the watchful black dragon, curled around the roots, Nidhoggr, entwined with a brood of coiling worms. Nidhoggr gnawed the roots, which renewed themselves.
The tree was immense. It supported, or shaded, high halls and palaces. It was a world in itself.
At its foot was a black, measureless well, whose dark waters, when drunk, gave wisdom, or at least insight. At its rim sat the Fatal Sisters, the Norns, who may have come from Jotunheim. Urd saw the past, Werdandi saw the present and Skuld stared into the future. The well too was called Urd. The sisters were spinners, who twisted the threads of fate. They were the gardeners and guardians of the Tree. They watered the tree with the black well- water. They fed it with pure white clay,
Randrasill
In the kelp forests grew a monstrous bull-kelp, Randrasill, the Sea-Tree. It gripped the underwater rock with a tough holdfast, from which rose the stem like a whiplash taller than the masts or rooftrees, the stipe. The stipe went up and up from the depths to the surface, glassy still, whipped by winds, swaying lazy. Where the water met the air the stipe spread into thickets of fronds and streamers, each buoyed up by a pocket of gas, a bladder at its base. The branching fronds, like those of the Tree on land, were threaded with green cells that ate light. Seawater takes in red light; floating dust and debris take in blue; weeds deep down in dim light are mostly red in colour, whereas those tossing on the surface, or clinging to tide-washed ledges, can be brilliant green or glistening yellow. The sea-tree grew at great speed. Strips tore away and new ones sprouted, new weed-spawn streamed from the fronds in milky clouds, or green clouds, of moving creatures that swam free before gripping at rock. In the water-forest creatures ate and were eaten, as they were in the roots and branches of the land-tree.
The tree was grazed by wandering snails and sea-slugs, rasping up specks of life, animal, vegetable. Filter- feeding sponges sucked at the thicket of stipes; sea-anemones clung to the clinging weed, and opened and closed their fringed, fleshy mouths. Horn-coated, clawed creatures, shrimp and spiny lobster, brittle-stars and featherstars supped. Spiny urchin-balls roamed and chewed. There were multitudes of crabs: porcelain crabs, great spider crabs, scorpion and spiky stone crabs, masked crabs, circular crabs, edible crabs, harbour crabs, swimming crabs, angular crabs, each with its own roaming-ground. There were sea-cucumbers, amphipods, mussels, barnacles, tunicates and polychaete worms. All ate the wood and fed the weed with their droppings and decay.
Things swayed, and slid, and sailed through the sea-forest, hunting and hunted. Some were fish-flesh disguised as weeds – angler-fish enveloped in floating veils like sargassum, dragon-fish hanging in the water indistinguishable from frond-forms, draped in shawls and banners like tattered vegetable protrusions. And there were huge fish with bladed bodies, refracting light, lurking shadows in the shadows, their swaying flanks changing colour as the light streamed through the water and was sifted.
The Sea-Tree stood in a world of other sea-growth, from the vast tracts of bladderwrack to the sea-tangles, tangleweeds, oarweeds, seagirdles, horsetail kelps, devil’s aprons and mermaid’s wine-glasses. Shoals of great fish and small fish went by, wheeling packed globes of herring, rushing herds of tunny. There were salmon on their long journeys – chinook, coho, sockeye, pink, chum and cherry salmon. There were green turtles grazing in the fronds. There were streamlined sharks in many forms, thresher, shortfin mako, porbeagle, tope, leopard shark, dusky shark, sandbar shark and night shark, the hunters of the hunters of the hunted. Great whales tore giant squid from the depths, or opened the vast sieves of their mouths to filter plankton. Creatures built homes in the canopy as creatures built homes in the World-Ash. Sea otters constructed cradles and dangled from the fronds, turning shellfish and urchins in busy forepaws. Dolphins danced and sang, clicking and whistling. Seabirds screamed overhead and plumped like arrows into the mass of water. The water was pulled this way and that by the sun and the moon. Tides crawled up beaches, were sucked into inlets, broke with white lacy spray on shells of rock, hurtled in smooth and rearing, or seeped and meandered in deltas.
The holdfast of the Sea-Tree was on an underwater mountainside, deep, deep down, as far as the last glimmer of sunlight or moonlight could penetrate. There were deeper things. There were creatures of the dark whose plated forms, or spiny or fleshy heads, were lit as though by brilliant lamps in the black gloom. Things that angled for prey with a fishing line of their own flesh, things whose eyes glared in the visible darkness.
At the foot of the World-Ash is the Fountain of Urd: still, cold, black water. At the foot of the Sea-Tree are vents and funnels, through which whistle steam, and spittings of molten stone from the hot centre of the earth. Here too, in darkness, worms crawl, and pallid prawns flicker glassy feelers. As the three women from Jotunheim, the Norns, sit at the edge of the fountain and feed and water the Tree, so Aegir and Ran sit in the currents that eddy about the holdfast of Randrasill. Aegir makes music with a stringed harp and a pearly conch. Whales and dolphins hang motionless, sifting the singing through the echo-chambers of their heads. The sounds can act like oil on the ocean, making a dull calm, or a glistening calm, seen glassy from under, and sparking from above. There are other tunes which perturb currents, and send great tongues of water bellowing up, as high above the thin surface as the tree is above the holdfast. The mass of water, glassy green, basalt black, holds for an everlasting moment and then the crest crumbles down and drives deep again, shedding foam, and froth, and billions of bubbles of air. Aegir’s wife, Ran, plays with a vast net which she loops about dead and dying creatures as they fall through the thick depths. Some say things are caught in her toils that are neither dead nor dying, but only entranced by the welling sound. What she does with the bones and baleen, the skin and scrags, is not known. It is said that she plants them in sand, to feed what crawls and creeps under it. It is said that she collects the very beautiful – a luminous squid, a sailor with thick gold hair, blue eyes and a lapis earring, an errant sea-snake – and arranges them in a weed-garden, for the pleasure of staring. Those who see her see nothing else, and do not return to describe her.
Homo Homini Deus Est
The thin child in wartime considered the question of how something came out of nothing. In the story told in the stone church a grandfatherly figure who resented presumption had spent six delectable days making things – sky and sea, sun and moon, the trees and the seaweeds, the camel, the horse, the peacock, the dog, the cat, the worm, all creatures that on earth do dwell to sing to him with cheerful voices, to sing his praises that was, as the angels incessantly did. And he had put the humans in their place and had told them to keep their place and not to eat the knowledge of good and evil. The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had not asked to be made use of as a tempter. The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age
There was nothing
Nor sand nor sea
Nor cold waves;
There was no earth,
