Yggdrasil, the Norns and the Nine Worlds: The Cosmos Behind the Runes

The runes did not float free of a world-picture. In the Norse poems they are won on a tree that holds the worlds together, and fate itself is cut into wood by three women at a well beneath its roots. Anyone who reads runes with a sense of where they come from will meet this cosmos sooner or later. This article sets out what the sources actually say about it: the Eddic poems, chiefly the Völuspá and the Grímnismál, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, the thirteenth-century Icelander whose handbook for poets is our fullest account of Norse myth.

A word of caution first. The poems are allusive and sometimes contradict one another, and Snorri, writing as a Christian two centuries after the conversion, organised the material more neatly than his sources did. The tidy diagrams of modern books, with every world in its fixed place, are reconstructions. What follows tries to keep to what the texts say.

Yggdrasil, the World Tree

At the centre of the Norse world stands Yggdrasil, an ash tree so great that its roots and branches hold the worlds together. The Völuspá opens its account of creation with it. In Bellows’s translation: “An ash I know, Yggdrasil its name, with water white is the great tree wet.”

Its name is usually read as “Ygg’s horse”, Ygg being one of Odin’s names, and the horse a poetic word for the gallows. The tree remembers the nine nights Odin hung on it to win the runes.

Three roots and three wells

Snorri gives the tree three roots. One reaches to the gods, and under it lies the well of Urðr, where the gods hold their court each day. One reaches to the frost giants, and under it lies the well of Mímir, whose water holds wisdom and for which Odin gave an eye. The third reaches down to Niflheim, where the spring Hvergelmir rises and the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws at the root.

The three wells give the tree a kind of order: fate and judgement under one root, wisdom under another, and the cold, primal source of all rivers under the third. The Eddic poems are less systematic than Snorri, but they know the same wells and creatures.

A living, suffering tree

The tree is alive and it suffers. Four harts graze on its branches, an eagle sits at the top, and the squirrel Ratatoskr runs up and down the trunk carrying words of spite between the eagle and the dragon below. The Norns keep it from rotting by pouring the water of their well and the white clay around it over the branches. The poem Grímnismál says the ash endures more hardship than people know.

This is not an image of a static, perfect cosmos. The world is held together by something that is constantly being eaten, gnawed and tended. It lasts because it is cared for, and the care is daily.

For a reader of runes, Yggdrasil is the frame for everything else. It is where the runes were won, where the Norns sit, and where the nine worlds hang.

The well of Urðr and the three Norns

Beneath one root of Yggdrasil lies the well of Urðr, and beside it live three women the Völuspá calls “maidens mighty in wisdom”. Bellows translates the stanza:

Urth is one named, Verthandi the next,
On the wood they scored, and Skuld the third.
Laws they made there, and life allotted
To the sons of men, and set their fates.

These are the Norns. Urðr’s name is related to the past tense of the verb verða, “to become”, and so means something like “what has come to be”. Verðandi is the present participle of the same verb, “what is coming to be”. Skuld means “debt” or “what is owed”. Reading the three as past, present and future is a later interpretation, but it is built on what the names actually say, and it is the basis of the three-rune reading that bears their names.

Notice the detail in the middle of the stanza: they scored on the wood. The Norns do not only speak fate. They cut it, as runes are cut.

Snorri adds that the gods ride to the well every day to hold court, that its water is so holy that anything dipped in it turns white as the skin inside an eggshell, and that the Norns pour it over the ash each day so that its branches do not wither. The well of fate is also the well that keeps the world alive.

Wyrd: the word behind “weird”

Old English had the same word as Urðr: wyrd, the ancestor of modern “weird”, which kept the meaning “fate” until Shakespeare’s weird sisters in Macbeth. The Beowulf poet says it plainly: “Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel”, fate always goes as it must.

Wyrd is not a script written in advance so much as the way things turn out, the working through of what has already been laid down. The grammar of the Norns’ names supports this reading. Two of them are forms of “to become”; the third is a debt. Fate in this sense is not a sentence passed from outside but the momentum of what has happened, together with what it obliges.

Asking the runes in this spirit is not asking for a fixed future. It is asking what has been laid down, what is taking shape, and what is owed.

The nine worlds

The Völuspá says the seeress remembers nine worlds, and Norse myth hangs them on the World Tree. The poems never give a tidy list; the nine usually named today are gathered from Snorri and the Eddic poems. They are not planets but realms of being, each with its own people.

Asgard

Asgard is the home of the Æsir: Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Baldr and the rest. The rainbow bridge Bifröst joins it to the world of men, and Heimdall guards it.

Midgard

Midgard is the middle world, where humans live, ringed by the ocean in which Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, lies coiled around the earth.

Vanaheim

Vanaheim is the home of the Vanir, gods of fertility, wealth and the sea: Njörd, Freyr and Freyja. After a war between the two families of gods, they exchanged hostages and made peace, which is how Njörd and his children came to live among the Æsir.

Jotunheim

Jotunheim is the land of the giants. The giants are not simply enemies; they are the old, wild forces of the world, and many gods have giant mothers or wives. Odin’s own mother, Bestla, was of giant kin, and Njörd married the giantess Skadi.

Alfheim

Alfheim belongs to the light elves, whom Snorri calls fairer than the sun. The poem Grímnismál says the gods gave it to Freyr.

Svartalfheim

Svartalfheim is the realm of the dark elves and the dwarfs, the smiths who forged Thor’s hammer, Odin’s spear and Freyr’s ship.

Niflheim

Niflheim is the world of ice and mist, one of the two worlds that existed before creation, where the spring Hvergelmir rises.

Muspelheim

Muspelheim is the world of fire, the other primordial realm, home of Surtr, who will burn the world at Ragnarök. In Snorri’s account, life itself began where the ice of Niflheim met the heat of Muspelheim in the great void, Ginnungagap.

Helheim

Helheim is the realm of the dead, ruled by Hel. Snorri says those who die of sickness or old age go there. It is not a place of punishment but the common end.

The cosmos in a reading

The nine worlds are sometimes used as a layout for a rune reading, with one rune laid for each realm: Asgard for the highest aim, Midgard for daily life, Helheim for what must be let go, and so on. Such position meanings are modern, built by analogy from the character of each world, and should be understood that way. But the instinct behind them is sound. Norse cosmology is a map of forces: order and wildness, fire and ice, the living and the dead, all held on one tree that must be tended every day. A question asked against that background is a question about where one stands among those forces.

Sources: Völuspá and Grímnismál, tr. H. A. Bellows (1923); Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda; Beowulf.