At the very top of Yggdrasil, in the highest part of the crown, sat an eagle. He was enormously big and enormously old and he could see everything in the whole world.
But the eagle was not alone. Between his eyes, right on the bridge of his nose, sat a little hawk called Veðrfölnir.
Veðrfölnir had been sitting there for so long that he had almost forgotten what it felt like to sit anywhere else. Every day he saw the same thing the eagle saw: the sky, the clouds, the seas, the mountains. Everything.
But Veðrfölnir sat a little bit higher up. Just a tiny, tiny bit. And one day he noticed something strange.
"Do you see that?" said Veðrfölnir.
"See what?" said the eagle.
"The shadow. Behind that mountain."
The eagle looked. "I see no mountain."
"That is because you are sitting too low," said Veðrfölnir, and then it went very quiet, because no one had ever told the eagle that he was sitting too low.
The eagle considered getting angry. That was his usual reaction. But instead he thought a little more and said: "What does it look like, that shadow?"
And Veðrfölnir told him. He told him about the shadow behind the mountain, and about the light that fell differently in the afternoon, and about how the sea changed colour when you looked at it from a slant above instead of straight above.
The eagle listened. He had not listened to anyone for a very long time, because when you can see everything you think you do not need to listen.
"Tell me more," said the eagle.
And Veðrfölnir told him. Every evening, when the sun went down and the shadows grew long, the little hawk told him what he could see that the big eagle could not. It was not much. It was just a different angle. But sometimes a different angle is exactly what you need.
And if you ever wonder why a little hawk sits on a big eagle's nose at the top of the world tree, that is why. Not because the eagle needs help seeing. But because even the one who sees the most in the world can miss what is right in front of his nose.