The Lands Between Heaven and Earth: The External Soul and the Worship of Trees in Elden Ring

Part Four

Brother will fight brother and be his slayer,

brother and sister will violate the bond of kinship; 

hard it is in the world, there is much adultery, 

axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder, 

wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong; 

no man will spare another. [...]

Yggdrasil shudders, the tree standing upright, 

the ancient tree groans and the giant is loose; 

all are terrified on the roads to hell…

—Seer’s Prophecy, Poetic Edda

If there’s one thing I can say with confidence about Hidetaka Miyazaki, the man loves trees. Throughout his body of work, when he and his level designers create an area that’s intended to feel safe and welcoming or sacred, they add trees. Firelink Shrine, the hub area that slowly fills with NPCs you rescue and befriend, is a rare patch of greenery amid the stony ruins and blighted swamps of Lordran. Its dilapidated temple is overshadowed by a great tree whose roots reach deep down to Firelink Altar, the gateway to the Gwyn’s seat in the Kiln of the First Flame. By journeying to some of the deepest reaches of Lordran’s caverns, one can reach Ash Lake, a vast expanse of eternal, unsullied water, broken only by the massive Archtrees that date back to the Age of Dragons at the world’s beginning. Similarly, in Bloodborne your mentor, the old hunter Gherman, rests beneath the big tree behind the Hunter’s Workshop; it’s here, as dawn breaks on the night of the hunt, that he offers you salvation and escape from the Hunter’s Dream. In Dark Souls 3, our first indication that the world is in much worse shape is the sight of Firelink Shrine’s wondrous tree, now shriveled and dead. 

In Elden Ring, the tree takes center stage, literally. From just about any location in The Lands Between the sky is dominated by the golden glow of the Erdtree. I can’t overstate just how huge this thing is. It towers above the Mountaintop of the Giants and its trunk could house a medium-sized town easily. The Youtuber Zullie the Witch, who specializes in datamining and deconstructing FromSoft games, estimates it stands more than 5,000 meters tall. 

But the Erdtree is also the spiritual center of this world. It has grown around the Elden Ring, which is the physical embodiment of the Greater Will, the force that governs the cosmological order of The Lands Between. The Erdtree participates in dispensation of the Greater Will, raining golden Grace from its branches, according to our disembodied traveling companion and level-up maiden Melina (more about her in a minute). It also plays a critical role in the cycle of life and death—the spirits of the dead are thought to return to its embrace and the remembrance of great heroes and demigods are hewn into its trunk. In the most disturbing of Elden Ring’s six endings, the player can side with the corpse-defiling Dung Eater to corrupt the Elden Ring in order to blight the Erdtree and prevent the souls of the dead from returning to it, cursing them to an eternity of unrest.  

In its role as a spiritual nexus, the Erdtree closely resembles Yggdrasil from Norse mythology. Despite one of the final pieces of Frazer’s argument in The Golden Bough hinging on the Norse god Baldr being a tree-spirit, and despite pointing out the prolific worship of trees in pagan northern Europe, Frazer pointedly never mentions Yggdrasil in his book. This gap is a big failing—one that points to the predetermined nature of his conclusions—but we can fill it in. Compare the way the Erdtree spreads Grace from its golden boughs with the description of Yggdrasil in the Seer’s Prophecy in the Poetic Edda (from Carolyne Larrington’s translation): 

I know that an ash-tree stands called Yggdrasil,

A high tree, soaked with shining loam;

From there come the dews which fall in the valley,

Ever green, it stands over the well of fate.

What is meant by “the well of fate” is somewhat unclear, but it aligns with the way the Erdtree has grown over and around the Elden Ring and its guiding principle of the world’s order. 

The Poetic Edda exerts a strong influence on Elden Ring in multiple ways. The first is the intentional use of obscurity. I was frustrated when I read the Edda a few years ago—taken down from oral traditions as it was 1,000 years ago, the poems assume a far greater knowledge of Norse culture than a casual reader today will have and the frequent use of kennings will send you scurrying to the end notes stanza after stanza just to understand what character is being referred to. FromSoft’s games recreate this disorientation when characters refer to history, places, and people the player has no context for while the flavor text in item descriptions ends up functioning like the explanatory notes at the back of the book. 

That frustration and disorientation is the real experience of confronting the raw material of mythology and folklore—no straightforward stories, no consistent characterization, just a great morass of customs and traditions, half stories with neither beginning or end, characters whose personalities and motives will remain eternally inscrutable. 

Secondly, the connection between World Trees, divine power, and magic runes is made clear by this passage from the Edda’s poem Sayings of the High One, in which Odin is the speaker:

I know that I hung on a windy tree

Nine long nights,

Wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,

Dedicated to myself,

On that tree of which no man knows 

From where its roots run. [...]

I took up the runes, screaming I took them, 

Then I fell back from there. [...]

Then I began to quicken and be wise,

And to grow and to prosper;

One word found another word for me, 

One deed found another deed for me.

The runes you must find and the meaningful letter,

A very great letter,

A very powerful letter,

Which the mighty sage stained

And the powerful gods made

And the runemaster of the gods carved out. 

Truly, does this not sound like Marika describing her ascension to divine royalty by embracing the Elden Ring and then challenging the player to collect its scattered shards from her children? The XP currency is called Runes, for God’s sake! It’s hard to ignore the symmetry of Odin crucified Yggdrasil with the statues of Marika in a similar position. 

And finally, in a fitting worldbuilding contribution from George RR Martin, knowing his fascination with medieval Europe and its mythology, the backstory of The Lands Between resembles the events of Ragnarok, the cataclysmic battle to come in which numerous gods are to die and the world to burn. 

In Elden Ring, the world reached its current state of fracture after the divine ruler of The Lands Between, the matriarch goddess Queen Marika, shattered the Elden Ring. Her various demigod children fought over its scattered shards, hoping to claim the Ring’s power and elevate themselves to Elden Lord. An entire region remains blighted by Scarlet Rot following the titanic clash that occurred there between her stepson General Radahn the Starscourge and her daughter, Malenia, Goddess of Rot. The marks of the Shattering pock the world, none of Marika’s children having been able to take her place to repair the Ring and undo the damage, and Marika herself mysteriously absent. 

Or perhaps the coming of the player’s character—this time a lowly warrior marked by Grace and called a Tarnished—heralds the onset of Ragnarok. After all, the task is to claim the shards of the Elden Ring held by these various demigods to become Elden Lord yourself. In doing so you will kill many members of the extended divine family. And while the whole world does not burn, the Erdtree must. 

Let’s talk briefly about the external soul. Another member of the royal family, the Lunar Princess Ranni, sought to escape the influence of the Greater Will, which had chosen her as a successor to Queen Marika. She rejected this fate by shedding her godly body. She orchestrated the Night of Black Knives, in which assassins stole a shard of the Rune of Death, allowing them to kill gods. She “cast away her own flesh,” in her telling, escaping the influence of the Greater Will. Players can find her charred body atop the Divine Tower of Liurnia. Her spirit inhabits the body of a life-size, blue-skinned doll and eventually jumps to a miniature doll that the player carries with them. Her questline, which unlocks one of the game’s endings, involves getting her to a place where she can fashion a new body for herself. In doing so she regains the ability to succeed Marika, not to continue the cosmological order of the Greater Will but to remake the universe in an order “not of gold, but the stars and moon of the chill night. I would keep them far from the earth beneath our feet. As it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but I would have them at great remove. And have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch all become impossibilities.” 

This stratagem works because the soul is inviolable. Fate, time, decay—these things act on the body. By becoming a being of pure spirit, Ranni becomes untouchable. This is rather the inverse of what Frazer says in the Golden Bough, when he elaborates beliefs that by removing the soul from the body and storing it in some safe place, the body becomes invulnerable.

In a departure from the usual lonely hikes that characterize these games, the Tarnished has a traveling companion for the player’s journey across The Lands Between. Melina is a girl without a body who asks the player to return her spirit to the Erdtree; she channels our runes into strength, much as the Firekeeper and the doll did in Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, but she is a much livelier character than they. In the first place, she’s quite skeptical of you at the outset and needs to be won over. More importantly, she has goals and plans of her own that only eventually intersect with your own. She refers frequently to her mother and the task she set her—it’s never outright stated but it’s strongly implied she is another of Marika’s daughters, a demigod. 

Melina leaves the player once they reach Leyndell, the Royal Capital, at the base of the Erdtree but quickly returns once the path into the heart of the tree is blocked by impassable thorns. The only way forward is to commit a “cardinal sin” and burn the tree. Melina is the kindling maiden—by burning herself alive she can ignite even the Erdtree, opening the way and setting the world on a path toward renewal. As she says at the Forge of the Giants just before she burns, “I have long observed The Lands Between. This world is in dire need of repair… O Erdtree, you shall burn. Burn, for the sake of the new Lord.” 

There’s a deep well of clues we could plumb here about how the Erdtree was almost certainly burned once before and that that burning was when Melina lost her body (this is a convincing theory and will most likely be born out by the expansion, playing a key part in the story of Shadow of the Erdtree) but that’s a bunch of hermetic lore that only means anything within the vocabulary of the game. Our project here is to understand why Melina’s sacrifice could move us and tap into some feeling of deep truth. Let’s return to the Golden Bough. 

What is a kindling maiden? Why does her burning cause the tree to burn as well? In making a dual argument in the final section of the book, Frazer describes European fire festivals a la the Druids and advances the idea of the external soul. He notes that “the peasants in many parts of Europe have been wont from time immemorial to resort to a ritual of fire at irregular intervals in seasons of distress and calamity.” These two ideas—ritual burning and the external soul—are closely related. Throughout the book Frazer catalogs example after example of the human impersonation of divinity in sacred rites of all sorts. Thus he sees in the human sacrifices set ablaze in Wicker Man-style burning ceremonies a personification of the wood-spirit. He writes: 

But if at these solemn rites the fire was regularly made of oak-wood, it follows that any man who was burned in it as a personification of the tree-spirit could have represented no tree but the oak. The sacred oak was thus burned in duplicate; the wood of the tree was consumed in the fire, and along with it was consumed a living man as a personification of the oak-spirit.

Melina is, in some obscure way, the external soul of the Erdtree. In her burning the tree burns as well because they are one and the same. The tree stands invulnerable as long as Melina persists safely, its vital essence preserved in her. But her destruction reverberates through the Erdtree. The sacred oak is thus burned in duplicate.