree.
These lines conjure an evocative image of a mysterious tree. Such images serve as a kind of springboard for the imagination. They lie at the heart of all shamanic visionary activity, and Odin’s journey on the World Tree echoes an apparently universal experience of shamans in all cultures, and all times. In tribal cultures whose traditions have survived into modern times, anthropologists have described how apprentice shamans acquire their helping spirits, those ‘beings’ which advise, give healing powers and assist in journeys to worlds of knowledge. To journey there, they carry out highly ritualized, sacralized and impeccably executed retreats into remote areas of the wilderness. These ventures into the ‘untamed’ landscape are well beyond the normalizing and secure bounds of human society.
In all traditional cultures, there were sacred places which were favourable for such first encounters with the spirits. These were places which existed in the material world but which had extraordinary significance as entry points to another world. They were literally and metaphorically doorways into the spirit realm.
The physical nature of that special place depended of course on the terrain in which the tribal culture lived. It could variously be in the vast lake areas of Siberia, the mountains of the East, the desert plains of western United States, the snow plains of the Sami or the rainforests of South America. For the apprentice shamans of early north-western Europe, it may have been a hilltop, perhaps on an ancient burial mound left by previous civilizations. But it seemed preferably to be high in a tree selected for the ritual.
The initiate wizard entered an altered state of consciousness and plunged into the imaginal depths of the collective unconscious. This state of mind could be likened to ‘dreaming with open eyes’. Nevertheless, the sacred process was framed within the material world: the physical, for shamanic inspiration is largely the sacralization of the familiar, rather than merely an escape into some ‘other’ reality. Seeing the familiar with new eyes is the gift of the shamanic journey, rather than simply an ‘escape’ into some other reality. So if ancient initiation practices were carried out in the same way as more recent traditions suggest, then the shaman climbed a ‘real’ tree in order to undergo a journey of the imagination as colourful and intense as possible. It engendered the arrival of spirit forces which would come upon the shaman in the guise of visions, sounds and the material form of animals.
In an example from a recent tribal culture, a Siberian shaman thought of the World Tree as represented by a birch. He explains that in preparation for the initiation ritual, or ‘on the way to the ancestral shaman’, the master shamans arrived with him at a tree believed to be possessed of powerful life-force. The initiate shaman rested at the foot of the special tree and examined the individual markings placed by various shamans over the years. By carving his name into the tree and vividly calling to mind the names of his shamanic ancestors, the newly inititated shaman shared the sacredness of the tree and acquired additional knowledge. Many recent tribal cultures believe that sacred objects like a tree are part of a cosmos which is structured in a manner we would call ‘holographically’. In this view, every individual tree is considered to represent the essence, the centre, the World Tree. I turned and looked again at the remarkable spirit-features of the ancient yew. It is easy to imagine how such trees could have been treated as, in our modern terms, a metaphor for a journey from one realm into another.
Today we would tend to conceive of the Otherworld journeys as being located in our psyche, perhaps deep in the unconscious. The imaginal structure of the World Tree, and Odin’s process of imagining journeying on the Tree as it transforms into a magical horse, would be tools and techniques for entering and accessing areas of the unconscious which might otherwise be closed to us except in the most deeply symbolic dreams.
But for the peoples of ancient Europe, the imaginal was a realm not physically bounded by the body, and not conceived of as ‘only’ an internal event, as we shall see throughout this book. For them, the significance of the imaginal was that it allowed humans to encompass realms outside even the physical plane of the material world. For our ancestors the everyday, logical, analytical, material world was a tiny microcosm of the magnificent, boundless imaginal world. Shamans were expected to be able to journey to this world, and act there on behalf of the community.
Odin’s vision, as described by Snorri Sturluson, appeared as a giant ash tree called Yggdrasil. It was so vast that ‘its branches spread out over the whole world and reach up over heaven’. Featured around the tree were three gigantic discs set one above the other, with a space in between each. These were the three realms which made up the cosmos. They were the Upperworld, Middle-earth and Lowerworld. Suspended among these three realms were nine worlds.
In the Upperworld branches of the World Tree lived gods and goddesses. There were two worlds of gods. Asgard was the world of a tribe of gods known as the Aesir, living in great halls; they were warrior gods representing aspects of the old sky god called Allfather, who was eventually replaced by Odin. Also in the Upperworld were the fertility gods known as the Vanir. There were twenty-seven gods and goddesses in all. Finally the Upperworld featured a third world of knowledge, the land of the light elves, magical creatures who expressed the spirit of nature.
The second level, around the lower branches and trunk of the World Tree was called Middle-earth. It is in this realm that human life unfolded. However, Middle-earth does not refer merely to the material world of everyday existence. Rather it is the spiritual world of humankind. It was surrounded by a vast ocean, and Jormungand, the immense world serpent, lay in this ocean. He was so long that he encircled Middle-earth and bit on his own tail. He ‘bound’ the energy of the realm. Without him it would have exploded in a raging chaos.
Another world witnessed by Odin in his visionary journey was at the outer edge of the Middle-earth disc, and lay ‘over the ocean’. This was the world of the giants, or ents, called Jotunheim. The giants were the beings who established the Earth. They were huge elemental forces, brutishly strong but short on intellect. Also in this Middle realm, in the north, lived the dwarves. They dwelt underground in a world called Nidavellir (dark home), a ‘subterranean’ world of darkness where shapes are forged. And there was another world called Svartalfheim (land of the dark elves). No clear distinction though can be drawn between the dwarves and dark elves; they appear to have been interchangable.
Odin saw that the Upperworld and the Middle World were connected by a bridge of fire, a flaming rainbow bridge, called Bifrost (Trembling Way). This can sometimes be glimpsed from within everyday states of consciousness. Snorri Sturluson says: ‘You will have seen it but maybe you call it the rainbow. It has three colours and is very strong, and made with more skill and cunning than other structures.’ The Trembling Way bridge transported the wizard from the world of mundane reality to the Otherworld, the transcended states of consciousness.
Deep in the roots of the tree lay the third realm. This was the Underworld or Lowerworld comprising Niflheim (the world of the dead), located nine days northwards and downwards from Midgard. Niflheim was a place of bitter cold and unending night. Its citadel was Hel, a place with towering walls and forbidding gates presided over by the hideous female monster, half white and half black, of the same name. However, the Lowerworld in ancient European cosmology is a realm which has to be completely re-visioned in order for us to understand its significance, for the word ‘hel’ carries negative connotations for western culture of the Christian Hell.
Certainly the Lowerworld of the European wizard could be dark and potent. But this world also held the wisdom of the dead. For wizards to journey to the Lowerworld was dangerous, but could reap great rewards of wisdom.
Snorri Sturluson says that Yggdrasil had three mighty roots, one each for the three realms of Upperworld, Middle-earth and Lowerworld. The first reached into Asgard, and nourishing this root was the Well of Wyrd, by the side of which lived the three Wyrd Sisters, makers of destiny. Each day the gods gathered here in council. The Wyrd Sisters (Norns in the Scandinavian versions) nurture the great tree. Sturluson writes, ‘It is said further that the Norns who live near the spring of Urd draw water from the spring every day, and along with it the clay that lies around about the spring, and they besprinkle the ash so that its branches shall not wither or decay.’
The second root spread to Jotunheim, and under this root was the Spring of Mimir, the great, wise giant who taught wizards some of their most important spells.
The third root plunged into the Lowerworld. Under this root was the Spring of Hvergelmir, the source of eleven rivers and the lair of the dragon Nidhogg. The dragon, or serpent, Nidhogg sends challenges and riddles up the full length of the trunk of Yggdrasil, carried by a squirrel, to a great eagle whose claws grasp the highest branches.
This, then, is the wondrous vision that Odin experienced during his initiation. He saw it, and he created it. It was the ‘sacred geography’ of his spiritual journey with Sleipnir, his eight-legged horse. In poetic form, it reveals how the people of the real Middle-earth imagined the cosmos.