How Old Is The Tree In The Text

Because Yggdrasil sits at the structural centre of the cosmos in the surviving textual sources, chiefly the thirteenth century Prose Edda, it has become one of the most recognizable and most widely adopted symbols of modern Norse and Heathen religious identity, reproduced in reconstructionist and revivalist Heathen practice as a devotional image standing for the whole of the cosmology those movements draw on, in a way comparable to how a small number of other single images, the Taijitu for Daoist cosmology or the Sri Yantra for Shri Vidya, come to stand for an entire cosmological system in compressed visual form.

Modern use of the tree image ranges from serious devotional and reconstructionist practice to purely decorative and popular-culture reproduction with no religious content at all, and this atlas records the symbol's source meaning in the medieval textual tradition without treating every modern use of a tree image as continuous with Heathen religious practice.

Because the Prose Edda is a thirteenth century Christian-era compilation of older material by Snorri Sturluson, historians treat its account of Yggdrasil as the fullest surviving description while remaining cautious about how far it preserves pre-Christian belief unchanged versus how far Snorri's own scholarly framing shaped the text, a source-critical caution this atlas applies to Norse cosmological material generally rather than singling out the tree.