Ash Dieback and the Dying World Tree
I. Ash Dieback – Hymenoscyphus fraxineus
In February 2012 it was reported that Ash dieback, a disease of the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior) caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, had arrived in Britain. This disease, which may have arisen in Asia, where the native ash trees have resistance to it, had already been causing devastation in other areas of Europe. In 1992, it was identified in Poland. By the mid-1990s it had spread to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, by 2008 to Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, then finally it reached Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Britain and Ireland.
Hymenoscyphus fraxineus is an ascomycete fungus. They are also known as sac fungi. The name derives from the ascus (from the Greek: ἀσκός askos, ‘sac’) in which non-motile spores called ascospores are formed. During its sexual stage, in the summer, the fungus grows on the stalks of the previous year’s fallen ash leaves and the spores are transmitted by the wind. In its asexual phase it grows in the trees themselves, penetrating the bark, its mycelium reaching into the xylem.
Ash dieback manifests in the necrosis of leaves at the top of trees and lesions of the stalks and of the insertion points where stalks attach to shoots and shoots attach to branches. As the disease progresses, the side shoots, beginning at the crown, then further down, die. Eventually it penetrates the trunk.
Ash dieback can kill up to 69 per cent of ash trees in woodlands although, encouragingly, around 20 per cent show resistance. Because of this it has been advised to leave ash trees that do not pose a danger to people to give them a chance to develop resistance and for the wildlife that depends on them.
II. Yggdrasil – The Norse World Tree
This disease of the European ash has both profound ecological and mythological implications. In the Norse myths the great ash, Yggdrasil, is the World Tree. Its image is one of ecological integrity.
In ‘Gylfaginning’, in the Prose Edda, Just-as-High tells Gangleri: ‘The ash is the largest and the best of all trees. Its branches spread themselves over all the world, and it stands over the sky. Three roots support the tree and they are very far apart.’ These reach into three wells located in the realm of the Norns, in the realm of the frost giants, and in Niflheim ‘Mist World’ where the root is gnawed by the serpent Nidhogg, who is accompanied by ‘so many serpents… no tongue can count them.’
High continues: ‘An eagle sits in the branches of the ash, and it has knowledge of many things. Between its eyes sits the hawk called Vedrfolnir (Wind Bleached). The squirrel called Ratatosk (Drill Tooth)... tells slanderous gossip, provoking the eagle and Nidhogg. Four stags called Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathor move about in the branches of the ash, devouring the tree’s foliage.’
Here we find Yggdrasil providing nourishment for stags, perching places for birds and running places for squirrels. The great ash is, in turn, nourished by the three wells. In Nidhogg and his companions gnawing at one of the roots we catch a glimpse of the processes of decomposition.
III. Tree People
In the Norse myths, as recorded in ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ in the Poetic Edda, the first humans, Ask (from askr ‘ash tree’) and Embla (from almr ‘elm’), are associated with ash and elm trees.
We are told of how ‘three gods, strong and loving’ found them on the land ‘lacking in fate’. ‘Breath they had not, spirit they had not, / blood nor bearing nor fresh complexions’. By Odin, they are given breath, by Haenir spirit, and by Lodur ‘blood and fresh complexions.’ It seems possible that Ask and Embla were latent forms within dead ash and elm trees who the gods gifted with life.
In the Norse and the Brythonic myths both humans and giants are associated and identified with trees. In ‘Hymir’s Poem’ the beard of the old giant is described as a ‘cheek-forest’. Ysbaddaden Bencawr ‘Chief Hawthorn-Giant’ has his shrub beard shaven before his beheading in Culhwch ac Olwen.
In the First Branch of Y Mabinogi the giant, Brân the Blessed, and his armies appear as a ‘forest on the sea’. Brân carries an alder shield in ‘Cad Goddeu’ ‘The Battle of the Trees’, where the magician-god, Gwydion, enchants trees to fight as soldiers against the monsters of Annwn. The image of an army as a walking forest is repeated in Macbeth when Great Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane.
IV. The Asland and the Norse Tradition in Lancashire
Although I am a Brythonic polytheist I am writing about the Norse tradition today as its influence can still be seen and felt within the landscape of Lancashire where I live in northwest England. This is evidenced by place names such as Carr Wood (from kjarr ‘swamp’) and, significantly in this context, the Norse name for the river Douglas, which is still occasionally used, Asland (from askr ‘ash tree’).
The Cuerdale Hoard, the second largest Viking hoard ever found, was dug up a few miles up the river Ribble from my hometown of Penwortham and there is Norse art on the Urswick Cross.
A couple of years after I had discovered Paganism, when I joined the UCLan Pagan Society in 2011, although there were a couple of Druids and Hellenics, most of the other members were Heathen.
One of the most popular workshop facilitators was a Heathen seidr man called Runic John. John, based on the Lancashire moors, lived and breathed his religion in his relationship with the Norse gods. To his huge drum, decorated with an image of Yggdrasil, through the World Tree, I learnt to journey. Although I had experiences with a number of spirits in the Norse Otherworlds and always had a strong sense of the presence of the four dwarves when they were called in at the beginning of the rituals, I didn’t meet any of the gods and never felt called to explore the Norse tradition in more depth.
It wasn’t until I met my patron god, Gwyn ap Nudd, a ruler of Annwn, the Brythonic Otherworld, and a guide of the souls of the dead and the living, in 2012, that I learnt to journey with him without a human guide and found my path within the Brythonic tradition as an awenydd ‘person inspired’.
V. ‘All Night I Hung on a Windy Tree’
Since then, I have had a handful of experiences with Norse deities. Three were with Odin, the Norse psychopomp and god of the dead, who famously hung on Yggdrasil with a spear in his side to gain knowledge of the runes. In ‘Sayings of the High One’ he tells of his time on the ‘windswept tree / nine long nights / wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, / myself to myself’ and how ‘screaming’ he ‘took up the runes’ and found ‘meaningful letters, / very great letters, / very stiff letters’.
My first experience with Odin followed a seidr workshop led by Runic John for the Oak and Feather Druid Grove several years ago. Of the journey I remember only meeting a grey woman who offered me fly agaric (amanita muscaria) and meeting and running with a pack of wolves.
More vividly I recall the dream I had the following night. I was back with John and he was performing an invocatory rite in which he placed his hand over one eye and channelled Odin’s voice. John’s face melted away and was replaced with Odin’s and for a moment I looked the god in eye.
The second was in a dream around the time I was editing the second edition of A Beautiful Resistance. Sitting with a group of fellow members of Gods & Radicals around a television screen I was sucked into the scene. Swept up into a stormy sky I saw the tumult was being caused by a vast war machine with countless propellers. Then, from a hatch in the bottom, leapt a man in a black hat with his black cloak unfurling in the wind. As he floated towards me one of his eyes fell out of his head and from the gaping gap a well of red spouted; blood began to pour out catastrophically, uncontrollably, and I could see it was going to drown the world. When I woke I realised he was Odin.
My last experience was more recent. Last September I started with a sore throat, runny nose, and tight chest, and was terrified it was coronavirus and that I might pass it on to my vulnerable parents, with whom I live. After getting tested I was awake all night with the burning in my throat and my nose running like a river, catastrophising about the worst that could happen, and feeling sorry for myself.
In the depths of the night I heard a voice, the voice of Odin, singing ‘all night I hung on a windy tree’, mocking me. Thinking of Odin hanging wounded on Yggdrasil for nine nights with no food or drink whilst I was in a warm comfortable bed with cough sweets and Lemsip gave me some perspective. Two days later my test came back negative – I didn’t have covid – it was just a cold.
VI. Hagall and the Sickness of Serpents
The only other Norse deities I have encountered are the Norns. This happened a couple of years ago at a Way of the Buzzard drumming circle, run by Jason and Nicola Smalley, who are shamanic practitioners based on the Anglezarke moors here in Lancashire. Jason, who has been called to work with the Norse tradition over the last few years, decided to lead a journey based on drawing a rune.
I drew Hagall ‘Hail’. Firstly it took me to the Well of Urd, the home of the Norns, Urdr, Verndandi, and Skuld, the Norse goddesses of the Wyrd (which means ‘fate’), then to Hvergelmir ‘Boiling Spring’ in Niflheim, where I received the troubling vision of the dying World Tree recorded in this poem.
Hagall
Hagall er kaldakorn
ok krapadrífa
ok snáka sótt.
Hail is cold grain
and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents.
Icelandic Rune Poem
The rune is cast
in the Well of Urðarbrunnr
shimmering as the moonlight
from betwixt branches
of Yggdrasil:
Hagall – Hail.
Winter is approaching.
I am Hagall floating
on black water
as the Norns refuse
to disclose my fate
and my corpse does not whiten
like the skin on the inside
of an eggshell.
Snowflake or lopsided H.
I am crossing traditions,
floating like snow between wells
and worlds until I come to Niflheim,
the World of Ice and Mist
and Hvergelmir,
where the taproot
of my soul once drank deep.
But here where Níðhöggr gnaws
the enumerable serpents have fallen sick.
They are coiling round my legs and arms
and they are hungry for my organs.
They are missing their mother.
Before Ragnarok the World Tree might fall:
the poisoned root poisons the serpents
coiling round the limbs of Hagall.
VII. Dying Back
Ash dieback threatens not only the great ash with whom we are mythically bound, but the integrity of our ecosystem and the lives of the creatures who are dependent upon it, feeding on its life and its death. As the ash woods perish we, too, are being ravaged by disease, by coronavirus. We are dying back.
As some people struggle to manage covid, others are striving to manage ash dieback. In my work as a conservation intern at Brockholes Nature Reserve I am involved with the Woodland Welfare Project. At Brockholes, 80 per cent of the woodland is ash – a monoculture planted to shield the area from traffic noise when the M6 was built nearby – and regrettably much will be lost. The project aims to remove the dying ash trees and process them for firewood and green woodworking, whilst saving trees that might be resistant, and replanting the woods with more diverse species.
As I go about this work I am increasingly aware of how people, trees, ecosystems and myths are intertwined. Like the ash we are not immortal. In spite of our modern medicine we remain prey to disease. Yet in the survival of some ash trees, deer running through them, the kestrel above, we find hope.
Lorna Smithers
Lorna Smithers is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist, and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. She has published three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls. Based in Penwortham, Lancashire, North West England, she is a conservation intern with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust and is learning to grow small green things and listen to the land. She blogs at ‘From Peneverdant’.