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(In memory of G. B. Tennyson)
THE SACRED TREE KNOWN AS THE YGGDRASIL WAS AN essential metaphor for Thomas Carlyle, one that transcended his fascination with the ways that Norse mythology helped to shape Teutonic Britain.1 As a universal symbol for Carlyle, the Yggdrasil (Igdrasil as he spelled it) is constitutive of cosmic harmony and historical continuity: "[A] seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day . . . , it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-grove . . . after a thousand years" (Sartor 30). The cosmic also had personal relevance for Carlyle, as seen in one of the more poignant letters to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle: "All sorrow is an enemy; but it carries a friend's message within it too. O my poor Jeannie, all Life is as Death, and the Tree Igdrasil which reaches up to Heaven, goes down to the Kingdoms of Hela, and God (the Everlasting GOOD and JUST) is in it all. - We have no words for these things, we are to be silent about them; yet they are true, forever true" (CL 14: 68). Carlyle would employ similar Yggdrasil associations to capture the simplicity and the quiet dignity of Jeannie 's childhood home in Haddington: "From threshold to roof tree no paltriness of unveracity admitted into it" (Froude, Forty Years 1: 96; my emphasis).
Even when Carlyle does not mention Yggdrasil specifically, as in Sartor Resartus, the allusion is clear. In the chapter "Idyllic" (Book 2), for example, in which the Editor reconstructs the childhood of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle refers only to correlative trees, the banyan and the lime, along with the oak and the ash, all of which clearly represent the sacred tree of the Norse: "'brave old Linden,' stretching like a parasol of twenty ells in radius, overtopping all other rows and clumps, towered up from the central Agora and Campus Martius of the Village, like its Sacred Tree; and how the old men sat talking under its shadow . . . and the wearied labourers reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens often danced to flute-music" (71).2 The "Sacred Tree" under the immortal protection of which the young Teufelsdröckh grows up can be none other than the Norse arch-symbol,...