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The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture by Paul Bauschatz PDF

A solid overview of heathen cosmology, though a difficult book to find in the real world! Academic and lengthy, but thorough.

A (lengthy) review by Bruce Lincoln, professor emeritus at University of Chicago:

"A rich, multilayered study of ancient Germanic concepts of time and causality, a theme which has been treated before but never with such imagination or diversity. Bauschatz works from a variety of perspectives, and his book defies easy summary or classification. A significant section is given over to detailed investigation of the forms and semantics of Germanic verbs (chap. 5, "Language," pp. 155-87), emphasizing the fact that in Germanic languages all action is coded as either past (for which the preterite is used) or nonpast (for which the present is used, "future" tenses having no forms of their own). Lengthy treatment is also given to the narrative structure of such Anglo-Saxon literary works as Beowulf and Widsith (chap. 3, "Beowulf and the Nature of Events," pp. 85-116; chap. 4, "Action, Space, and Time," pp. 117-54), in which a modern reader perceives little save endless "digressions, genealogies, and obscure allusions to people and events seemingly irrelevant to the "core narrative" so dear to our tastes.

Materials more familiar to the historian of religions are presented and brilliantly analyzed in sections given over to Eddic cosmology (chap. 1, "Urth's Well," pp. 1-29) and early Germanic ritual forms as reported by Ibn Fadlan (chap. 2, sec. 1, "Burials: Rites and Artifacts," pp. 33-57) and Tacitus (chap. 2, sec. 2, "Rituals and Everyday Life," pp. 59-84). Yet in all these separate researches, Bauschatz continuously returns to a common theme: the implicit structure of time and causality in which all that is past impinges powerfully on the present and future, just as Urth's Well (or Spring, for, as
Bauschatz shows, Old Norse brunnr denotes a mysterious and powerful source of water which bubbles up to the surface actively)-the reservoir in which all past experience accumulates-continually nourishes the world-tree Yggdrasil."

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