Oswald's Tree

How local saints tell the universal truth

Our tale begins with the severed arm of an exiled king.

In the early seventh century after Christ, Northumbria had passed back into pagan rule. Oswald, rightful heir, had been exiled to live among the northern Picts in what we now call Scotland. There he was baptised and initiated into the faith of his fathers. In 634, he rallied his forces, and returned to do battle with the pagan kings at Heavenfield. Setting up a cross at the battlefield, he prayed with his soldiers, and, despite the superiority of enemy numbers, he prevailed. The next year, he sent words to the monastery of Iona, calling for the holy man, Aidan, to help restore the Christian faith to his kingdom. King Oswald gave Aidan the Isle of Lindisfarne as his bishopric and base of mission.

In later years, a brother of that monastery, the chronicler Saint Bede, reported how one Easter feast, King Oswald, and Saint Aidan, was sitting together for dinner. Word was brought to the King that outside the poor and hungry were gathering. The king took up a great silver platter of food and ordered that it be taken outside to be shared among the poor, then the plate itself broken into pieces and given to them. Moved by the King’s charity, Saint Aidan prayed God that the hand which held that plate may be forever blessed.

So it was. Oswald finally fell in battle against the pagan King Penda. His enemy meant to deny him the proper funeral rites of an Anglo-Saxon king, and defiled his body by chopping it into parts. But Oswald, it was said, was a descendant of Wotan and friend of ravens. One of his patron birds took up his arm in its beak, flew away, and dropped the limb on a tree. That tree, Oswald’s Tree, would soon give its name to a town: Oswestry.

St Bede reports that the land around Oswald’s tree grew fertile where the blood dropped. People sought the soil around the tree for its miraculous, medicinal benefits, so much so that they dug a well, which remains in Oswestry to this day. The arm was kept encased in precious metals as a relic until it was lost in the iconoclastic tumult of the Reformation. But Saint Oswald’s skull remains in Durham Cathedral to this day.

What does this strange story mean to Christians of English-lineage churches now? We may be more or less ready accept the stories of the Bible at face value, which happened a long time ago in far away places. But what of these more recent stories, for me, so much closer to home? Are they and the relics they describe just mediaeval superstitions? Were the people of old more gullible than we are, less educated, more ready to accept incredible tales? Perhaps it would be better to forget about what the Book of Common Prayer calls the “uncertain stories” of the English saints and stick to the Gospel truth…

There is no doubt about which is more fundamental: the Bible is key to the Christian story and the life of the Church. But there is a danger when we learn the faith that we make it too general, too distant, something we can safely package away into the distant past and not worry too much about the detail. This is a mistake. It has helped to accelerate the decline of the Christian faith in my homeland today. But it does not have to be a case of either-or. We can remember both our local saints and the story of Scripture. And that is what we are meant to do. Oswald’s Tree does not exist in noble isolation. It is part of a much bigger story that takes place around another tree.

Oswestry is so near the Welsh border that it has at times been a Welsh town, and there is a clue about that other tree in its Welsh name, Croesoswalt: not Oswald’s Tree, but Oswald’s Cross. The Cross on which Christ died is often called a “tree,” especially in mediaeval hymns, and we might imagine Oswald’s Tree as one of the many branches of that great Tree which has spread, like a mustard bush, over the world. You could say that it is one of England’s local branches of that tree, a fractal shoot off the same. Oswald’s mythological ancestry to Odin is another link to the Cross, since Odin too was supposed to have died on a tree and risen again to life, a point which Anglo-Saxon Christians did not miss. Oswald’s story points to the great story, what J.R.R. Tolkien called the “true myth,” of Jesus Christ.

A story of trees

The story of Christ, after all, is a story of trees: or maybe, if pious legends are to be believed, of one tree in two forms. Go back to the garden of Eden, the story of Adam and Eve, the one all British children used to know. Through speaking His Word and breathing out His Spirit, God the Father has created the world. From that world, he carves out a glorious garden, and places the first man there to tend it. You may have imagined it as a flat place like a walled garden, but Genesis implies that it is a high place, a kind of mountain: how else could it be the source of the four rivers mentioned there, flowing out from it to give life to what will become the great nations of the world? Eden is a holy mountain, a place hovering between heaven and earth, where the contamination of death and sin are as yet unknown.

God at first creates one human, who bears God’s “image and likeness.” This is why He makes one human first. The human is like God, and God is one. The human does not really have a name. “Adam,” the name we usually give him, simply means “human” in the Hebrew language that Genesis was written in. But the human was not made to be alone. Just as God the Father is one, and yet His Word and Spirit are coeternally with Him in that oneness, so the human made in His image would have a beloved help and companion drawn out from his very self. Hence the part of the story that often gets left out of children’s bibles and Sunday school tellings of Genesis, perhaps because it is embarrassing to modern scientific sensibilities and ideas of sexual equality: God makes Eve from Adam’s rib.

Before you throw up your hands in horror at the ancient world’s patriarchal misogyny, pause and think about the symbolism of this for a moment. Eve is drawn not from Adam’s foot, as though she were lower than him, or from his head, as though she were above him, but from his side, to stand beside him. Yes, the Scripture describes her as his “helper,” but King David uses exactly the same word in the Psalms when he proclaims “God is my helper,” so it is hardly a derogatory term. It means that Adam has to rely on Eve, as we all have to rely on God. So much so, that they are incomplete without one another. This, in Genesis, is the meaning of the sexual binary between man and woman. The marriage of Adam and Eve and their sexual union restores them to their primal unity, makes them one flesh, one body. And from their union, they can obey God’s first commandment to mankind: go forth and multiply. From the one come the many.

So, Adam is to rely on Eve. That reliance, however, goes famously amiss, which brings us back to the tree. For while Eden is full of trees, laden with fruit that Adam and Eve can eat, there is one tree forbidden to them. The tree of the Knowledge of Life and Death is the only one they must not touch. Why not? Was it just there as a test of loyalty? That seems an odd thing for God to do. His ways are admittedly beyond our understanding. Adam and Eve’s, though, are very understandable. Anyone with young children knows that putting a ban on something is a sure way to encourage them to “test your boundaries,” as modern psychobabble puts it. And you or I, faced with that banned tree and its forbidden but delicious-looking fruit, might well ask the same question as any right-minded four-year old gazing on a banned ice-cream: why? Why shouldn’t I try some?¹ After all, it’s just there, within my grasp, and it’s right at the centre of the garden, right on the peak, so it must be important…

The dragon

When the dragon came along, neither Eve nor Adam took much persuading. Yes, you read that aright. I know, we usually think of it as a snake. But how many snakes have you met that can talk? To that, you might answer, you’re more likely to meet a talking snake than a talking dragon. Hold that thought. The distinction between snakes and dragons was less clear in the ancient world than ours. Think of it as a dragon, and it helps us to connect the story of Genesis with all the ancient stories of dragons, including St Michael and the dragon in Revelation, or closer to my home, St George, Beowulf, King Arthur and the many other dragon-slayers of yore. It can also take us much further afield, to the dragon myths of the Far East or the winged snake Quetzalcoatl of South American lore. The talking snake was far more than your common-or-garden asp or adder. It was a supernatural, sentient creature, which thought and planned and spoke.

A little Hebrew knowledge can help us understand why there was such a supernatural talking snake in the Garden of Eden in the first place. You will have the word “seraphim” before, perhaps associated with cherubim in Christmas hymns. It’s the plural form of seraph, and you most likely know that a seraph is some kind of angel. More specifically, these are the angels the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel describe as surrounding the throne of God. That proximity to God shows that they are especially high-ranking angels. If you have ever imagined them as chubby dove-winged babies playing harps, you are in for a shock, because the Hebrew word seraph means snake.

Maybe the connection is getting clearer, but you won’t find it explicitly told in the story of Genesis. There is no mention there of the creation of the angels. Their creation is generally interpreted as a product of God’s first words in Genesis 1: “Let there be light.” It cannot have been a physical light, after all, since the stars and sun come later in the chapter. It must be a spiritual light. And at the end of the story of Eden, when Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, we read of an angel guarding the way back in with a flaming sword, so they must have been made by then. Angels keep cropping up as you read on in Genesis, and throughout the Bible. Hence ancient interpreters, Jewish and later Christian, thought of the angels as predating the physical creation of the cosmos, being emitted in that great, primal light of creation.

To fill in the gaps of this story, we have to go to other ancient Jewish literature that was written to be read alongside the biblical account. There, we discover how certain angels rebelled against God, led by one of the very highest ranking spirits. They refused in particular to bow to creatures of mere flesh and blood, these new “humans” God seemed to love so much. The Genesis story makes far more sense if we think of the “snake” as one of those fallen angels who turned against God, an enemy agent who infiltrated the garden, a seraph of high rank: maybe even the great dragon himself, whose fall and battle with the Archangel St Michael is described at the other end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation: Satan, the ruler of the corrupt angels who seek the ruin of human souls.

God makes all out of nothing, and nothing He makes is fundamentally evil. If He did, then He would be responsible for evil, which would mean that He was less than absolutely good. This rule of thumb applies even to the Devil himself, who was made good, and whose evil may still serve some good purpose in God’s inscrutable plan. And though he is the prince of lies, like the best of liars, he has to mix falsehood with truth to make it credible. There is a grain of good even in his evil words. This is how we have to interpret his seduction of Eve. Eat the fruit, he said, and you will be wise, like God; you will be like one of us, the angels, he implies.

And there is some truth in that. When Eve and Adam take and eat, they suddenly know that they are naked. They understand their vulnerability, and this knowledge makes the vulnerability real. They make themselves clothes of leaves, since they do not know killing or death, so leather is out of the question. Eden was a vegetarian paradise. But that knowledge came with a cost that God did not want them to bear: the cost of sin and death. In the infancy of humanity, we saw too much, too soon.  It’s a danger of which parents whose children are demanding their first smartphone will be acutely aware. The smartphone is not the worst analogy one could make, because there is a time when one can perhaps use certain technologies wisely, and a time before which one should not even try. There’s a reason for a low age limit on driving a car or owning a gun.

Garments of skin

Remembering that God makes nothing evil, we can see the Tree of Knowledge in the same light. Humanity’s error was not in taking the fruit from the tree, but in taking it too soon, before God wanted us to take it, whether that is because the fruit was not yet ripe or we were not yet ready to taste it. And so Adam and Eve were, and we all are still expelled from Eden, from that fertile realm that rises up from earth to heaven, our home among the angels. One of them guards the gate with fire, not just as a punishment, but to protect us from eating even more of that heady fruit which we cannot in this lifetime and this untransfigured body properly digest.

To survive outside Eden, the first humans needed armour. The first death hinted at in the Bible is that of the animal from which God made Adam and Eve their “garments of skin,” the leather protective clothing they would need to make their way in the world of sin and death that lay outside Eden. The second is the animal sacrifice their son Abel made to God, which pleased Him, but made his brother Cain’s countenance fall with jealous anger. This precipitated the first murder of a human, and fratricide at that, when Cain killed Abel. Exiled but protected by God, who placed a curse on any who would kill him, Cain founded the first city. His descendent, Tubal-cain, would be the first to forge weapons of metal, taught to do so, according to ancient Jewish literature outside the Bible, by fallen angels. The all-too-human work of industry and war was prompted from the first by evil supernatural powers.

The story of Genesis continues along the narrative arc begun in Eden, with humans constantly taking God’s power into their own hands, not relying on His bounty and His good time, but learning new technologies by illicit means, and suffering as a result. The extra-biblical literature tells of the Sons of God, the fallen angels, mating with humans. We don’t need to imagine physical impossibilities, because in the ancient world, the temple prostitutes of pagan deities were ritually made vessels for possession by spirits when they were used by men, the idea being that their children would inherit the qualities of the daemons. Their offspring are called “giants” in the Bible and the extra-biblical literature, great men like the heroes and demigods of Greek myth, and just as cruel and violent. Again, it doesn’t make it into the Sunday school cut of the story, but the sickening interbreeding, rape, human sacrifice and orgiastic violence of the “giants,” not just the typical wickedness of men, is the reason God sends the famous flood from which Noah was spared. It remains fashionable in some quarters to distinguish the nice God of the New Testament from the vengeful, angry God of the Old. Not only is this a heresy, called Marcionism, which the Church has rightly condemned, and which has led to historic anti-Semitic attacks on the Jews, but it’s simply false. The enemies God crushes throughout the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, are the hybrid human-daemon monsters whose immorality isn’t “naughty but nice,” but truly horrific.

We may seem to have sailed a long way from the Tree, but not necessarily so. For if we wind back to Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Eden, we will find that they had another son to make up for the loss of poor Abel. His name was Seth. According to a pious legend from before the 3^rd century, Adam grew ill. Seth returned to the gate of Eden and asked for oil from the Tree of Life to help revive him. Instead, the Archangel Michael gave him a branch, or in later versions some seeds, from the Tree of Knowledge. Returning, Seth found his father dead, and either planted the branch on his grave or the seeds in his mouth. Adam’s body nourished this new sapling. More specifically, in the later version, a shoot of the Tree of Knowledge springs from Adam’s skull. Thousands of years later, this tree would, via a rather tortuous journey, go on to provide the wood from which the Cross was made on which Christ died.

We do not need to take these pious legends literally to gain from the spiritual connection that they make. The main connection  is between the Tree by which sin and death entered the world, at the Dragon’s behest, and the wooden “Tree” of the Cross, by which the Dragon was defeated and humanity restored to eternal life. But there are other connections, too. Noah’s ark was made of wood, and serves as a symbol of the Baptism, which is a crucifixion of the self to sin. The water of the flood washes away the draconic, serpentine sins that afflict us, and the wood of the ark, like the wood of the Cross, carries us not over but through the waters to the promised land. Later in the Torah, Moses’ staff is made of wood, and through it God works such miracles as turning it into a snake, parting the waters of the Red Sea, and bringing water from a stone. The Ark of the Covenant was made of wood, which the Israelites carried through the deserts under Moses’ lead as a portable throne for the presence of God as they, too, travelled through hostile and demon-infested lands to reach their promised land. There is an ancient, lasting connection between trees and salvation, even in the Bible alone.

Faith and folktales

But the connections do not end with the Bible. That is only the beginning. One of the problems Christians face today is the erosion of our local folklore and Christian culture. Most manuals of catechesis focus on the universal principles of Christianity, giving the teachings of the Church in the most general way possible. This is all well and good, but we also need to remember that Christianity is about the particular. It is the religion of families, parishes and nations, not just of isolated individuals with bibles in their hands. In England, we have our own stories, and our own trees, which connect our land and people to the Holy Land, to Eden and to Jerusalem.

St Oswald’s Tree is one of those. When his blood dripped from its branches and sanctified the land beneath, it wasn’t because St Oswald himself is a “god,” in the pagan sense. It is because as a saintly man, he participated in the holiness of Christ, our God. When Oswald gave to the poor, he was taking part in Christ’s love of the poor. When he fought the pagans, he was taking part in Christ’s battle against the Dragon and his demons. When his blood dripped to the floor, it was a means for Christ’s blood to nurture the earth. His life was a sharing in Christ’s life, his death a sharing in Christ’s death, his blood a sharing in Christ’s blood.

The first question of the Book of Common Prayer’s catechism is deceptively simple: “what is your name?” The catechist may even be tempted to miss it out. But it is an important question. Our Lord said, “I have called you by name; you are mine.” He spoke of himself as a shepherd who knows each of his flock by name. When we receive the name of a saint from Scripture or the later Church at our Baptism, even though it was chosen by our parents and given to the priest by our godparents, that is the name by which Christ has called us. Through them, He has given us our names. It is worth paying attention to your Christian name and to the saint whose blessings that name bears. By sharing in that name, you share in that saint’s particular mission, their particular way of sharing in and revealing Christ. No one saint completely represents Christ, because only He perfectly reflects the image and likeness of God. But in their own, individual ways, each saint reflects some aspects of that image. It is as though we are looking at one of those posters which, from a distance, shows a character from a film - Star Wars versions of these were once popular - but when you get close up, you see that it is a kind of mosaic of smaller images and other characters. When we look at the saints, we see particular aspects of Christ. We are one body with many limbs and organs. To see the whole, you have to step back, and the image of God will emerge in the face of Christ.

This, incidentally, is how Tolkien’s characters work in the Lord of the Rings. You cannot take each character and say clearly that this person represents Christ, or this person represents Peter or Mary. But each of the characters in their way represent some aspect of one or more saints. The exiled king Aragorn, for example, is reputedly based partly on the story of St Oswald, though their specific tales seem to end very differently: St Oswald’s in death and dismemberment, Aragorn’s in glory. But look deeper at the story which unites them and their ultimate end is the same. As kings returning from exile, they take a part in the story of the great king Christ, who lived a while apart from the Father in our world, died, rose from the dead and ascended back into glory. The exiled kings of history and fiction tell something of this story in their lives. In St Oswald’s case, though he died in battle and his body was torn apart, he now dwells a saint in heaven, and at the Resurrection his body will be whole again.

What is true of the saints is true of us here. Sainthood should be the aspiration of every Christian. Christians are meant to be saints in the making. But Christ calls us not to some generic pattern, some one-size-fits all way of being Christian. He calls us by name, by parentage, by nation. It is worth the effort of researching your own Christian name, the local saints of your county or town, and the saint after whom your parish church is named. Each of them has their own saint’s day, marked in the Kalendar (sic) of the Book of Common Prayer. These days are a cause for celebration: for celebrating in prayer at Holy Communion, and for feasting with family and friends, for making journeys to places of pilgrimage, perhaps for praying at the relics of their bodies, physical remains destined with absolute assurance for Resurrection. If you need an excuse for a party or a journey, the saints can give you plenty.

You most likely did not choose your own name. At Confirmation, though, you have the opportunity to choose another Christian name of your own. This is not compulsory, but is a worthy practice and matter for prayerful discernment. You might ask your priest which saint’s story matches your own sense of mission and the virtues of character to which you aspire. It could be a biblical saint, or someone more local. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a saint of the same sex as you: think of all the Jean-Maries in France and Jose-Marias in Spain. But once you take that saint’s name, you live with his or her prayers, blessing and protection — and through that saint, with Christ’s. For they are only parts of His body, as we are, and their work is all His. This is what it means to be, as the Catechism says, a “member of Christ,” along with St Oswald and all the saints.

So take up the cross as your sword, join the angelic armies of heaven, and join in the battle of the kings of old against the dragons that assail our world!

1. At about that age, or perhaps even younger, I once asked myself this question about a cigar stub left smoking unsupervised in an ashtray, and very quickly discovered the answer.