Yggdrasil meaning
Yggdrasil is the world-tree of the Eddas, and also the gallows Odin hangs on. The poems do not give a neat map of nine realms. That poster is modern.
The tree at the middle, which is also a gallows.
The name. Often read as Yggr’s horse — Yggr a name of Odin, “horse” a kenning for the gallows he hung on.
Where it comes from
An ash in Völuspá, perhaps a yew in other lines — the species is already unstable. Roots among wells, a serpent below (Níðhöggr), an eagle above, the squirrel Ratatoskr carrying insults between them. Odin hangs on the tree nine nights in Hávamál to take up the runes. “Nine worlds” is a modern tidy diagram of scattered lines. The poems do not hand you a clean map. Compare the Kabbalistic tree and do not merge them.
Norse
A cosmos you suffer on
The world-tree is not a comfortable axis mundi and nothing more. The name remembers a hanging. Knowledge, in this myth, is taken by a god who puts himself in the position of the dead. The tree holds up the worlds and it kills. That double duty is the entry. A decorative ash with pretty roots has left the poem.
Norse
Refuse the poster
Nine neat realms in a stack are a textbook. The sources are stranger and less finished: wells with different names in different stanzas, creatures that quarrel, a tree that shakes at the end of things. Unfinished is not a defect here. It is the state of the evidence. The valknut has the same honesty to keep.
Near this
Sources
- Völuspá and Hávamál in the Poetic Edda
- Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.