Norse Mythology

During the long winter nights one can look up at the northern circumpolar sky and see the Big Dipper slowly making its way around the pole star. The cosmic world tree is called Yggdrasil, meaning “the awesome one’s horse, or mount.” The awesome one is Woden (or Odin), and Ursa Major is still known as “Odin’s Wagon” in Scandinavia, and you can see him slowly riding around the pole star at night. Another explanation is also given for calling the world tree Yggdrasil “the awesome one’s horse.” Odin “rode the gallows” when he hanged himself on Yggdrasil, making the tree “the horse he rode” when he made the ultimate sacrifice of himself to himself, to learn the secret of seeing the future. He seized the runes or talking sticks (presumably from the Norns, though this is not said), the cut and inscribed twigs of Yggdrasil, on which these three mysterious women who know the past, present, and future, wrote the twenty-four secret letters by which the future could be divined. Later the runes came to be used by men, a gift of Woden. This myth will be important for reading the fuþark.

The other road of communication, aside from the squirrel and the rune twigs, is the rainbow bridge which is often visible in daylight soon after a rainfall. It runs from the base of Yggdrasil up to the world of the gods, Asgard. After nightfall, it can be seen twinkling brightly in the darkness of the sky as the great frosty arch of the Milky Way. It is thus, I believe, that there are two words for the bridge between the worlds. It is called both the bifrost, as the Milky Way, and also bifrost, as the rainbow. In many religions, the Milky Way is the ghostly road that souls take on their last journey. In Germanic religion it is used by the gods to come to the holy place at the base of Yggdrasil for their assemblies, and also to take their last journey to fight their final and fatal enemies at Ragnarok.