So low his roots to hell's dominions tend."

As already mentioned, numerous legendary stories have become interwoven
with the myth of the Yggdrasil, the following sacred one combining the
idea of tree-descent. According to a _trouvere_ of the thirteenth
century,[17] "The tree of life was, a thousand years after the sin of
the first man, transplanted from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of
Abraham, and an angel came from heaven to tell the patriarch that upon
this tree should hang the freedom of mankind. But first from the same
tree of life Jesus should be born, and in the following wise. First was
to be born a knight, Fanouel, who, through the scent merely of the
flower of that living tree, should be engendered in the womb of a
virgin; and this knight again, without knowing woman, should give birth
to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. Both these wonders fell out
as they were foretold. A virgin bore Fanouel by smelling the tree; and
Fanouel having once come unawares to that tree of life, and cut a fruit
from it, wiped his knife against his thigh, in which he inflicted a
slight wound, and thus let in some of the juice. Presently his thigh
began to swell, and eventually St. Anne was born therefrom."

But turning to survivals of this form of animism among uncultured
tribes, we may quote the Damaras, a South African race, with whom "a
tree is supposed to be the universal progenitor, two of which divide the
honour."[18] According to their creed, "In the beginning of things there
was a tree, and out of this tree came Damaras, bushmen, oxen, and
zebras. The Damaras lit a fire which frightened away the bushmen and the
oxen, but the zebras remained."

Hence it is that bushmen and wild beasts live together in all sorts of
inaccessible places, while the Damaras and oxen possess the land. The