While a firmly-rooted World Tree is absent from classical Greek mythology, Greek folklore speaks of a tree that holds up the heavens. The Kallikantzaroi fulfill the role of Nidhoggr, gnawing at the bark and sawing at the trunk.<\/p>\n
Roots go down better in country than city. All that concrete, most likely, and a sub-terrain filled with hurtling metros and sewers is no place to set down roots. Urban dwellers achor their roots in concepts of \u201ccountry\u201d, meaning nation, not \u201ccountry\u201d signifying land, the kind that gets under your fingernails. Visceral roots are a thing of wider landscapes, where the only things underground are life-providing: rivers and springs and patient seeds, or life-accepting: our burial places.<\/p>\n
The \u00c9gig \u00e9r\u0151 fa, or Sky-reaching Tree, holds up the Hungarian sky. Heroes must first travel to the end of the world and then scale the tree. There are perilous creatures in the branches, but the hardy can reach the heavens and speak with the souls therein. As for its roots, they delve deep into the ancient shamanic past of Hungarian tribes before the 1st millennium, likely sharing a root or two with the Turkic and Mongolian peoples. The Baltic nations also have a sky sustained by World-Trees. Celtic mythology is curiously barren of such trees; the lofty stature of the Gaelic Bil\u00e9 probably owing more to neopagan syncretism than to ancient roots.<\/p>\n
Even such an ubiquitous tale as Jack and the Beanstalk contains a germ of columna cerului, though much reduced in stature. Rereading the story as myth and not fairy tale is a most worthwhile exercise. (Genetically modified plants are a common thing in the reduction of myth to folklore.)<\/p>\n
In a similar devolution**, a popular Hungarian folktale places the tree in the garden of a king\u2019s daughter. Among its branches lives a three (sometimes seven or nine) -headed dragon. When the princess suddenly disappears, a dream reveals that the dragon has invoked turbulent winds to lift up the princess into its castle, hidden high in the tree. The castle could be on any leaf: the search is made more difficult by the fact that a whole country fits on each and every one of them. No prince or duke could climb the tree; but for a poor shepherd boy who took his axe and climbed for seven days among the lands to find a land identical to the world below, the princess would have been forever lost.<\/p>\n
Yielding to his captive\u2019s request, dragon took the young shepherd in as a servant, commanding him to care for his emaciated horse. The skin-and-bone horse revealed that its forage is burning embers, but since the horse is the only creature who knows how to destroy the beast, the dragon has starved it almost to death. When the poor boy feeds it, the horse regains its shape and the boy sees that it has five legs (!). They escape and the horse tells him that in the woods there is a boar: in its head there is a hare, in the head of the hare there is a little box, in the box five bumblebees, and in them lies the strength of the dragon. The boy smashes the box between two stones, cuts off the nine heads of the weakened wyrm, and flies down on horseback with his bride.<\/p>\n
In other versions the tree grows on infinitely and has no top. In others, the fruit rejuvenates whoever eats of it, or gives them immortality. In some folk tales there is a direct reference to roots in hell, crown in heaven, and the hero has to go into both places on his quest. In some striking versions the tree grows out of a stag or horse. Sometimes the Sun, the Moon and the Wind live inside the tree and aid or delay the hero in his quest.<\/p>\n
In Hungary, the earliest \u201crecord\u201d of the tree is a clay roof tile into which the maker pressed the image of a tree. A rune pressed in the top branches represents the concept of \u201cUr-God\u201d, thus the tree is a personification of a guardian God or spirit. Other nomadic tribes, notably the Huns & Hittites, also utilized the same symbol for their god. (The rune is identical to the 4000 year old Hittite hieroglyph of \u201cGod\u201d.) The tree is often represented as a \u201ctulip tree\u201d, with tulip motifs recurring not only in oral lore but also in depictions found on carved gates, painted crafts, or embroidered into vests and pillowcases. Hence the tulip has a special meaning & magical powers in Hungarian folklore, and often incorporates the \u201cUr-God\u201d rune in it. The sky-reaching tree myth is a representation of the belief that world shall be held together and preserved against all odds.<\/p>\n
Which naturally brings me to my own roots, which I, like my luckless victims, am unable to clearly describe. After toying with haustorial, but only briefly, I\u2019ve settled on adventitious for my root system. Wikipedia again: \u201cAdventitious roots arise out-of-sequence from the more usual root formation of branches of a primary root, and instead originate from the stem, branches, leaves, or old woody roots.\u201d I can\u2019t say that they are anchored in Canada, though they did certainly form there, but are rooted rather in a soil undefined by borders, the eclectic, syncretic land of my own humble reckoning, but firmly so, for a place you can\u2019t delineate on any map. My roots get their nourishment from those things that hold a fascination for me at any and every level, which means home is everywhere else and nowhere special, stranger in a strange land. Underneath ordinance maps is a richer, deeper, transtemporal strata that does not divide, because it cannot be coveted or disputed, fenced off or fought over.<\/p>\n
Utopist? Idealist? I did say that my thoughts on the matter were no clearer than most. (It\u2019s a land where questions thrive more readily than answers. Don\u2019t ask, that\u2019s just how my mind works.)<\/p>\n
Lastly, and speaking of answers, apologies for not linking to the site for which I hurried to do the interview, it seems to not yet be on line. I\u2019ll provide a link when it appears.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.john-howe.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Yggdrasil-port.jpg\" "\\"Yggdrasil\\"")
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