The Rootless Tree Falls- Samhain, Soddag Valloo, and the Silent Feast of the Ancestors
- Maggie Moon
- Nov 9
- 9 min read
Updated: Nov 11
The Rootless Tree Falls- Samhain, Soddag Valloo, and the Silent Feast of the Ancestors
The ancestors are part of the living world. Honoring them is an important part of most traditions historically. Their presence was woven into every stone and root, into the soil that fed the crops and the strength that guided the hand. To honor them was to sustain the balance between life and death, between harvest and renewal. In every loaf of bread baked for the feast, in every candle lit upon the sill, the old ones gave thanks for the turning that allowed all beings to share in the great wheel of becoming.
Across the Celtic and Norse lands this was the sacred hinge of the year, the season when memory returned through mist and dream. The fields had been cleared, the livestock gathered, and the final harvest stored. The people turned inward with the earth, lighting fires in gratitude for the abundance that would carry them through the dark. At this time the ancestors walked among the living, and the living welcomed them as kin.
I write of these observances because they are woven into the rhythm of existence itself. Our ancestors did not keep these days for appearances or consumerism. They gathered because the turning of the seasons called them to remember. When the harvest was complete and the light began to fade, they lit fires not in fear of darkness but in gratitude for the cycle that sustains all life. Every gathering, every shared loaf, every flame on the hill was a comfort of belonging, and a promise that life would continue.
They lived by the breath of the land and the song of the sky. The movement of the Moon, the deepening arc of the Sun, the migration of birds and beasts, the scent of rain upon leaf and earth, these were their teachers. The festivals aligned their hearts with those celestial and earthly tides, weaving the body of the human into the body of the world. Through these rhythms they remembered that they were part of something vast, a lineage of hands and hearts that tended the sacred balance between creation and decay, light and rest, life and transformation.
Today that same current still moves within us. But when we feel this souls craving for something deeper, the world grows louder and the market demands our attention, but the soul hungers for something older.
These holy days were never meant to be shallow entertainments.
Their purpose was to feed the spirit, to draw us back to the living world and to each other.
To treat them only as occasions for buying and display is to miss their depth.
The soul longs not for glitter but for meaning, for connection, for the sense of belonging to something eternal and true. It hungers for the warmth of shared flame, for the quiet dignity of tradition, for the feeling of being held within a lineage that remembers and endures.
The old ways awaken that memory. They remind us that celebration is sacred work, that joy is an incantation and that reverence can live in every gesture. When we step into these ancient rhythms with awareness, we are not escaping modern life but mending its fractures.
Our ancestors understood this. They gathered to honor the wheel of time, to align with the stars and the turning of the earth, to give thanks for the harvest, and to remember those who walked before them. Their customs were acts of love, for the land, for spirit, for life itself.
I feel them near as I write. They whisper through the wind and the flame, urging us to remember who we are and where we come from. We are the continuation of their breath, the next link in an unbroken chain of remembering.
When we remember the dead, we awaken to the sacredness of life, and the circle continues, whole and shining in its endless return.
To share food and flame with the unseen was an act of belonging. The ancestors were not distant figures of myth. They were guardians of wisdom and keepers of continuity, whose blessings moved through the blood and through the ground itself. The fires kindled at Samhain were prayers of gratitude, each spark a promise that remembrance would never fade.
These rites endure because they speak to something eternal in the soul. A rootless tree falls, yet a tree whose roots are nourished by love and memory endures every storm. The work of the witch, the healer, and the seer is to tend those roots with reverence. In doing so, the living become the bridge between the worlds, carrying forward the breath of those who came before and preparing the way for those yet to come.
As the nights lengthen and the stillness of winter approaches, the world invites us to listen. The silence of the season is not emptiness but a doorway. It is the moment when dream, remembrance, and spirit weave together, guiding the heart back to its source. The Silent Feast of the Ancestors calls us to sit at that threshold, to share our gratitude with the unseen, and to remember that every act of honouring strengthens the thread between past and future.
This is the threshold that opens into Samhain, and the ancient feast of Shibber Vallo. It is the turning of the root beneath the frost, the song of remembrance rising through leafless branches, and the reminder that we are each ancestors in the making.
The Rootless Tree Falls -Samhain-Soddag Valloo-The Silent Feast of the Ancestors
As the seasons have deepened through my own work, I have found a rhythm whispering beneath the surface ,seasonal energies and alignment with the lunar Samhain.
Old calendars once breathed with the land itself. The fire festivals were not fixed to numbered days but followed the pulse of weather, livestock, and field. Samhain was felt rather than calculated, known by scent and sky and the hush before the first frost. As Sharon Paice MacLeod reminds us in Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld, the old rites were shaped by the living earth, not by the clock.
When I began studying the movements of the heavens through that same wild lens, I noticed a hidden harmony, a crossing point between the equinox and the solstice, when the Sun reaches fifteen degrees of Scorpio. In 2025, that alignment arrived on November 7 at 5:01 PM Eastern Time, and many see it as a moment of balance between descent and renewal.
At this point in the year, the Earth’s northern hemisphere tilts further from the Sun, deepening the long shadows of late autumn. The days contract, the nights stretch wide, and the solar path bends toward its lowest arc in the sky. It is a time when the pulse of the cosmos seems to echo what we feel in our bones, the drawing inward, the gathering of light into the seed of winter.
Others, such as myself, feel the power more keenly in the dark moon that follows, the quiet night of November 11 into 12 this year, when the sky empties itself and dream becomes the doorway. In this way of seeing, Samhain is not a single night at all, but a season of crossing, a liminal stretch of days when the worlds lean close and breath and memory entwine.
For a witch in days of old living in the countryside, I suspect the true signal would not be a chart or an ephemeris, but the land itself, the smell of damp soil and leaf rot, the way birds and animals change their paths, the feel of the air on the skin. Early ritual life seems to have followed these kinds of signs, with the yearly cycle shaped by herding, harvest, and weather rather than only on strict astronomical calculation.
It is also worth remembering that Samhain is the very name of the month of November in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and Sauin in Manx Gaelic. The word carries the sense of “summer’s end”, so the whole month can be felt as Samhain tide, not only its opening night.
I do not offer this as a final answer, only as one way of listening to the year. For me, these November nights are a continuous threshold, a slow turning rather than a single click of the clock, and it is within that long breath that the Witch’s Compass begins to turn.
I do not claim this as the only way, only as one path through the turning. For me, these November nights carry a strange sweetness, a hush that feels like the true breath between the worlds. It is the place where the Witch’s Compass turns inward, where the year exhales, and the ancestors draw near to listen.
The Rootless Tree Falls
Today I can hear in my mind as I write these words for you one of Wardruna’s songs “Rotlaust tre fell” Rootless Tree Falls. It is an invocation to the World Tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots and branches hold all nine worlds of existence within them. In the song the voices rise as a prayer, “Give strength to the root, that life shall be bound to the root.” It is both plea and remembrance, a call to nourish the unseen structure that upholds all creation.
Yggdrasil stands as the great mirror between realms, its roots drinking from the deep wells of wisdom, its branches stretching through the heavens. Within it, the ancient truth of correspondence lives: as within, so without; as above, so below. What exists in the vastness of the cosmos also breathes within us. Each human soul is a reflection of that living tree, sustained by its own roots of spirit and earth.
To strengthen the root is to honor that connection. It is to remember that the unseen world feeds the seen, that the health of the branches depends upon the life beneath the soil. This song, and the album Yggdrasil as a whole, remind us that true endurance comes from depth. A rootless tree falls, but one nourished by earth and shadow endures through every season.
The wisdom of Yggdrasil is the wisdom of balance , between underworld and sky, between stillness and movement, between the many worlds that interlace our own. When we tend our roots, we take our rightful place within that vast and sacred web. We become part of the living pattern that binds life to life.
Wardruna lyrics – Rotlaust Tre Fell English Translation
lyrics translated casually by Maria Kvilhaug aka Lady of the Labyrinth
Kom Austre — Come Eastern
Kom gryande dag — Come dawn
Kom fedre og mødre av høgtimbra ætter — Come fathers and mothers of high lineages
Kom hanar i heimar tri — Come roosters into three worlds
Kom Allfader Odin — Come All-Father Odin
Kom moder min Frigg — Come mother mine Frigg
Kom vise Vanar — Come wise Vanir
Kom utgamle Thursar — Come ancient Thurses
Om frøa er ber, syng den song som i fordums liv avla —
If seeds are fruit, sing that song that once made life
Ask standande heitir Yggdrasil —
The standing ash is called Yggdrasill
Tronar eviggrøn yvir Urdarbrønn —
Eternally green, enthroned above Urd’s well
Høyr meg alle, søner åt Heimdall —
Hear me all, sons of Heimdall
Statt upp or svevna — Stand up from your sleep
Gjev kraft til rota — Give power to the root
Kvasst den eldest av ormar som gneg i grunna —
Sharpen the oldest of vipers that gnaw from the ground
Tri nornar eg ber at liv skal du spinne —
I pray to three Norns that you shall spin life
Tri nornar eg ber at liv skal du tvinne —
I pray to three Norns that you shall twine life
Tri nornar eg ber at liv skal du binde —
I pray to three Norns that you shall bind life
…binde til rota… — Bind to the root
Æsir, Nornir, visa Vanir, Thursamøyir, þrá Valkyrjur,
álfar, dvergar, dísir, völvur, vörðar, verger Yggdrasils —
Aesir, Norns, wise Vanir, thurse maidens, yearning Valkyries,
elves, dwarfs, goddesses and witches,
guardians and protectors of Yggdrasill.
When we remember the dead, we awaken to the sacredness of life, and the circle continues, whole and shining in its endless return.
For reference: The Solar midpoint: November 7 | Lunar dark moon: November 11 – 12 (2025)
Sources:
Almanac. “Celtic Calendar: What Are Cross-Quarter & Quarter Days?” Almanac.com, 23 Jul 2025.
URL: https://www.almanac.com/quarter-days-and-cross-quarter-days
Wikipedia contributors. “Samhain” Wikipedia, 2025.
Learn Religions. “Quarter Days and Pagan Fire Festivals.” LearnReligions.com, 19 Jun 2019.
URL: https://www.learnreligions.com/quarter-days-and-cross-quarter-days-2562061
IrishMyths.com. “What Is Samhain? (Definition & Etymology).” 11 Aug 2022.
Digital Medievalist. “Samhain (Samain or Samhain?).” DigitalMedievalist.com.
URL: https://www.digitalmedievalist.com/opinionated-celtic-faqs/samain/
Sharon Paice MacLeod, Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld, McFarland and Company, Inc., Jefferson NC, 2012, p. 76.
² Dictionary of the Irish Language (Royal Irish Academy, 1913–1976), entries for Samhain (Irish, Scots Gaelic) and Sauin (Manx Gaelic).
A. W. Moore, The Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man (London: D. Nutt, 1891), 116.
“The Manx Year: Hollantide,” The Manx Notebook, accessed November 2025, https://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/mquart/mq06537.htm.
Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 360–366.
