Tallinn saw the world’s first appearance on public display of a Christmas tree, in 1441. The Brotherhood of the Blackheads – not a fraternity with a skin problem but a merchant guild – started celebrating in the town’s Christmas market a custom already widespread in the home.
It must be said that Rīga, the capital of neighbouring Latvia, vies for the same distinction. The claim is plausible: both cities are in the former Livonia, then under the control of German-speaking, crusading orders.
We’ll go with Estonia as the home of the first Christmas tree because it fits in nicely with the forest as the soul of the Estonians.
Even so, trees have an ancient symbolism for all humanity. The “world tree”, maailmapuu, connects heaven with the earth and the underworld, the spiritual with the material worlds, familiar to many as Yggdrasil, the tree of Norse myth.
Karen Armstrong in a Short History of Myth (2005) places the origin of world tree symbolism in the Old Stone Age, and she says:
“The spiritual world is such an immediate and compelling reality that it must have been more accessible to human beings. In every culture, we find the myth of a lost paradise, in which humans lived in close and daily contact with the divine. At the centre of the world, there was a tree linking earth and heaven, which humans could easily climb to reach the realm of the gods. Then there was a catastrophe: the tree was cut down, and it became more difficult to reach heaven.”
Armstrong says the world tree myth reminds humans they can participate in this dual world, “not only in moments of visionary rapture but in the regular duties of their daily lives”.
On leaving Tallinn, I bought a wonderful book, Eesti mütoloogia algajatale – “Estonian mythology for the beginner” by Marju Kõivupuu.
“Trees are more ancient than humankind,” says an old Estonian folk saying, and the ethnologist of Finno-Ugrian peoples and former Estonian president Lennart Meri said: “A tree lives longer than a person; people outlive a forest.” Perhaps, he meant our lives with those of trees are intertwined, in reality and in our minds. Even today more than half of Estonia is in forestland.
Kõivupuu writes that in Estonian and other Finno-Ugrian beliefs, the world tree stood and still stands highly in people’s estimation. The observation that the branches of a tree grow towards the sky, and its roots dive deep into the earth is not lost on the shamans of northern Eurasia and North America, ancient and modern. In this tradition, also present among Finno-Ugrian peoples, the trunk of the tree symbolises the axis of a fourth dimension beyond everyday experience.
Earlier this week I took a pruning saw into the town belt below our mother’s house, and collected a Christmas tree for ourselves, an age-old tradition recalling our family’s northern winters, incongruously in faraway New Zealand, as the summer solstice approaches. A merry Yuletide everyone, häid jõulud.
Lovely, thoughtful, uplifting and inspiring... Thank you!