The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  She was glad to get past the ancient history. The arts were for the Urður.

  “Where did humanity come from? The goði would answer: ‘from trees and water because their spiritual essence is inseparable, wherever trees and water come into being, so must men and women, too.’ Humanity does not stand apart from or above the rest of the more-than-human world. Our essence is inextricably bound up with the essence of the greater whole.

  “The völva might add: ‘From wood and water, and, more fundamentally, from what is written. Humanity is destined to exist; therefore, we exist.’ Fate, the inscrutable force that links all agency throughout the cosmos, assures us that humanity is at the heart of all creation.”

  She scanned the faces in the room. Two students in the front row were splayed out and snoring quietly already. She sympathised; she wouldn’t have liked to have been compelled to sit through this at their age. She hoped they’d wake up later and appreciate the enormity of what she had to say. The worlds required the young to care, not sleepwalk to disaster.

  “Back to Karl. Lind was the first man, unwittingly or otherwise, to uncover the something that was evident to our forefathers and encoded in the very name Yggdrasil. As we are all aware, the most satisfactory translation of the name Yggdrasil is Odin’s Horse. Ygg is another name for Odin, and drasill means horse. However, drasill also means walker, or pioneer. Some scholars have in fact argued that the name means Odinwalker. In some parts of the sagas, Yggdrasil and Odin seem to be one and the same. When Odin hung, speared, for nine days on the World Tree, he uttered the words that he had ‘sacrificed himself onto himself,’ as if tree and god were one and the same.

  “Now, it has been clear since the expeditions of Karl Nilsson Lind that the trees of the Nine Worlds are intertwined between worlds. They have roots and boughs more deeply entangled than the deepest, most ancient of forests in ways we are only beginning to understand. Tapping into that root system has enabled some to travel between the worlds in a way long thought reserved for the gods, reserved for Odin himself. Lind’s hypothesis was that Yggdrasil, and all the folklore surrounding the world tree, was a construct of our genetic memory. That is, his discovery of what has come to be known as staggering was in fact a rediscovery of an ancient lost art, a secret long buried with the kings of old.

  “Odin remains at the core of staggering. His Óðr, the force that inspires people to perform or to prophesize; to produce scholarly works or to enter a frenzy in battle, is vital for travelling within the trees. Óðr overwhelms and infuses us, blankets our consciousness and brings us ecstasy: Odin, if you will, takes our hand and guides us through the greenways.

  “Here, on Midgard, Karl found first one, then many candidates for what he called heartwoods, the oldest of groves. Yew trees that were gnarled and twisted when Sumeria was young. Pines as old as the Pyramids. Old trees, like antenna, catching unworldly signals. Trees that resonated and thrummed with Óðr when sung to, songs from the beginning of days. Entities that took your embrace and danced you to somewhere entirely different, continents away—worlds away for those of us who are particularly adept. We have accepted this way of life as we have always embraced Yggdrasil: as a benefactor and a guardian. Those favoured by Odin ride his steed, those blessed by other gods still ride on wagons.”

  It was an old trick. Tell your audience what they already know and then create a bridge from there. There were an awful lot of blank faces staring back at her, but if she invited any comments at this stage, she might not be able to keep her narrative on track. Either that or the waggoners really were on strike and she’d just been stupidly insensitive.

  “However, for all the comfort, protection, and sheer utility of the World Tree, I have been compelled to search for further answers. My contention is that we cannot see the wood for the trees; that is, we can’t see the whole situation clearly because we’re too intimately involved with it.

  “The great irony here is that for all the mobility they grant the adept, trees don’t move. That’s worth repeating. Trees. Don’t. Move. So, how does the very-firmly-rooted tree evolve so that it can spread across separate worlds? We take it for granted that Odin and his brothers didn’t literally slay Ymir and set about constructing the worlds from his titanic corpse. The oceans are not actually Ymir’s blood, the sky is not his skull, neither is the vegetation his hair. Although, if it were, long and tangled hair might explain how Yggdrasil spanned the cosmos.”

  The audience were still unmoved, so she plunged on.

  “My simple question has been this: how did Yggdrasil come to be, and how did it become so successful? How did it come to be our carer and our guardian? My fellow Verðandi and I have lived with and travelled through a great many of Yggdrasil’s holy groves and conducted many studies that I hope my Lind forebears would be proud of. The most important thing to grasp from our studies is that many of the most impressive capabilities of Yggdrasil can be traced to a tree’s unique existential predicament.”

  She paused for emphasis.

  “Again. Trees are rooted to the ground. They are unable to pick up and move when they need something or when conditions turn unfavourable, which would make them exceedingly poor as Vikings.”

  The audience remained tight-lipped.

  Eldhúsfíflar, she thought, if it is dry you want, I’ll give you enough kindling to burn down the house.

  “This sessile lifestyle means any given tree must find everything it needs, and must defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. It follows that a highly developed sensory repertoire is required to locate food and identify threats. And so, a tree smells and tastes—they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies. A tree sees—they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow. A tree touches—a vine or a root knows when it encounters a solid object. And trees hear; the sound of a caterpillar chomping a leaf primes the tree’s genetic machinery to produce defence chemicals. Tree roots seek out the water flowing through buried pipes, which suggests that plants somehow hear the sound of flowing water.

  “The sessile lifestyle also helps account for plants’ extraordinary gift for biochemistry, which far exceeds that of animals and, arguably, of our imperial chemists. Even then, our advances, from aspirin to opiates, are derived from compounds designed by plants.

  “Unable to run away, plants deploy a complex language to signal distress, deter or poison enemies, and recruit animals to perform various services for them. A recent experiment by one of my pupils found some plants create a reward and punishment system, a carrot and stick, if you will. They emit a scent that encourages bees to remember a plant and return to it, making them more faithful and effective pollinators. Even more ingenious: several trees are known to send a distress call when attacked by caterpillars. Parasitic wasps some distance away lock in on that call, follow it to the besieged plant, and then eliminate the attackers, a form of plant bodyguard.

  “So, if plants can sense and respond to all these environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—it follows that there may exist some information-processing system to examine the environment and coordinate a plant’s behavioral response. Memory may be a thorny word to apply across kingdoms, yet there are clearly ways that Yggdrasil is storing information biologically that doesn’t require a frontal lobe and hippocampus. For example, immune cells remember their experience of disease and call on that memory in subsequent encounters, even down through generations.

  “Now, no-one believes that we will locate a big walnut-shaped organ somewhere in our plants which processes sensory data and directs plant behaviour. But when we look closely, we do see very sensible, cooperative behaviour. The simplest example is how individual trees support each other, working together for the collective good. My pupils have seen how trees form anastomosis between their roots, allowing them to provide each other with both structural support and vital nutrients. We have
witnessed mother trees using this network to nourish shaded seedlings, including their offspring, until they’re tall enough to reach the light. Even more striking, we have seen how fir trees use a fungal web to trade nutrients with birch trees in the same grove, over the full course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the year. If you delve deeply enough, a vibrant forest community becomes apparent.

  “This village of boughs and beams can mount a coordinated and robust defence. When antelopes browse acacia trees, the leaves produce tannins that make them unappetizing and difficult to digest. When food is scarce and acacias are over-browsed, the trees produce sufficient amounts of toxin to kill the animals.”

  She paused. That was the complicated part over, but it was also the bit that she could prove, if she had to, through details of a hundred experiments at Hvergelmir.

  “Once you have a clear understanding that trees communicate and cooperate daily, it is a simple matter to extrapolate further. There are around six trillion trees on Midgard, which is around one thousand trees per person—and many times that across the Utangard, with estimates of the number of trees on Vanaheim and Alfheim alone that dwarf those numbers. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine percent of the biomass on Midgard. Humanity is a whisper by comparison.

  “Let’s look now at Vaxa, also known as the Trembling Jötunn. After he passed, Karl’s acolytes amongst the Dane-zaa and Tsuu T’ina discovered a clonal colony of a quaking aspen in the central part of Hvítramannaland. There are tens of thousands of trunks above ground, all linked with a massive underground root system. It is in fact a single living organism, as proven by identical genetic markers. The plant is estimated to weigh collectively six thousand tons, making it the heaviest organism we know of. The root system of Vaxa is probably eighty thousand years old—roughly as long as humans have been wandering out of Fornland.

  “We have no way to reliably estimate how many of these Vaxa-style giants exist. But they are vastly old and interconnected in ways we have only begun to study. There are plenty of signposts and suggestions of a sentient mind at work. Blessed with a lifespan of thousands, if not millions of years, what have these constant gardeners achieved? As the empires of man, Sumerian, Persian, Roman, waxed and waned, as the Norse mastered iron and steel and devised intricate solutions to measure the universe around them, what has the serene Yggdrasil accomplished? Infinite complacency? Endless stagnation? Epoch-spanning dullness? Should not all the aeons have amounted to something, beyond, well, lots more trees?

  “We have learnt from the sagas that the World Tree is fragile. Dragons gnaw its deepest roots, four stags feed insatiably from its branches. Only the goat Heidrun and the deer Eiktyrner live in balance with the tree. They feed from the branches too, but they give back gifts to the Tree also. The goat offers mead and the deer pours waters from its antlers into the roots. The Norns, too, tend the tree daily, pouring water from their well to nourish the roots. The fates of legend would collect the sweet glimmering dew which fills the valley; this dew is said to be memory of yesterday.

  “Yggdrasil is balance, is a complex, synergistic, self-regulating system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life across the Nine Worlds. Yggdrasil creates the air we breathe, the water we drink, the habitability of the Nine Worlds. It doesn’t just connect the Nine Worlds, it sustains them. That, to me at least, is purpose enough. That is how I would define the great Arboreal civilization, not as mere buildings and monuments, but nine worlds flung across the sky, reshaped in her image and silently cherished for eternities.”

  All right, you wretches, she thought. Trees chat, check. Trees work together, check. Trees are big and old and everywhere. Check. Time for the big reveal.

  “But I will go further still and state that the World Tree has not only nurtured life, but has shaped the evolution of that life. Let me state that again for clarity: the trees have shaped the life around them. The fact that the tree collective is one, effectively immortal; and two, possesses many different genes leads us to another conclusion. By using her seeds to selectively pollinate, Yggdrasil must have guided her own evolution. What a magnificent and potent tool, a deep and intuitive knowledge of genetics born from countless generations.

  “Think of the potential—you could grow dull workers, who would produce tools and weapons or a breed of warriors to use in battle, or diplomats, with powerful brains that would allow a tree to act with authority far from the grove—a way for distant colonies of trees to communicate with one another. Expansive new colonies could be started by sending a child to root outside of the bounds of a colony, even across the Ginnungagap. Pheromones would probably be used to start, but eventually, a deeper level of communication could be developed that would allow the intelligent, but sessile, parents to program their dull, but motile, children.

  “Lind’s taxonomy, the Náttúra Bók, contains numerous passages that suggest he believed there is an immense amount of invisible and inaccessible activity going on all around us. Our lives, be they imprisoned by the war demands of the fylkirs or the sophistry of the skalds or simply isolated deep in the meat of our animal brains, can only vaguely perceive this realm, the realm of ancestors and spirits.”

  There was a nervous ripple of laughter. Ah, so they laugh when they are threatened, do they? Well, wait and see, boys and girls, wait and see. Momma’s got a brand-new bag and it’s time to clear the dance floor.

  “Lind also hinted at a conscious mind that influences and observes our actions. That divine agency can be assumed to be Yggdrasil, at work with a multiplicity of deft and delicate chemical tools. The Álfar and the spirits, more beautiful than the sun, more ephemeral than the breeze: those creatures are Yggdrasil too. They are her signals and her suggestions.

  “I am not trying to describe a single, peerless mind, with mastery over all things, across all worlds. I don’t think there is any real intent or emotion in Yggdrasil. She is unfathomable, ineffable, utterly alien. The World Tree will never attest to confirm or deny my hypothesis. In place of a brain, what we see is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the murmurations of starlings. In a flock, each bird has only to follow a few simple rules, such as maintaining a prescribed distance from its neighbour, yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coordinated behaviour. Something similar is at work within Yggdrasil, with her thousands of root tips playing the role of the individual birds—gathering and assessing data from the environment and responding in local but coordinated ways that benefit the entire organism. The nature of mimetic osmosis is not well understood, but it demonstrably occurs. Patterns are traced and recognised, and information is exchanged between groves of trees.

  “From our vantage point, we can only see certain activity. The falling of leaves, the slow growth of a sapling. Over many years, we might see an errant root tumble a wall built foolishly close. But it is what we can’t see that is of interest. Activity beyond our senses—or at least, beyond our experience.

  “Much like the parasitic wasp, we are Yggdrasil’s tools, her dull workers. We eliminate her diseases, help her procreate, hunt the animals that plague her, even light the fires that allow her rejuvenation. Once she opened the doors to the Nine Worlds, she sent us through. We spread her seed, and she claimed them as her colonies, bending the climate to her will. For time immemorial, before the advent of recorded history, Yggdrasil has fashioned a joint path through the brambles and the briars. We are inextricably linked to our woody brethren. We were truly born from trees.

  “As the skalds would have it: ‘…in every human there is a tree, and in every tree there is a human, the forest sea is the second sea of Midgard, the tide on which man wanders. The forests work in silence, fulfilling Odin’s mighty design.’ We should serenade them more often.”

  Iðunn hoped her cadence would make it obvious she had finis
hed speaking, but even so, she instinctively glanced at Bohr for approval, both for timekeeping and to chair the remainder of the Mál. For all her armoured pride, she felt naked on the podium, and couldn’t wait to step away.

  There was a brief round of applause in which Bohr shuffled forward to start proceedings, but the crowd was impatient and peremptory. Questions began before the speaker had wheeled into place.

  The first to rise in response was one of the Urður, an older völva, leaning heavily on her staff and speaking as she stood. “As the skalds would have it indeed, for there is more than a touch of poetry about your thesis, my dear. Still, from your lips to my ears. What do we have in the way of proof rather than rhetoric?”

  It irritated Iðunn when people asked questions for which answers had already been provided.

  “In a nutshell, for those of you in the audience who may be hard of hearing: for a tree to move a person between worlds, it is axiomatic that they must be capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.”

  She imagined that might put the crone in her place, but the Urður rose up further, as if casting away her age.

  “Thank you, my dear. Let me see if I have been following. Your contention is that, these electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals? And that the Álfar and Vættir spirits are actually products of these signalling systems?”

  That was unexpected, Iðunn thought. An Urður who knew her arse from her elbow.

  “Technically, the latter part was Karl Lind’s suggestion, but yes, for a large part, that is what I am saying.”

  “But in the absence of actual—even abstract—two-way communication with this sentience, how can we be sure? Have you ever asked an oak?”

  The elderly völva smiled, smug with play on the Norse words, Askr and eik. She missed her calling as a skald.