A Far Green Country

On Eden and Faerie-Land

“Eve’s attendants, immortal children, far from Hesperian glades you are flown,
Once Elven Lords, now tending tree, and leaf, and stone,
Sing the hymn of Eden in the morning, make ready the wood for sunrise,
Set all the earth in proper motion,
Watching over your Lady’s children, though we speak not.”

I once heard a priest say that the church sanctuary, as a sort of indoor “sacred grove”, is meant to represent the garden of Eden. That during the liturgy we are spiritually returning to paradise, if only for a while.

Our longing for our lost paradise, for Eden, is felt everywhere. It permeates our art, our literature, our music. It is said that the arts themselves were born out of longing for what had been lost, and that great art can only come from pain. There’s a reason we romanticize the starving artist.

This longing has never been forgotten. Every culture, from every continent, retains some memory of what was lost in their myths and legends.

Eden has been called by many other names. Fairyland, Asgard, Olympus, Avalon, Valinor, among others.

But I think modern people may view “pagan” concepts of paradise like Olympus and Asgard as something that does not exist in Christianity, which could not be further from the truth. The vague American idea of “heaven” has forgotten what paradise really was. I intend to show that all these mythic paradises from Eden to Asgard are one and the same place.

In Eden we find everything that men have ever longed for. We find the Holy Mountain, the Tree of Life, the halls of the righteous dead, the garden we sprang forth from, the rainbow bridge, apples of immortality, and all manner of elves and gods. We find our home.

The Lost Realm

It may seem trite to start with the question “what is and where is the garden of Eden”, but I think it’s important to go over. Mostly because in our day and age, like so many others things in Christian cosmology it has been reduced to a very simple and vague conception.

Of course, it contains the things you saw in Sunday school. It is the birthplace of mankind, the garden where we fell from grace.

But it isn’t just a garden.

Eden is an entire realm, a “garden” in the sense that it’s consecrated and set apart from the rest of the world. The earthly sacred groves we’ll talk about later are usually situated somewhere inside the larger dark forest, Mirkwood. The garden of Eden fills this role in a more primordial way, as the singular paradise in the center of an entire world of void and sin and darkness.

Placing the garden on a map is more difficult, but we can use one of its defining features to try and do so.

Most Christian (and Jewish) traditions once understood it as a place on a mountain (God’s mountain), at the center of the world- holy tributary rivers flow down from it, and there is something like a world tree or tree of life at the center. Those are the defining features in a nutshell. Other traditions like the Norse or Greek share many of these ideas.

While the location of the garden is heavily debated, I will just get out of the way the idea that we “know” that it was in the middle east, where the modern day Tigris and Euphrates are, because “the Bible says so”. It’s not that simple.

The location of Eden has thousands of years of debate behind it. And beyond Abrahamic traditions, other cultures share an almost identical description of paradise but place it far elsewhere.

Many cultures share the idea of four rivers flowing down from the holy mountain. It’s in the Abrahamic tradition, but also in Mesopotamian and even Indian mythology. Indian cosmology shares a version of this, where from the holy mountain Meru the world is split into four continents.

You can read more about this here, but the takeaway point is that cultures all over the world have agreed on this general cosmology and this location of the primordial mountain at the center of the world.

These cultures have usually identified the four holy rivers with rivers local to themselves. Understandable yes, but not useful if we want to figure out what Genesis and other myths are really talking about.

And more importantly, the Middle-East location doesn’t work well for the symbolism of the garden. The garden is supposed to be at the center of the world, as the world tree and holy mountain are essentially placed at the center of the world. Christian tradition has always taught this, that the garden is at the center and the four holy rivers flow down and out of it, marking the quadrants of the world.

There’s only one place on Earth where this really makes sense. I’m partial to the old idea that the garden of Eden was (is) located at the true center of the Earth, or the North Pole.

Map of the Arctic by Gerardus Mercator

Here is where we get to connect Eden to Hyperborea.

Hyperborea itself deserves its own post, because I believe there is more than one location that share this name. For the most part, I think the Greek stories (and other cultures’ tales) of an Indo-European race are speaking of a historical ancient civilization somewhere in Northwestern Europe, perhaps Doggerland or Britain, but not the North Pole.

However, other traditions that mention this idea of Hyperborea, the land “beyond the north wind”, I think are talking about a different, more primordial place. It’s this version of Hyperborea that we can connect to Eden.

This version began to pop up in the early days of map-making, when the supposed continent at the North Pole began to be placed on maps and labeled with names like Hyperborei. I won’t clutter this article with countless screenshots, but you can go look up Arctic maps from the 1500-1600’s to see this.

Gerardus Mercator drew the above map of the arctic. The “Rupus Nigra et Altissima”, or “Black, Very High Cliff” at the center of his map is assumed to be a mountain at the pole, and it was a common belief of Mercator’s age that the pole itself was actually magnetic mountain.

In many other old maps, the arctic continent is referred to as the Hyperborean continent.

In all of these maps you will see the general layout of a four-island archipelago separated by four great canals or rivers, with a great rock or mountain at the center.

It’s a common suggestion that the four rivers flowing out of the garden in the book of Genesis and other traditions are represented here by the four rivers drawn flowing out of the North Pole. The vision of Hyperborea, a northern paradise populated by a golden, un-fallen race can be interpreted as memory of the Biblical paradise. Its golden haired and fair skinned inhabitants are also sometimes refereed to as elves or minor gods (such as the Aesir and Vanir from Norse myth), tying it in to tales of Fairyland such as Tolkien’s Valinor, which is inhabited by the Vanyar or the “fair elves”. As of course, if anyone still lives in Eden, they could not be men, but perhaps our divine cousins.

It’s this arctic version of Hyperborea that is usually disussed in esoteric traditions as well (such as Theosophy), where it is a primordial land at the pole, usually said to be the birthplace of humanity. The Hyperboreran “root race” these tradition say has its home there. is connected to the Greek mythological “Golden Age”, when humans were said to be perfect and sinless. Already the connections to Eden as well as Faerie should be apparent.

However, the North Pole as a location of Eden shares an issue with placing it in Mesopotamia- that is, if you travel to these places today you may realize, Eden is not there.

Sundered from the World

If you sail to the North Pole today, you won’t see much of anything but floating ice. Likewise, you will not find anything approaching a paradise in the Middle-East.

However, this is actually to be expected. As we learn in Genesis, after the fall the garden was “sundered” from mankind and the entrance is guarded by an angel. We cannot simply physically travel to Eden, much in the same way that in myths not just anyone can stumble upon an enchanted forest or ascend a holy mountain to speak with the gods.

“Fairy Land”

This brings up an interesting question of in what way we were “removed” from paradise when Adam and Eve were thrust out of the gate and forced to “descend” from the holy mountain. Was it as simple as walking out of a garden? Or was Eden literally removed from the boundaries of our world?

Tolkien certainly thought so, and man’s “sundering” from Faerie and enchantment is something he long wrote on and brooded over. He attempted to explain this separation with his elven paradise of Valinor. Eru (God) literally removes the sacred land from the circles of the world, so that humans sailing for it would simply encounter empty waters if they tried to sail there. However, elves and others among the blessed are granted passage along the “straight way”, which allows them to sail to Valinor. Valinor, once an accessible continent, becomes Fairyland, a place of myth beyond human reach.

We see this in other traditions as well. In Norse myth, Asgard is its own realm on the world tree apart from Midgard, and in Greek myth, the true Olympus was actually usually thought to be in another realm as well (despite there being a “real” Mt. Olympus in Greece).

The consensus appears to be among all traditions that we have truly been barred from the realm of paradise, to the point that it is not even accessible to us unless granted passage by some divine blessing. The idea that “you can’t go back to Eden” is a literal one, it’s not only because we can’t find it. It isn’t only guarded by angels, it’s removed from our dimension itself. This idea also makes concepts like the Bifrost from Norse mythology more interesting- what sort of bridge can take you through alternate dimensions from Earth to the land of the gods?

Since Eden is now sundered from our “realm”, we could not see it even if we did travel to the old location of its gates. We can not expect to be able to find the gates of Eden now no matter how far we look.

The Great Wall

The Biblical Eden is also said to be “walled”, with specific entrances and exits. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are specifically thrust out of the eastern gate, seen here in a painting by Thomas Cole:

Also note that being sent out of the Eastern gate of Eden would send Adam and Eve towards Europe if based on the Mercator map…

The idea of Faerie being walled is seen everywhere in mythology, usually specifically to keep out demonic powers.

From this comes the common appearance in myth of a sacred “hedge” or something similar that separates sacred groves and enchanted forests from the human world.

Tolkien’s Eden equivalent, the undying lands of Valinor, are barricaded by a great mountain range erected by the Valar to keep out Tolkien’s Satan equivalent, Melkor. (Tolkien’s Valinor is not the birthplace of humanity, but in all other aspects it fills the role of Eden/Faerieland).

In Norse myth, Asgard is also surrounded by a great barrier, this one built by a Jotun(giant) hired by the Aesir. Olympus was said to be heavily fortified as well.

This plays into Milton's Paradise Lost in a big way, where Lucifer’s entrance to Eden is presented as a great feat, because of how formidable its defenses are. To get past the walls of Faerie and its angelic guard is not an easy task.

Going back to the North Pole theories, I like to imagine that the Aurora Borelais (the Northern Lights) that surround the Arctic circle are what’s left of this magical barrier, the great defensive mountain range of Faerie. Far out of reach to us mortals that enter the circles of the North, mystically sundered from us and know longer tangible, but still ethereally beautiful. Perhaps some blessed individual or hero sailing beyond the Northern Lights would encounter not only the shifting ice, but a door to paradise, or at least could come to the guarded gates by way of the Bifrost.

“And see not ye that bonny road?

Although commonly imaged simply as a “rainbow bridge”, the Bifrost is a bit more than that. Its description, in my opinion, sounds more like the Northern lights than a regular rainbow. Some scholars have proposed that the name “Bifrost” means something along the lines of “shimmering path” or “swaying road to heaven”. Yes, I know the Aurora is seen around the south pole as well. But I can’t help but wonder.

The Holy Mountain

At the center of God’s country is the great Holy Mountain, the peak at the center of the world.

Zion. Olympus. The white mountain of the gods. Asgard. The Elf-King’s hall.

This seems to be a lesser known feature of biblical Eden, since we focus on the garden aspect. However, the Holy Mountain is the most important place in Eden, because this is God’s seat on Earth.

It’s a common tradition in Christianity to say that the garden of Eden itself, where man was born, was located on the slopes of the holy mountain.

This changes the normal conception of Eden. Usually we think of it as a place God made only for man, and then He “went” there to create us. However when viewed in the full mythic context, it's more as if God created us in his own personal garden, at the foot of his castle. Mythically this points to how it was always our destiny to ascend into our Father’s house, rather than descend out of Eden in shame.

"I see the fire that we have brought forth:
A grimness so cold yet it promised great warmth.
Elite we're no longer, ran off the court.
Fate, we'll pretend we're still one with the source.

Eden might as well burn if it's not promised back,
trees lit up as incense, harkening our past.
God grant us something, he'll do as You ask,
and I'll follow him down this rugged, raw path."

- Chase McBride

Of course, it it not only Christians that remember a glimpse of the holy mount.

To the Germanics it was Asgard, the mead hall of the Aesir. To the Greeks, Olympus. In India, it is Meru.

The realm of Faerie contains this mount as well.

In Tolkien’s Faerie, his vision of Eden, Valinor, we find Taniquetil, the home of Manwë and Varda, the king and queen of his pantheon of gods, where they are served by the light elves. From its peaks, Lord Manwe watches over the entire earth, seeing and hearing all things with the aid of his eagles much as Zeus or Odin did. Here Tolkien tied together Germanic myth with Fairyland, a place where gods and elves live in harmony.

Some common ideas surrounding the Holy Mountain across cultures is that it is magnetic and/or magical, and lies at the geographic center of Earth. In the modern era Gerardus Mercator called it Rupes Nigra, or “Black Rock”. It was considered a phantom island at the North Pole. Mercator wrote this on the island-

“In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone…”

The World Tree

The Biblical garden also contains the tree of life. This tree of life at the center of the garden (and at the center of the world) corresponds to the same “world-tree” found in the Germanic tradition. The belief in a world tree at the center of the world is found from Europe to Africa to Asia and the Americas.

The Biblical account pays more attention to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it is the Tree of Life with more primordial significance.

Where the Holy Mountain is God’s abode, the Tree of Life is also located at the center of the world and represents the order and harmony of the universe. It is where Creation “grows” out from the energies of the Divine.

From Paradise Found [1885]:

“The Tree of Life, The middle tree, and highest there that grew.”—Milton

This tree is sometimes seen as the source of all the realms and all life, the “root” that all other being sprang from.

In Jewish mythology the Tree of Life or the "tree of souls" produces new souls, which fall into the Treasury of Souls. The Angel Gabriel reaches into the treasury and takes out the first soul that comes into his hand. Then Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the embryo until it is born

Every culture on Earth has some form of this myth of the great world tree, and that tradition is actually carried on in Christianity through the symbol cross, which has in some mysterious way replaced the tree as the new spring of eternal life. The ancient tree of life was the symbol of life for Adamic man, whereas the cross has become the new symbol of eternal life in Christ.

We find these sacred trees in Faerie as well. Tolkien portrayed them best with the two light giving trees of Valinor, the precursors to the Sun and Moon, which were marred and destroyed by Melkor (parallel to Satan entering and marring Eden). Even in modern fantasy-fiction like the Legend of Zelda or Avatar you’ll find the archetype of the life-giving primordial tree.

The Garden

Of course, we can’t forget the actual garden in the Garden of Eden.

God’s garden, an agrarian paradise, where man was born and walked with God. Myth has no shortage of examples of this place. It’s in these fields and meadows surrounding the holy mountain that we get more connections to Faerie, as it was these lands that Tolkien imagined being the domain of the elves- the dryads and naiads who’s job it is to keep up God’s gardens.

The holy gardens are where God walked with Adam, where all the minor deities and spirits of pagan pantheons walk and dance.

Separate from the great world tree, paradise if usually said to be filled with many other sacred groves and trees, holding fruits like the apples of immortality (Tree of Life in the Bible). Probably the most iconic of these is pagan myth is the garden of the Heperides, the garden that grew golden apples tended by the daughters of the Titan Atlas.

Tolkien includes this as the gardens of Yavanna, the goddess of all that grows on the Earth.

C.S. Lewis uses the garden and golden apple archetype in the Magician’s Nephew, where Digory heals his sick mother with an apple from a sacred Narnian grove.

The Garden of Eden as the birthplace of mankind is made all the more beautiful when imagined in its full context, with all the country of God surrounding it. Imagine Edenic gardens where elves tend to life-giving trees and golden flowers, where the gods of Olympus and Asgard ride by on their chariots, where Christ himself walks in the evenings and the Sun never sets.

Halls of the (Living) Dead

Where do the righteous go when they die?

In Norse tradition, the great warriors went to Odin’s hall in Asgard, Valhalla. In Tolkien, the spirits of slain elves flee to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor where they await re-housing in their physical bodies. Countless other world traditions speak of the heavenly realm where they will ascend to after death to be with the ancestors.

However, Christian tradition today seems to assume that “Heaven” is an entirely non-physical, vague place. But just because your spirit may go there after death, sundered from your body, does not necessarily mean Heaven is itself intangible.

Christ Himself has a body now, the Incarnation of God, and He ascended to Heaven in that physical body. But where did he go? “Heaven” must mean something tangible Well, it seems clear to say that he ascended to His throne on the Holy Mountain. Yes, Christ went to Valinor, to Paradise. The God-Man entered the long-lost paradise. There is less difference than you might think between Frodo’s sailing into the West and Christ’s ascension to Right Hand of the Father. It is all a part of the same pattern.

Western Christian tradition before the modern era continued to treat Heaven as a more physical location. King Arthur went to the mysterious land of Avalon at his death to await his return. Avalon is of course a name for Eden. The question of whether the living or the dead go to Avalon/Eden is irrelevant and therefore why it is so unclear in Arthurian legend whether or nor Arthur actuality died. Because those that go to paradise are no longer dead, but alive, more alive than us in Midgard could ever be.

There is really little difference between the ancient mythologies and the Christian tradition on this matter. Going to “Heaven” means going home.

Elvenhome

Paradise, when understood as not only our birthplace but also as the entire country of God and the realm of “Faerie” is also the home of the elves and nature spirits and all manner of other fantastical things.

One ancient tradition from Scandinavia says that “elves” are children of Eve that she hid from God (because they were unwashed), resulting in them becoming a sort of in-between entity, not full human or fully spirit. It could perhaps be interpreted that these children still dwell in Eden.

But this is the connection I am so fond of, that the elves and nature spirits and deities of myth and folklore are not all “demons” as some have said, but are children of God just as we are. Our sundered cousins.

Connecting with the Biblical idea that the garden lies on the lower levels of the Holy Mountain, in Norse mythology the realm of the elves is sometimes not actually a separate realm from Asgard, but said to simply be in the lower country surrounding the holy mountain. In Greek and Roman mythology, Olympus was populated with countless nature spirits.

We see this in Tolkien as well- the Holy Mountain is the home of the king of the gods, but the elves dwell throughout the all the rest of the land of Valinor. They tend its gardens, build beautiful cities, and spend the endless ages in bliss.

Through this connection of Eden and Faerie, we can imagine Eden not as an empty garden before Man, but as a realm that Adam and Eve found in a state more akin to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, a home to all manner of races and characters and beasts from legend. A place that is not empty without Man, but full of being that miss us greatly. Eden is big enough for men, elves, and all others to live in sight of God’s mountain.

Outposts of Eden- Enchanted Forests

Finally, we’ve come to the archetype of the enchanted wood, probably the most instantly recognizable location in all myth and folklore. What good story doesn’t have an enchanted wood, or a number of them?

The place where we find elves, where heroes go on mystic quests, where druids performed ancient rites, where maidens flee for refuge. An enchanted forest can be anything and anywhere really, as long as some enchanted folk or power dwells there.

Ironically though, these enchanted forests are not in the any of the realms of Faerie at all, but in our own. I think they are best described as “outposts” of Faerie, much as how the priest said that modern church sanctuaries are little Edens.

The archetype of the enchanted elven forest contains all that we’ve already spoken of, only smaller.

They are small refuges in the midst of the dark of Mirkwood. They often use magic “hedges” to keep out men and devils. Their center point is often a great mound or a sacred tree. They are the home of elves, nature spirits, woodland gods. Though they are not God’s mountain, they are often sacred groves, places of worship where God’s presence is said to be particularly strong

I don’t think anyone understood this better than Tolkien.

Tolkien’s Elven kingdoms- Lothlorien, Doriath, Rivendell, etc, are conceived as outposts of the Valar who have not gone home to Valinor, their Eden. They are not the “true” Faeire in the High West, but they are an echo of it. The elves that dwell in these ancient woods use their power to turn their dwellings into small Valinors, dells and valleys where their power can thrive, places where death and decay can be kept at bay. To step into Lothlorien feels to the Hobbits like they had stepped into Valinor itself. Even the trees of Lothlorien are trees transported from across the sea, a piece of Faerie.

And this is always the experience of men in folktales that find their way into an enchanted wood. They may not have made it to Eden, but they get a taste of it. They get a taste of a land of enchantment and romance, adventure and high beauty. When an Arthurian night rode through Mirkwood (an outpost of Hell) and found some sacred grove, in some sense he had discovered Eden.

But these enchanted forests are enchanted not necessarily because they are in Faerie, but because a piece of Faerie dwells in them. In Tolkien it is the elven rings, in the Legend of Zelda series it is the sword of evil’s bane, in a Germanic sacred grove it may be an ancient stone ring. A church may not be the literal paradise, but God’s presence in the Eucharist makes it so. These sacred groves and mounds where ancient Druids once tried to connect with God may truly still be places where our sundering from Faerie is not so complete.

All men, whether Christian or pagan, have longed for the same lost home. The differences in faith are on how to return there as fallen beings, but not on what “there” is. All men long for the divine. We all wish to ascend the Holy Mountain.

When we experience the enchanted, we are not experiencing something foreign. The feeling common among the creators and lovers of art and story has always been one of longing- we long for the mountain, the golden halls, the garden, the wildwoods, for great heroism and high beauty. We long for these thing not because we have never know them, but precisely because we once did.

We long for home.