At the guts of the mythology of the Anglo-Scandinavian-Germanic North is the evergreen Yggdrasil, the tree of lifestyles believed to carry up the skies and unite and separate 3 worlds: Asgard, excessive within the tree, the place the gods dwelled of their nice halls; Middlegard, the place people lived; and the darkish underground international of Hel, domestic to the great goddess of demise. With the appearance of Christianity within the North round the yr one thousand, Yggdrasil was once recast because the go on which Christ sacrificed himself. G. Ronald Murphy bargains an insightful exam of the lasting importance of Yggdrasil in northern Europe, displaying that the tree's picture endured no longer easily via its absorption into descriptions of Christ's crucifix, yet via attractiveness by means of the newly switched over Christians of the reality in their new faith within the photographs and narratives in their older faith.

Rather than living on theological and cultural changes among Christianity and older Anglo-Scandinavian ideals, Murphy makes a controversy inner to the tradition, exhibiting how the hot dispensation was once a consciousness of the outdated. He indicates how architectural and literary works, together with the Jelling stone in Denmark, the stave church buildings in Norway, The Dream of the Rood, the runes of the futhark, the around church buildings on Bornholm, the Viking crosses at Middleton in Yorkshire or even the Christmas tree, are all indebted to the cultural interweaving of go and tree within the North. Tree of Salvation demonstrates that either Christian and older Northern symbols may be learn as a unmarried tale of salvation.