One is a great ash with a squirrel running up and down it and a dragon chewing at the roots. The other is a circle of branches and roots that never ends. On the Norse world tree, the Celtic tree of life, and why people keep mixing them up.
Tree of life vs Yggdrasil, in one line: Yggdrasil is a single named tree in Norse mythology, a great ash that holds the worlds together, with gods, animals and wells around it and a fixed place in the story of the end of the world. The Celtic tree of life is not one tree and has no story attached. It is an old Irish idea of the sacred tree that joins earth and sky, drawn today as a modern knotwork emblem in which roots and branches meet in a circle. They grew from the same instinct, that a tree can hold the world up, but they are different trees.
The English phrase "tree of life" is older than either use of it here. It comes from the Book of Genesis, where the tree of life stands in the garden of Eden beside the tree of knowledge, and it was later borrowed for sacred trees all over the world. So when a ring or a tattoo is sold as a "tree of life", the phrase alone does not tell you which tree you are looking at.
Yggdrasil: what the Norse sources actually say
Almost everything we know about Yggdrasil comes from two Icelandic books written down in the thirteenth century, long after the conversion: the poems of the Poetic Edda, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a handbook that retells the myths for poets. Neither describes a picture of the tree. Both describe a world.
An ash that stays green
In Völuspá, the seeress's poem that opens the Poetic Edda, the tree is first remembered as a seed under the ground, and then, in stanza 19, standing in full. In Henry Adams Bellows's 1923 translation: "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." Three women come from the water below it, Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, and they set the lives of men. The tree, in other words, stands over fate itself.
Three roots, and who lives under them
In Grímnismál, Odin, in disguise, describes the tree from the inside. Stanza 31 gives it three roots: under one lives Hel, under the second the frost-giants, under the third humankind. Snorri, in Gylfaginning chapter 15, places them a little differently, among the gods, among the frost-giants and over Niflheim, with a well beneath each: Urd's well, where the gods hold their court every day; Mímir's well, the well of wisdom; and Hvergelmir, the roaring spring at the bottom of everything.
The animals in the tree
This is where Yggdrasil stops being a symbol and becomes a living thing. An eagle sits in the crown, and Snorri adds a hawk, Veðrfölnir, sitting between the eagle's eyes. A squirrel, Ratatoskr, runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between the eagle at the top and the dragon Níðhöggr at the bottom. Four stags, named in Grímnismál stanza 33 as Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór, graze on the highest branches. Serpents lie under the roots, and stanza 34 names seven of them.
And the tree suffers. Stanza 35 says plainly that the tree suffers more than men know: a stag bites from above, the trunk rots at the side, and Níðhöggr gnaws from beneath. Snorri adds that the Norns pour water and white clay from Urd's well over the tree every day so that its branches will not rot. The world tree of the Norse is not serene. It is being eaten alive, and being kept alive, at the same time.
We carved one of those stags, in our own way, as the Forest Spirit Deer Ring, and wrote about the deer of the Eddas in Deer Symbolism.
Odin's horse: what the name means
The most widely accepted reading of the name is "Ygg's horse". Yggr, "the terrible one", is one of Odin's names, and "horse" is an old poetic word for the gallows, the thing a hanged man rides. That reading leans on Hávamál stanza 138, where Odin says he hung "on the windy tree" for nine nights, wounded with a spear, "offered to Othin, myself to myself", on a tree "that none may ever know / What root beneath it runs". The poem never names the tree, but scholars almost all take it to be Yggdrasil. At the end of the ordeal he takes up the runes. Other readings of the name exist, among them "yew pillar" and "tree of terror", and nobody has settled it.
That story is the reason Odin and his ravens belong to the same world as the tree. More in Huginn and Muninn, and in silver on our Odin necklace.
Ash or yew?
The poems call it an ash, and the ash is also the tree from which, in Völuspá, the gods shaped the first man, Ask. But an ash loses its leaves in winter, and Völuspá says the tree is "ever" green. Some scholars have suggested that the tree behind the myth was really a yew, which keeps its needles all year. The same question hangs over the great tree at the temple in Uppsala, described in a note to Adam of Bremen's history in the 1070s as having wide branches "always green both in winter and summer", beside a well where sacrifices were made. The note says nobody knew what kind of tree it was. It is the closest thing we have to an eyewitness account of a real Norse sacred tree, and it may have been meant as a copy of Yggdrasil on earth.
At the end of the world
At Ragnarök, Völuspá says only that "Yggdrasil shakes". The sources never say it falls. A man and a woman, Líf and Lífþrasir, survive the end by hiding in a place called Hoddmímir's wood, and some scholars, Rudolf Simek among them, read that wood as another name for the world tree itself. If so, the tree that held the old world shelters the people who begin the new one.
The nine worlds
Völuspá speaks of "nine worlds" in the tree, but no Old Norse source lists them all in one place. The tidy lists you see online, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim and the rest, are modern reconstructions put together from scattered mentions. They are useful, but they are not a map from the Viking Age.
The Celtic tree of life: an idea, not a character
The Irish side looks very different. In early Ireland a sacred tree, a bile, often stood where a king was inaugurated, and the annals record kings riding into a rival's territory in wartime to cut that tree down. Irish has a phrase for it, crann bethadh, the tree of life. Medieval Irish place-lore remembers great trees standing over the land, among them the ash of Uisnech near the symbolic centre of Ireland.
What it does not have is a cast. There is no squirrel, no dragon, no named stags, no well of fate under the roots. The Celtic tree is a way of seeing: rooted in the ground, reaching into the sky, the dead and the living joined through the same trunk. In our Celtic Tree of Life article we put it this way: if Yggdrasil is a story, the Celtic tree is a proverb.
The knotwork emblem most people picture today, branches and roots curling round to meet in a circle, is largely modern. It was shaped by the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by modern jewellery, drawing on the interlace of early medieval Irish and Scottish art. The idea is old; the outline is new.
Tree of life vs Yggdrasil, side by side
| Yggdrasil (Norse) | Celtic tree of life | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | One named world tree in a mythology | An idea of the sacred tree; today a knotwork emblem |
| Species | An ash in the poems; some argue for a yew | Many: oak, yew, ash, hazel each had a place |
| Sources | Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda, 13th-century Iceland | Early Irish annals and place-lore; modern Celtic Revival art |
| Who lives in it | Eagle, hawk, squirrel, four stags, the dragon Níðhöggr, serpents | Nobody in particular |
| What it holds | The worlds of gods, giants, the dead and humankind | Earth and sky, a people and its land |
| Its story | Gnawed and tended daily; shakes at Ragnarök | No single story; kings were made beneath such trees |
| The image people wear | No standard Viking-age picture survives | Roots and branches joined in a circle (modern) |
Is Yggdrasil the tree of life?
Not in the sources. The Norse never call Yggdrasil a "tree of life"; they call it the world tree, the noblest of trees, the ash of Yggdrasil. The phrase got attached much later, as English writers used "tree of life" for every sacred tree they met. In a looser sense the answer is yes. Yggdrasil holds up every world that has life in it, it is watered every day so that it will not die, and it shelters the two people who outlive the end. It does the work of a tree of life without the name.
The Celtic tree is the one that carries the name, crann bethadh, but it never had a mythology as large as Yggdrasil's. So the honest summary is: Yggdrasil is a world tree that behaves like a tree of life, and the Celtic tree of life is the name without the epic.
Why the two get mixed up
Partly because the jewellery market treats "Norse" and "Celtic" as one shelf. Partly because both are northern, both are trees, and both are drawn in interlace. And partly because there is no surviving Viking-age image of Yggdrasil at all, so modern designers borrow the Celtic circle to draw it. Our Viking jewelry history makes the same point: the world tree is central to the myths, but every tree design on Norse jewellery today is a modern interpretation.
If you want to tell which tree a piece means, look for the animals. An eagle at the top, a serpent or dragon at the roots, a squirrel on the trunk, stags in the branches: that is Yggdrasil. A clean circle of branches and roots braided into knotwork and nothing else: that is the Celtic tree of life.
Our tree, honestly described
We should say plainly where our own work sits. The tree on our Son of the Forest pieces is drawn the Celtic way. On the Son of the Forest ring, a tree of life signet ring in hand-carved S925 sterling silver, the tree is pierced openwork whose roots climb and branches fall until they braid into one another around the rim, an eternal knot made out of a living thing. The tree is 24K fire-gilded, a sword runs along the band, and a Swiss blue topaz is set at the sword's guard. It comes in US sizes 8 to 12, open at the back, in two editions.
The Son of the Forest cuff, a Celtic tree of life cuff bracelet, puts a single world tree at the centre with a coronation sword on either side, a Swiss blue topaz in each pommel, thorn vines along both blades and the sun, moon and stars at the ends. It took seven months from first sketch to finished silver.
Neither is a copy of a Viking-age object, because there is none to copy. We drew a tree whose roots and branches cannot be told apart because that is the part of both traditions that moves us most: the idea that what holds you down and what lifts you up are the same living thing. We do not claim the pieces protect or change anything for the person who wears them. The rest of our northern work is in Norse mythology jewelry.
Questions people ask
Is the tree of life Norse or Celtic?
Both cultures had a great sacred tree. The Norse one is Yggdrasil, a named world tree with its own mythology. The Celtic one is the Irish crann bethadh, an idea of the sacred tree rather than a single tree. The knotwork "tree of life" design sold today is Celtic in style and modern in outline.
What does Yggdrasil symbolize?
In the sources it is the axis that holds the worlds together, the place where the gods meet in council, and the tree that stands over the well of fate. It is also always under attack and always being tended, which many readers take as a picture of the world itself: wounded, repaired, still standing.
What kind of tree is Yggdrasil?
The poems call it an ash. Because Völuspá also calls it evergreen, some scholars have argued that the tree behind the myth was a yew.
What are the animals in Yggdrasil?
An eagle in the crown with the hawk Veðrfölnir between its eyes, the squirrel Ratatoskr on the trunk, four stags in the branches, and the dragon Níðhöggr with other serpents at the roots.
Did the Vikings draw Yggdrasil?
No standard Viking-age image of it survives. Modern designs, including tree of life rings and pendants sold as Norse, are interpretations.
What does a tree of life ring mean?
Usually rootedness and continuity: family, ancestry, life renewing itself. That reading comes from the Celtic tradition and the modern knot design. A ring that carries Norse details, ravens, a serpent at the roots, a stag in the branches, points toward Yggdrasil instead.
Roots in the dark, branches in the weather, and one trunk between them.
Son of the Forest Ring · Son of the Forest Cuff · Son of the Forest collection · Norse Mythology Jewelry
More from the Journal: The Celtic Tree of Life · Huginn and Muninn · Viking Jewelry · The Norse Bear