Ratatoskr: The Squirrel of Yggdrasil
Meet Ratatoskr, the squirrel who runs up and down Yggdrasil carrying insults between the eagle at the top and the serpent Nidhogg at the bottom.
Ratatoskr (Old Norse Ratatoskr, sometimes anglicized Ratatosk) is the squirrel who, according to the Poetic Edda, runs up and down the trunk of the great World Tree Yggdrasil, carrying malicious gossip between the eagle who sits at the top of the tree and the serpent Níðhöggr who gnaws at the roots. The squirrel is one of the most distinctive and enigmatic figures in the Norse mythological corpus, and the image of a small, busy, gossipy being running up and down the axis of the world is one of the most striking in Old Norse poetry.
The Name and Its Meaning
The name Ratatoskr is a compound of two Old Norse elements. The first, rata-, comes from the verb rata (“to travel, to roam, to drill”). The second, -toskr, is a word of disputed meaning: it has been connected to Old Norse tungr (“tongue”) and to a hypothetical toskr (“tooth”), and the 19th-century philologist Sveinbjörn Egilsson glossed the whole as “drill-tooth” — a being whose teeth gnaw, and who runs. The most widely accepted reading, following Egilsson’s Lexicon Poeticum (1860), takes the name as a poetic compound meaning “the gnawer of the tree” or “the one who runs and bites.” Rudolf Simek, in his Dictionary of Northern Mythology (1993), notes that the etymology is uncertain and that the name may be older than the surviving stanzas that name the figure.
Ratatoskr in the Grímnismál
The most explicit reference to Ratatoskr is in the Grímnismál (stanza 32), one of the eddic poems of the Codex Regius (c. 1270, but probably based on older oral tradition). The Carolyne Larrington translation (2014) renders the stanza:
Ratatöskr is the squirrel who runs on the ash Yggdrasil; the eagle’s words he carries down and says them to Nithhöggr below.
The verse is short but vivid. The squirrel runs up and down the world tree, carrying the eagle’s words down to the serpent, and the serpent’s words up to the eagle. Sophus Bugge (in his edition of the Poetic Edda, 1867) read the stanza as the description of an animistic figure — a small, active being who functions as a kind of mediator between the higher and the lower regions of the tree. E. O. G. Turville-Petre, in Myth and Religion of the North (1964), read the figure as a folklore-type, the gossip-carrier who stirs up trouble between two great beings, and compared the figure to the monkey-couriers of medieval European fables.
The Eagle and the Serpent
The two beings between whom Ratatoskr runs are the eagle at the top of Yggdrasil and the serpent Níðhöggr at the bottom. The eagle is described in the Grímnismál (stanzas 31–33) as a wise and ancient being, sitting in the top of the world tree. In some readings, the eagle is associated with the figure of the wind; the Völuspá mentions a great eagle whose wings produce the wind. The eagle is, in the Norse imagination, a being of the upper regions — the air, the sky, the cosmos as a whole.
The serpent Níðhöggr is, in the surviving sources, one of the great dragons of Norse mythology. The name Níðhöggr means “the striker in malice” or “the malicious striker.” The serpent lies at the roots of Yggdrasil, gnawing at the tree and the corpses of the oath-breakers and murderers at Náströnd, the strand of corpses in the underworld. The serpent is a being of the lower regions — the earth, the underworld, the place of the dead.
The eagle and the serpent are not the only two beings at the top and bottom of the tree. The Grímnismál also describes four stags — Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór — who eat the leaves of Yggdrasil, and the Völuspá (stanza 20) describes the three Norns who sit at the base of the tree, drawing water from the well of fate. The eagle, the serpent, the stags, and the Norns are the principal inhabitants of the tree, and Ratatoskr is the most active of them.
The Role of the Gossip
The role of Ratatoskr as the carrier of gossip is the most distinctive feature of the figure in the surviving sources. The squirrel is, in the Grímnismál, the one who carries the eagle’s words down to the serpent, and the serpent’s words up to the eagle. The two beings are the upper and the lower regions of the cosmos, and Ratatoskr is the one who stirs them up.
The image of a small, busy, gossipy being who stirs up trouble between two great beings is a common folkloric motif. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, in their catalogues of folkloric motifs (The Types of the Folktale, 1961; Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 1955–1958), catalogue the figure of the stirring gossip as a worldwide type. The Norse figure is part of a more general pattern, in which a small, clever being — a fox, a crow, a monkey, a small god — is the one who stirs up the larger beings. The reading that the squirrel is not a neutral messenger but a trouble-making figure is the standard one in modern scholarship.
The Tree Itself
The World Tree is, in the surviving sources, an immense ash that supports all the nine worlds. The tree has three roots: one reaching the Well of Urd, one reaching Mímir’s well, and one reaching the Spring of Hvergelmir in Niflheim. The tree is described as being shaken at Ragnarok, and as surviving the end of the world in a renewed form. The tree is the central cosmic structure of the Norse cosmos, and the beings on it are the principal inhabitants of the cosmos.
The squirrel’s role in the tree is one of the most important details. The squirrel is the only one of the beings on the tree who actively moves between the upper and lower regions. The Norns sit at the well, the stags eat the leaves, the eagle sits at the top, the serpent at the bottom. The squirrel is the only one who runs. This makes the figure an important emblem of the dynamic nature of the Norse cosmos: nothing is static; everything is in motion, and the smallest being is as much a part of the cosmic structure as the largest.
The Material Culture: Squirrels in Viking-Age Art
The squirrel is, in the surviving Viking-Age art, a relatively rare figure. There are a few images of squirrels on the picture stones of Gotland (notably Stora Hammars I and Tängelgårda), and a small bronze figure of a squirrel in the National Museum of Denmark. The figure is not common in pagan art, and Ratatoskr is not specifically named in any of the surviving carvings — the identification of the squirrel on the picture stones with Ratatoskr is a modern reading.
The image of the squirrel on the world tree became canonical in the late 19th-century illustrations of the Norse myths, particularly in the work of the Danish illustrator Lorenz Frølich and the Swedish artist John Bauer. In the Bauer illustrations, Ratatoskr is typically rendered as a small, red-brown, alert squirrel running up and down a stylized ash tree, with the eagle visible at the top of the frame. The modern devotional or symbolic image of Ratatoskr in Asatru art and Heathen iconography derives from these late-19th-century illustrations.
Ratatoskr in the Continental Sources
The figure of the squirrel on the world tree is, in the surviving Scandinavian sources, primarily a Norse figure. The continental Germanic sources do not include an equivalent figure. The squirrel is mentioned in Old English (as ácweorna and wefer) and in Old High German (as eihhurno) as a forest animal, but it is not given a cosmic role. Ratatoskr is, in this sense, a specifically Norse invention, and it is not directly paralleled in the older continental Germanic tradition.
The Old Norse word íkorni (squirrel) is used in the Skáldskaparmál as a term of art in the kennings for various things, and the Nordic flying squirrel (Pteromys volans) is native to the forests of Finland, the Baltic, and northern Russia. The figure of Ratatoskr has no clear connection to the flying squirrel, but the existence of the species in the Nordic world may have contributed to the vividness of the figure in the medieval Scandinavian imagination.
Ratatoskr in Modern Culture
Ratatoskr has had a significant impact on modern popular culture. The figure appears in fantasy novels, in video games (notably the God of War and Smite series), in tabletop role-playing games, and in modern art. The name is a striking one, and the image of a small, busy, gossipy being on the world tree has inspired many modern adaptations.
In modern Asatru, Ratatoskr is sometimes invoked as a symbol of the communication between the upper and lower worlds, and the figure is occasionally used in ritual to represent the act of mediation between the realms. The practice is not universal, and no major Asatru organization treats Ratatoskr as a primary devotional figure. The figure remains, in the words of the scholar John Lindow (Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, 2001), “one of the most puzzling of the Norse mythological figures” — known from a single stanza, but vivid enough to have entered the popular imagination.
The Symbolism of the Tree-Dweller
The figure of Ratatoskr is important in the structure of the Norse cosmos because it represents the small, busy, gossipy activity that occurs between the great beings. The squirrel is not a major figure — he is not a god, not a giant, not a hero — but he is a small, persistent figure who, by his activity, contributes to the dynamic of the cosmos. The cosmos is not a static structure: it is a place in which the great beings interact with the small ones, and in which the upper and lower regions are connected by the small but persistent activity of beings like the squirrel.
The figure is, in this respect, a reminder of the complexity of the Norse cosmos. The great and the small are all part of the same dynamic, and the smallest being is as much a part of the structure as the largest. The image of the squirrel running up and down the world tree is, in the end, an image of the Norse cosmos as a place in which everything is in motion, and in which nothing — not even the gods — is at rest.