the many interpretations of Yggdrasil.

When you depict the cosmos, you map it, you are performing the ritual of sacred geography, taking abstract invisible concepts and stickpinning them into a fixed place where they're suddenly more concrete, in a real position, around the corner, or over that mountain range, or under that hill, and even if that place's time & space doesn't match nor measure nor visibly scale as ours does, you've given or found it a physical connection point attached to our own. It felt real enough to begin with, enough to record it in mythological lore and make a story of it, but in assigning it a location, it gets that much more real and perhaps accessible. After every rain, Bifröst is a two-way street, and there's a point where the land we walk meets the trunk of Yggdrasil and connects all the points of the Norse Cosmos to us.

Mostly we see more general depictions of Yggdrasil, and the above world tree map diagram re-titles some of the otherworlds, possibly to be more linguistically accessible, but then some of the worlds kept their Norse names, then there's the more Germanic "Walhalla", and so it's really a curious variation to examine.

[found unattributed on pinterest, so if you know where it's from, we would love to know!]

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology, field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.