A Theory About Why Ash Harms Fey in ACOTAR

In Sarah J Maas’s books, Ash wood is the only weakness the fey have that humans are able to exploit. Maas has yet to offer an explanation for why this material, of all substances on Earth, can disrupt the fey’s supernatural healing abilities. Anyone who listened to our recent episode on A Court of Mist and Fury will know that I have become somewhat preoccupied with the potential of Ash weapons to level the playing field for humanity. My interest goes beyond the practical, though. I have also dabbled in theory.

What is a Fey to Sarah J. Maas?

This becomes complicated very quickly. Fairy lore varies from culture to culture. The English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish all have their own stories about creatures that broadly fit the description of Sarah J. Maas’s Fey. It doesn’t end there. In Germanic myth, there are elves (light and dark) and dwarves. In Iceland, they have the huldufolk. Sarah J. Maas seems to draw inspiration from all of these sources as well as modern sources. But, I couldn’t help but notice that the fey more or less look like Tolkien’s elves, and that in the Crescent City series, the world that was originally inhabited by humans is called Midgard.

Interconnected Worlds

I’m not going to go too deep into it here, but there are hints that Sarah J. Maas’s various series may be interconnected. At the very least, we have plenty of evidence in A Court of Mist and Fury that powerful entities from other realms have been stranded in this world. Even if the novels are not interconnected, there are at the very least multiple worlds and there is some way for entities to move between those worlds. What if we had a mythological source that combined ash wood and inter-world travel?

I know an ash tree,
named Yggdrasil,
a high tree, speckled
with white clay;
dewdrops fall from it upon the valleys;
it stands, forever green,
above Urth’s well.
-Voluspa, Poetic Edda

Yggdrasil is the world tree in Norse mythology. The nine realms are situated around the tree. And, of course, Yggdrasil is an ash tree. Is it possible that Sarah J. Maas has structured the world’s of her universe around the world tree model. Is it then possible that ash trees are in some sense children of The Great Ash Tree? If that’s the case, then ability of ash wood to nullify magic may stem from it’s connection to the fundamental magic of creation itself.

It may also be worth noting that that the norns carve the fates of all beings into the bark of Yggdrasil. Being pierced by world tree bark may have the effect of delivering the finality of fate to the immortal. All the more reason for humanity to hold these trees to be sacred. For these reasons, I believe we must begin the immediate cultivation of vast ash groves. Both out of religious duty, and out of the need to protect our lands from these dangerous fey creatures.