It has been said that if the oak be regarded as the king of trees and the Hercules of the forest, the ash may fairly claim supremacy as their queen, and Gilpin terms it the “Venus of the Woods.”
“At its foot is the Undar fountain where sit the three Norns or Fates—time past, time present, and time to come; these give Runic characters and laws to men, and fix their destinies. Here is the most holy of all places, where the gods assemble daily in council, with All-Father at their head.
“These three Norns have a certain analogy to the three mythic Persian destinies seated by the fountain of perennial life; and the tree itself is evidently a symbol of that inscrutable power which is the life of all things; thus representing, under an arborescent form, the most ancient theory of nature, analogous to that personified in the Indian Parvati, the goddess of life and reproduction; also in the Egyptian Isis; and in the figure so frequently met with in the museums of Italy, called ‘Diana of the Ephesians,’ a variety of the Indian Maya.
“In the Chinese sacred books, ‘the Taou (the divine reason or wisdom, but here put for the Deity) preserves the heavens and supports the earth: he is so high as not to be reached, so deep as not to be followed, so immense as to contain the whole universe, and yet he penetrates into the minutest things.’ The sacred ash of the Scandinavians corresponds as a symbol with the Chinese Taou.”[19]
Hesiod and Homer both mention the ash; the latter mentioning the ashen spear of Achilles, and telling us that it was by an ashen spear that he was slain.
In the heathen mythology, Cupid is said to have made his arrows first of ash wood, though they were afterwards formed of cypress.
So much mystery has always been associated with the ash tree, that in all ages and in all countries innumerable superstitions have grown up in connection with it, and, from their modern propagation in an age of education, will evidently die hard.
In many parts of the Highlands of Scotland, at the birth of a child, the nurse puts one end of a green stick of this tree into the fire, and while it is burning gathers in a spoon the sap or juice which oozes out at the other end, and administers it as the first spoonful of food to the newly-born babe.
In Somersetshire, and some other counties, the burning of an ashen fagot is a regular Christmas custom, and it is supposed that misfortune will certainly fall upon the house where it is not duly fulfilled. In the same county, there is held annually the “Ash Faggot Ball.” The fagot is bound with three withes, which are severally chosen to represent them by the young people present—the first withe that breaks in the fire signifying that they who selected it will be the first to be married. It is said that these customs prevail extensively where the Arthurian legends are very strong, and that “it is probable that the association of the ash with Arthur grew out of its dedication to the gods of war, on account of toughness for weapons.”
While many of the surviving superstitions connected with the ash may probably be traced to Yggdrasill, it has been observed that though Yggdrasill was an ash, there is reason to think that, through the influence of traditions, other sacred trees blended with it. Thus while the ash bears no fruit, the Eddas describe the stars as the fruit of Yggdrasill. “This” says Mr. Conway, “with the fact that the serpent is coiled around its root, and the name Midgard, i.e., midst of the garden, suggest that the apple-tree of Eden, may have been grafted on the great ash.” He also says there is a chapel at Coblentz where a tree is pictured with several of the distinctive symbols of Yggsdrasill, while on it the forbidden fruit is represented partly open, disclosing a death’s head. The serpent is coiled round the tree’s foot. When Christian ideas prevailed, and the Norse deities were transformed to witches, the ash was supposed to be their favourite tree. From it they plucked branches on which to ride through the air. In Oldenburg it is said the ash appears without its red buds on St. John’s Day, because the witches eat them on the night before, on their way to the orgies of Walpurgisnacht.