Ash

Fraxinus excelsior stands last in leaf and first in importance among the trees that the Norse, the Anglo-Saxons, and the rural English chose to charge with significance. The same species supports the cosmological axis of Norse mythology, supplies the material for the spear that defines a warrior culture, and — in village practice a thousand years and more later — heals herniated children and afflicted cattle. The question worth asking is why: what in the wood made it available for all three roles simultaneously.

This page holds those three threads separately before pulling them together.

The tree

Common ash — Fraxinus excelsior — is a tall, late-leafing deciduous tree of limestone soils and damp woodland edges, native across Britain, Ireland, and most of Europe. It is the last major British tree to come into leaf in spring and one of the first to drop in autumn; the old weather rhyme about ash and oak budding sequence is a piece of genuine phenological folklore, not invention. The leaves are pinnate, seven to thirteen leaflets on a stalk, and the bark grey-brown and smooth in youth, deeply fissured with age. The flowers are inconspicuous, appearing before the leaves.

The wood is the thing. Ash is dense, tough, and elastic — it absorbs shock without splitting, bends before it breaks, and takes a clean edge on the grain. Those properties made it, for centuries, the first choice for handles, oars, cart-shafts, and, above all, spear shafts. That last use runs through almost everything the mythology says about the tree.

Yggdrasil

The Norse world-tree is identified as an ash in both the major written sources. The Völuspá — the great prophetic poem in the Poetic Edda, preserved in the 13th-century Codex Regius from earlier oral tradition — opens its account plainly: “An ash I know, Yggdrasil its name.” Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (c. 1220), in the Gylfaginning section, chapter 15, expands: “The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky.” Three roots anchor the tree to three wells — the Well of Urðr (fate), the spring Hvergelmir in Niflheim, and Mímir’s well of wisdom — though Snorri’s arrangement of these wells differs somewhat from the older poetry, and the Poetic Edda poems are not internally consistent on the geography.

The name Yggdrasill is conventional but contested. The most widely accepted etymology resolves it as “Odin’s horse”: Yggr being one of Odin’s many by-names and drasill meaning horse — horse being a kenning for the gallows, since a hanged man “rides” the rope. This connects directly to Hávamál, the wisdom poem also in the Poetic Edda, in which Odin describes hanging on “the windy tree” for nine nights, wounded by a spear, given neither food nor drink, until he perceives the runes and falls back. The tree is his instrument of self-sacrifice; the ash is the gallows that yields knowledge.

One necessary caveat: Snorri was a Christian Icelandic scholar writing roughly two centuries after Iceland’s conversion. He is the richest single source for Norse mythology and also the one most likely to have rationalised a messier inherited tradition into a tidy system. Where his prose account diverges from the Poetic Edda stanzas, the older poems generally have the stronger claim.

Askr — the ash-man

The first human male in Norse cosmology is named Askr, which is simply Old Norse for “ash tree.” The Völuspá (stanzas 17–18) places his creation after the shaping of the world: three gods find two nearly powerless beings on the land — without spirit, sense, blood, or colour — and bestow those gifts in turn. The poem names Odin alongside two figures, Hœnir and Lóðurr, whose identities are disputed by scholars. The Gylfaginning (chapter 9) retells the story with Odin, Vili, and Vé as the three creators, finding the first humans as driftwood on a shoreline: Odin gave breath and life, Vili gave wit and feeling, Vé gave hearing, sight, and good colour.

In both accounts the man comes from an ash; his companion Embla comes from a tree whose identity is debated — elm is the most common reading, though the Old Norse etymology of embla is not settled. The two accounts differ in divine personnel but agree on the material: the first man is an ash tree given breath and form.

The choice is not arbitrary. In a culture where ash was the spear-wood — the defining implement of a warrior — naming the first human “ash tree” is naming him after both his material and his function. The correspondence is built into the language.

Aesc — the word that carries both

In Old English, aesc means both “ash tree” and “spear.” The two meanings are not homonyms that happen to collide; they are the same word, deployed interchangeably in poetry. A spear shaft could be called an aesc because spear shafts were made from ash; ash could be called aesc in contexts where its material prestige — hardness, flex, the quality that stops a shaft from shattering on impact — is foregrounded. The same equivalence appears in Old Norse, where askr features in skaldic kennings for “spear.”

Odin’s spear Gungnir is, in later tradition, an ash spear. Thor’s weapons were also associated with ash. The Norse sources credit both gods with ash-wood implements precisely because the material was the real-world basis of serious weaponry. Mortals’ spear shafts were ash by default — and, where ash was unavailable, bow staves and arrow shafts followed. When the first human is named Askr, the resonance is not merely botanical. It is martial and cosmological at once: humanity as ash-spear, upright and purposed.

British folk practice

The Norse thread is cosmological. The British folk thread is domestic, medical, and hyperlocal — and its sources are primary.

Gilbert White, in his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), recorded two distinct ash-tree healing customs in Hampshire. The first is the shrew-ash: a live shrew sealed into a hole bored in the trunk, and the branches of that tree thereafter used to stroke cattle suffering from lameness and swellings attributed to a shrew running over them. A shrew-ash in Richmond Park was visited into the mid-19th century for children’s whooping cough; those brought to it were passed under a “witch bar” inserted into the trunk while a woman known as the “shrew mother” recited words timed to the sunrise. White also described the second custom directly: ailing children, particularly those with ruptures or weak limbs, passed naked through a cleft in a pollard ash before dawn.

Edwin Sidney Hartland documented the cleft-ash cure in detail in the journal Folklore (vol. 7, 1896, pp. 303–306). In both Suffolk and Somerset the child was passed through three times, face-upward. In Suffolk, three different people carried the child through in turn; at Bishop’s Lydeard in Somerset, the child was passed from a virgin girl to a boy. The cleft was made for the purpose, then bound and left to close. If the tree healed over, the child’s rupture was expected to close with it.

Frazer’s Golden Bough preserves the case of Thomas Chillingworth, then about thirty-four years old, who had been passed through a cleft ash as an infant of one year. He guarded the tree with such conviction — refusing to allow any branch to be cut — because the local understanding held that the rupture would return the moment the tree was felled, followed by mortification and death. The custom was reported in Somerset, Suffolk, and Essex as late as the 1920s, the Essex instance at Terling in 1925.

Thiselton-Dyer, in The Folk-lore of Plants (1889), documents the broader livestock tradition: “ash rods are still used in many parts of England for the cure of diseased sheep, cows, and horses” — the shrew-ash logic applied without the entombed animal, the wood itself carrying the remedial charge.

One further recurring claim: ash repels snakes. Adders were said to be unable to cross a line drawn with an ash stick; wreaths of ash hung near farmhouse doors were understood to protect against snakebite. The belief runs through multiple English county collections independently enough into the 19th century to count as genuine widespread practice, even if no mechanism was ever made explicit.

What is actually attested

The modern Wiccan correspondence system gives ash to the sun (some books substitute Neptune or sea-associations), with powers of protection, healing, and sea magic. These are 20th-century practitioner assignments — traceable to mid-century occult herbals — not folk survivals.

What the documented record actually shows is more specific and more useful:

• Cosmological (Norse, attested in the Poetic Edda and Snorri): Ash is the world-axis, the material of the first human, the wood of divine weapons. These are distinct claims from distinct poems — do not collapse them into a single “ash is sacred” statement.
• Military (Old English and Norse): Ash equals spear, linguistically and materially. The word and the implement are the same. This is the practical root that made the cosmological symbolism available.
• Medical (British folk practice, 17th–20th century): Ash heals herniated children and livestock damaged by shrews. The mechanism is sympathetic; the practice is documented in named primary sources with procedural detail and geographic distribution.

None of these traditions are explicitly linked to each other in the historical record. They converge on the same species because that species was materially dominant in northern European life. Practitioners drawing on the Norse material are working a cosmological tree. Those using the cleft-ash and shrew-ash traditions are working a village-medical tradition with documented procedure and documented survival into living memory. Both are coherent practices. Only one has anything to do with the Völuspá.

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Cross-references on this site: rowan (protective trees in British folk tradition compared); oak (the other dominant sacred tree in the British Isles); elder (healing wood with overlapping village-medical uses).