KVASIR SYMBOL DATABASE

APPLE & APPLE TREE

Entry by Joseph Hopkins with art by Rim Baudey for Kvasir Symbol Database at Mimisbrunnr.info, July 2020.
Updated August 2022.

DESCRIPTION & DATING

Apples are the fleshy fruit of the apple tree, which grow in temperate climates in many varieties (genus Malus). This article primarily discusses three of these varieties: The crab apple (Malus sylvestris), varieties of which grow native in western and northern Europe, and the domesticated apple tree (Malus domestica), which ultimately stems from Malus sieversii, a wild apple native to the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan.

By way of unclear diffusion—probably through trade channels such as the Silk Road—Malus domestica was introduced to the Mediterranean, and later to western and northern Europe. (For somewhat recent discussion regarding the domestication of the apple, see for example Cornille A, Gladieux P, Smulders MJM, Roldán-Ruiz I, Laurens F, Le Cam B, et al. (2012).)

Notably, Rim Bitik, the artist who produced the depictions of plants on this page and primary artist behind Mimisbrunnr.info, is a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan. The former capitol of Kazakhstan, the city of Almaty is popularly held to take its name from its association with the apple (Compare Kazakh alma, meaning ‘apple’).

SOURCES

A FEW WORDS ON APPLE WORDS

Before diving into the historic record, it’s necessary to take a moment to clarify a few points around words for the apple and the apple tree in ancient Germanic languages.

Terms for the ‘apple tree’ in ancient Germanic languages include Old English apulder, apuldor; Old Saxon apuldra, Old Saxon apuldra; and Middle High German apfalter. All stem from Proto-Germanic *apalđraz or *apulđro. This word consists of two components: The suffix *-dhro- and the Proto-Germanic word for ‘apple’, *ap(u)laz. From Proto-Germanic *ap(u)laz develops the modern English word apple (from Old English æppel) and its ancient Germanic siblings, such as Old Frisian appel, Old Saxon appul, Crimean Gothic apel, and Old Icelandic epli. (Reconstructed forms are from Orel 2003: 21 with additional examples from Oxford English Dictionary’s entry “Apple, n.”)

As the Oxford English Dictionary outlines, Germanic and non-Germanic cognates to the modern English noun apple can refer to various fruits, but by and large they generally refer specifically to the fruit of the apple tree, reaching back as far as the Proto-Germanic period. (For comparative discussion of Germanic apple terms, see the aforementioned Oxford English Dictionary “Apple, n.”)

It appears that 'apple' as in 'fruit of the apple tree' is the primary meaning throughout the linguistic complex, with other uses secondary and often comparative, yet exactly how much that Proto-Germanic ‘apple’ resembled what we think of when we think of an apple today is an important question to be discussed later in this entry. The same can be said for what ancient Germanic languages speakers would have associated with that Proto-Germanic ‘apple’, which differs from how modern English speakers perceive the fruit.

Readers may also find a little related discussion on the term crab interesting: The word crab, referring to the sourness of the wild apple, first appears on record in the 15th century (Middle English), with no clear precedent. On the other hand, crab, referring to the crustacean, descends from Old English crabba, and seems to be related to the crab of the crab apple by way of the crustacean’s perceived cantankerousness and disagreeability (Compare Oxford English Dictionary: “crabbed, adj.”, and “crab, n.2”). Due to the limitations of the record, exactly how old this comparison is remains unclear but it certainly seems connected to the introduction of a comparatively sweet fruit (that is, sour—crabby—versus sweet).

CONTINENTAL GERMANIC GODDESSES:
THE MOTHERS & NEHALENNIA

Numerous shrines unearthed primarily around the Rhine in what is today Germany from around the first century to fifth century CE indicate that the ancient continental Germanic peoples venerated the Mothers, goddess-like entities often depicted in trios, but sometimes alone. Depicted in a style influenced by Roman material culture, objects frequently feature Latin inscriptions that refer to the women as the Matres (Latin ‘mothers’) and Matronae (Latin ‘matrons; mothers’), preceded with various Germanic names.

The appearance and clothing—the iconography—of these supernatural female figures indicates a constellation of associations. The women are depicted facing forward, sometimes wearing large, bonnet-like headwear, and often holding objects such as bread loaves, diapers, and, frequently, baskets of apple-like fruit. (For a quick overview of this topic, see Simek 1996: 204-206; for images of replicas of the Matronae Aufaniae, see Wikimedia Commons here.)

Iconographically related and commonly interpreted as a Germanic deity (but sometimes seen as Celtic), the goddess Nehalennia is attested on numerous votive altars around what is today Zeeland, Netherlands. Similar to the Mothers, she is often depicted holding baskets of what appear to be apples or apple-like fruit. (Compare Simek 1996: 228-229 and for images of the deity with fruit baskets, see Wikimedia Commons)

Veneration of these entities among the ancient Germanic peoples appears to continue into the Old English record as represented by Mothers Night (Old English Mōdraniht) attested by Old English historian Bede, and among the North Germanic peoples as the dís-valkyrie-norn complex, where we again see trios (or threefold multiplicands) of women associated with child birth, death, and a native concept of fate, wyrd (see discussion in, for example, Simek 2007 [1993]: 61-62, 204-208, 220).

THE OLD ENGLISH RECORD:
NIGON WYRTA GALDOR,
THE SO-CALLED NINE HERBS CHARM

The apple plays a significant role in the Old English charm Nigon Wyrta Galdor, commonly known as the Nine Herbs Charm. For example, invoking the Old English extension of the god Odin, Wōden:

Translation by J. S. Hopkins for Mimisbrunnr.info, 2020. Read the entire translation here.

The ‘wood-sour-apple’—that is, the aforementioned crab apple—along with apple muck (Old English gor) also appear in the prose instructions accompanying the verse sections of the charm. The apple is perhaps the otherwise unknown Weregulu mentioned there as well. Whatever the case, the apple, whether of the crab apple variety or otherwise, clearly plays an important role in the text.

The fact that the poet refers to the apple as the wood-sour apple rather than simply apple also raises question: Is this description intended to set it apart from the domestic, sweet apple, perhaps Malus domestica? This remains a mystery.

The apple is the most commonly mentioned fruit tree in the Old English corpus, and, in addition to the Nigon Wyrta Galdor, crab apples appear in a variety of other Old English medical texts. (For a concise overview, see Hooke 2010: 246-249) Apples are also frequent in Old English place names, discussed in the “Archaeological Record & Place Names” section below.

NORTH GERMANIC RECORD

The North Germanic record is much more substantial than what comes down to us from the Continental Germanic Peoples and the Old English. Although apple trees do not grow in Iceland, where most of the ancient North Germanic corpus stems, we find numerous references to the apple there in the context of pre-Christianization Germanic mythology. These references indicate some level of iconographic continuation—for example, the apple is again associated with the iconography of goddesses and again associated with Odin—while raising other questions.

Iðunn: Apples & the Gods

Let’s start with the goddess iconography. Famously, the North Germanic record strongly associates apples with a particular goddess, Iðunn (pictured above). In the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, the goddess is described as possessing a wooden box that contains apples, a clear parallel to the Mothers and Nehalennia outlined above. We learn in, for example, Skáldskaparmál and the skald Þjóðólfr of Hvinir’s poem Haustlǫng (‘autumn-long’) that when the goddess is missing, the gods rapidly age.

Narratives surrounding Iðunn contain a variety of symbols and motifs that point to a broader motif complex not entirely understood by us today. For example, Loki transforms Iðunn into a nut before rescuing her in the shape of a falcon. Apples and nuts, of course, are both tree fruits, and due to strong similarities elsewhere in other Indo-European cultures, scholars have pointed to potential an Indo-European origin for this narrative. (We’ve left this section intentionally concise: For an in-depth tertiary treatment of this deity, we recommend English Wikipedia’s entry on Iðunn, which contains much broader coverage than either Simek or Lindow’s handbook entries on the topic.)

Vǫlsunga saga: Apples, Sex, & Lineage

As for Odin (Old Norse Óðinn), we see a parallel in the Old English Nigon Wyrta Galdor and the Old Norse record in an association between Odin and the apple in the famous Vǫlsunga saga. An apple plays a crucial role in the Old Norse Vǫlsunga saga, specifically in the birth of the dynasty founder Vǫlsung himself, where it is again associated with the deity Odin. Let’s take a look at the narrative (bracketed comments and bolding are my own own):

Rerir now acquired a deal of plunder through his and married a woman who seemed likely to make him a suitable wife, and they lived together for a very long time, but had no heir, nor any child at all. Neither was at all happy about this and they earnestly prayed to the Gods to let them have a child. And we are next told how Frigg a heard their prayer and spoke to Odin about their request. He was not at a loss what to do and fetched a valkyrie of his, the daughter of Hrimnir the Giant [glossing jǫtunn], put an apple in her hand and told her to take it to the king. She seized the apple, assumed the form of a crow and flew until she came to where the king was sitting on a howe [a burial mound]. She dropped the apple into the king’s lap. He picked the apple up and guessed what it was all about. Then he left the howe and went back to his men, had a talk with the queen and ate part of the apple (Finch 1965: 3).

In an accompanying note, Finch notes that it is unclear whether the king alone or both the king and queen consume the apple. Whatever the case, the queen soon thereafter finds herself with child, but the pregnancy goes on for a remarkably long time with no end in sight. Rerir comes down with an illness and dies while out on campaign. After a total of six years of pregnancy, the queen feels as though she is going to die, and has the child cut from her womb. The newborn boy, who is named Vǫlsung, was, according to the saga author, said to have kissed his mother before she died. Later, when the boy grew of age, the jǫtunn Hrimnir sends the same valkyrie daughter who delivered Odin’s apple (named Hljóð) to marry Vǫlsung. It is with an apple that the Vǫlsung dynasty begins. (Finch 1965: 3-4).

The motif cluster of Odin and the apple tree again returns to play a further role in Vǫlsung’s life a little later in Vǫlsunga saga: Soon after we’re told of a large tree that grows in the center of Vǫlsung’s hall called Barnstokkr, a compound meaning ‘child-tree’. The tree receives brief mention in the saga as it comes down to us today, and during that time it is described both as a “great apple tree” (mikli apaldr) and as a great oak (elk mikil). Barnstokkr’s flowery branches reach through the top of the hall and, during a wedding celebration central to the saga’s early plot lines, the god Odin appears and stabs the tree with a sword, which none may pull free—except the hero Vǫlsung. (Finch 1965: 4)

Understandably, Barnstokkr has generated a significant amount of commentary from scholars over the years, producing a general consensus that, as translator R. Finch summarizes, that the tree was probably originally an apple tree closely aligned with Odin’s gift of an apple that occurs right before this episode in the saga, and that in an earlier form the motifs were connected to what scholars broadly refer to as a “fertility cult”, citing for example the motifs of incest, the central ‘child-tree’, and the sexual transmission and extreme potency of effects of the gods-given apple (cf. Finch 1965: 4). (For further discussion on Barnstokkr, see English Wikipedia’s on this topic, which is again more expansive than the standard tertiary sources on the topic.)

Yggdrasil: Fruit from the Center of the Cosmos

A comparable motif connecting the great tree occurs in the eddic poem Fjǫlsvinnsmál. The poem contains discussion about Mímameiðr (‘Mimi’s Tree’), which appears to be one of various names for Yggdrasil, the enormous sacred tree central to all things. The stanza discusses how the tree bears fruit sought after by suffering women, likely pregnant judging by the stanza as a whole, and, it seems, that they are to cook it. The Old Norse word for fruit used here is aldin, which refers specifically to tree fruits such as acorns—nuts—and apples. (Carolyn Larrington produced a rare recent translation of this poem in her revised translation of the Poetic Edda (see Larrington 2014: 262-263, 318, but compare the much earlier translations of Thorpe and Bellows for a slightly different approach, cleanly outlined on English Wikipedia’s helpful article on Mímameiðr).

Archaeological Record & PLACE NAMES

Another notable mention of the apple in the North Germanic record is within the phrase apples of Hel (Old Norse epli Heljar) that occurs in a piece by the skald Þórbjorn Brúnason embedded in Heiðarvíga saga. It remains unclear what exactly this means, but we know from the archaeological record that apples also have some association with the dead, such as those discovered in the Oseberg Ship burial.

The Oseberg Ship burial is a remarkably well preserved ship burial dating from the Viking Age discovered in, as its name implies, what is today Oseberg, Norway. The grave contained the remains of two women, a spectacular ship, and many notable grave goods. The ship and some of the grave’s contents are viewable today at the University of Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum (not to be confused with the Danish museum of the same name), and readers can find an interactive online version of the museum’s exhibition here. One of the items discovered in the grave was an ornate bucket or barrel containing crab apples.

Back in 1980, archaeologist Else Roesdahl noted the presence of wild apples in the Oseberg Ship burial and highlighted the discovery of a domestic apple core found in what is today Lund, Sweden dating to the Viking Age (which may have been grown in the region or imported). She also noted the developing state of archaeobotany at the time (“virtually nothing is known about vegetable cultivation in [Viking Age Denmark]” (Roesdahl 1982 [1980]: 119). While archaeobotany has most certainly come a long way since 1980, it remains unclear as to exactly when and how Malus domestica was first known to the ancient Germanic peoples and to what extent.

Some further evidence to the place of the apple among the ancient Germanic peoples may be derived from, for example, place names, often referred to by scholars as toponyms. For example, in her study of trees in Old English-era England, scholar Della Hooke notes how common references to apple trees are:

The apple tree is by far the commonest mentioned fruit tree mentioned in early English place names and charters, occurring seventy-two times in the latter source and some twenty-three times in place-names. (Hooke 2010: 249)

These place names contain numerous modifiers describing the trees, including some that indicate the trees or orchards there were particularly old. Hooke goes on to note the various forms in which these apple tree names occur, including their modifiers, and highlights North Germanic influence in north England (where the Old Norse form epli occurs). (Hooke 2010: 249-250)

Clearly, further studies in the area are necessary before deducing exactly when Malus domestica came to western and northern Europe. Nonetheless, the native crab apple appears to have seen much use and held significant symbolism.

ANALYSIS

The apple tree belongs to the broad focus on trees and groves in ancient Germanic religion, wherein groves and sacred trees are venerated, humankind traces its descent from trees, and existence rotates around a central axis, a great sacred tree. As with other tree types in this context, people may be referred to as apple-trees in skaldic poetry. While it is in this context that the apple tree should therefore be primarily considered in the ancient Germanic corpus, another aspect also requires some commentary: The changing set of associations with the apple beyond the primordial fixation with trees.

Only very recently has it been possible for one to walk into a shop and procure an apple at any time of the year, and the Malus domestica strains best known to us are remarkably different than their widely propagated forebears, which could be sweet, spicy, or wonderfully sour; a rainbow of different colors and sizes; and tolerant to different circumstances, such as heat and cold. The vast majority of today’s commercial apples are grocery store shelf-bound, eye-friendly candy—as journalist Michael Pollan memorably puts it “blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb[s]” (Pollan 2001: 7).

Now all but erased, apples also once held a strong association with eroticism, both in the sense of sex and death. Scholars have long noted that comparative surveys reveal a strong association with apples and sex (apples as “love fruit”) in Ancient Greek culture and far beyond, often employed in, for example, love poetry, and often used in a comparative context with sexual anatomy. As scholar Brian Gault puts it, “fruit imagery is one of the most universal sexual metaphors, and the apple is commonly employed in this vein. In many ancient cultures, the apple was viewed as an aphrodisiac, whose consumption would stir sexual excitement and enhance fertility” (Gault 2019: 91-92).

In the ancient Germanic spheres, the record certainly implies this was also the case, and this also hasn’t gone unnoticed by scholars in the field. For example, as scholar E. O. G. Turville-Petre put it back in 1964:

[Among the North Germanic peoples and related,] the apple and other round fruits may be seen as symbols of fertility and death … whether or not the wild apples had practical value, they probably had a similar significance. This is suggested by the large number of wild apples found in the Oseberg grave, in one case together with grain. (Turville-Petre 1964: 187)

Yet what Turville-Petre neglects to mention here is that wild apples do in fact have plenty of practical value for human beings: By way of the magic of fermentation, the very sour and commonly found crab apple readily becomes a very drinkable alcoholic beverage. Alcohol from fermented fruit is no doubt one of the oldest and most readily available means of producing alcohol in human history. To produce alcohol from crab apples, one requires nothing more than edible fruit and the wild yeast naturally present upon it, a storage vessel, and a little labor, luck, and patience—no special tools necessary. In fact, the crab apple tends to make for superior alcoholic beverages than their often sweeter domesticated cousins (of course, your mileage may vary!). In fact, the process is so simple that apples, like other fruits, ferment and become alcoholic right by the tree, as this drunken moose stuck in an apple tree in Sweden was well aware (Zielinski 2011).

As Pollen discusses in his well-known 2011 novel The Botany of Desire, apples seem to have been strongly associated with alcohol until the beginning of the 20th century, largely due to the influence of the 19th and early 20th century temperance movement in English speaking regions and connected regions such as portions of Scandinavia. The temperance movement made a strong push to snuff out the association between apples and alcohol and push prohibition, and under prohibition orchards intended for alcohol production were burned by authorities or abandoned by their former owners. This in time resulted in a cultural shift away from associating the apple with what some scholars might call the Dionysian—the sexual and wild—and toward the much more tamer associations one can find today.

It’s also curious that Iðunn’s abduction most closely resembles a narrative about the theft of an alcoholic beverage, the Mead of Poetry. These associations and similarities raise a variety of questions. For example, was Iðunn considered something of a personification of an apple tree, similar to what we see in later folklore where female entities personify trees such (as the English, Danish, and German ‘elder-tree mother’ and ‘ash-tree lady)’? (On these figures, see for example Hopkins 2014: 36-37) And does the gods’ taste for alcohol extend to alcoholic beverages made from apples, what we today know as cider or applejack?

Unfortunately, without hard evidence from the textual record or the archaeological record we’re left to wonder—the surviving Germanic corpus generally does not discuss topics such as alcohol production or provide things like recipes, and apples, like trees more broadly, rapidly biodegrade exterior to special conditions. A new study surveying the archaeological record of Malus domestica seems over due.

Whatever the case, sexual symbolism and scenarios abound in Vǫlsunga saga and its invocation of the symbol of the apple and repeated association with sex and childbirth is quite clear. Here the gods not only present it as a sexual curative but also as a remedy: It seems the fruit had a certain association with potency, whether erotic or medicinal more broadly.

The fruit has also played a role in assisting Indo-Europeanists in reconstructing the biota known to the earliest speakers of Indo-European languages, the Proto-Indo-Europeans. However, this observation comes with complications and qualifications. As philologist Benjamin Fortson puts it:

The European [branches of the Indo-European language family] allow the reconstruction of words for such trees as the oak, elm, juniper, alder, apple, hazel, and cherry. These may have been [Proto-Indo-European] or specifically European [branch] terms that that arose later; complicating our analysis is the fact that several of these words, such as ‘apple’ (*abel-), have an un-Indo-European look to them that suggests borrowing (although the borrowing could itself be of Proto-Indo-European date). (Forston 2011 [2004]: 44-45)

While the timeline for the introduction of the domestic apple remains unclear today, it appears that apples, whether of the introduced and domestic variety or the native and crab variety, have long played a significant and potentially important role in the culture of the peoples who spoke ancient Germanic languages. This significance plays into the broader focus among the ancient Germanic peoples of centralizing the tree as conceptually ancestral and cosmologically central, and it is no doubt ultimately within this context that the apple tree should be considered.

ABOUT THE ART

This entry contains three original pieces by Rim Baudey for Mimisbrunnr.info, all produced by the artist in 2020. They are as follows:

• I: The north Germanic goddess Iðunn, her apples, and her abductor, the jötunn Þjazi in bird form

• II: The “wood-sour-apple” or crab apple (Malus sylvestris)

• III: An alternate depiction of the goddess Iðunn, holding a box of apples

Readers can find wallpaper-quality versions for personal use by clicking the images. Please contact Mimisbrunnr.info for image use requests.

SEE ALSO

• Bee, important pollinators associated with alcohol and native concepts of fate in ancient Germanic culture

REFERENCES

• Cornille A, Gladieux P, Smulders MJM, Roldán-Ruiz I, Laurens F, Le Cam B, et al. 2012. “New Insight into the History of Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the Genome of Cultivated Varieties”. PLoS Genet 8(5): e1002703. Online: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002703

• Finch, R. G. 1965. Volsunga saga. Nelson. Viewable online via the Viking Society for Northern Research’s archives.

• Fortson, Benjamin. 2011 [2004]. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. Wiley.

• Gault, Brain P. 2019. Body as Landscape, Love as Intoxication: Conceptual Metaphors in the Song of Songs. SBL Press.

• Hooke, Della. 2010. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape. Boydell.

• Hopkins, Joseph S. 2014. “Goddesses Unknown II: On the Apparent Old Norse Goddess Ilmr”. RMN Newsletter, 8. University of Helsinki. Online.

• Larrington, Carolyne. 2014. The Poetic Edda. Revised edition. Oxford World’s Classics.

• Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire. Random House.

• Roesdahl, Elsa. 1982 [1980]. Viking Age Denmark. British Museum Publications.

• Simek, Rudolf. 1996. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Boydell & Brewer.

• Turville-Petre, E. O. G. 1964. Myth and Religion of the North. Greenwood Press. Viewable online at Archive.org.

• Zielinski, Sarah. 2011. “The Alcoholics of the Animal World”. Smithsonianmag.com. Online.