Hávamál

Odin on the windy tree

Odin hangs for nine nights on a windswept tree, wounded by a spear and given to himself, and takes up the runes.

Reference: stanzas 137–138 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems); stanzas 138-139 (Bellows numbering) (The Poetic Edda)

Myth and literature · Quotation

The text, stanzas 137–138

137.
I trow I hung on that windy Tree
nine whole days and nights,
stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin,
myself to mine own self given,
high on that Tree of which none hath heard
from what roots it rises to heaven.

138.
None refreshed me ever with food or drink,
I peered right down in the deep;
crying aloud I lifted the Runes
then back I fell from thence.

Our paraphrase

In plain English

Odin says he hung for nine nights on a tree swept by the wind, wounded by a spear and offered to himself, with no food or drink. Then he took up the runes and fell back from the tree.

  • Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936), stanzas 138-139 (Bellows numbering)
Myth and literature · Context

Context

This is in the section called the Rúnatal, “the counting of the runes”. The poem does not name the tree. Scholars almost universally accept that it is meant to be Yggdrasill.

Some commentators have compared the scene with the crucifixion of Christ. That is a scholarly comparison; the poem does not state it.

Historical evidence

In the manuscripts and scholarship

The Hávamál is preserved in one medieval manuscript, the Codex Regius (c. 1270), where it follows the Völuspá. The manuscript places the stanza beginning "I know that I hung" at the very end of the poem. Most editors since Karl Müllenhoff move it here, where they take it to close the Loddfáfnismál. Bellows identifies the "windy tree" as the ash Yggdrasil, called Odin's horse because of this story, and says two lines of the next stanza were presumably borrowed from the poem Svipdagsmál. He calls this stretch, the Rúnatal, the most confusing part of the Hávamál: some stanzas are fragments of the story of winning the runes, one is misplaced from the mead story, and others come from miscellaneous sources. Commentators often compare the hanging to the crucifixion of Christ.

Modern interpretation

Modern interpretation

On this site the story is often read as a picture of learning that costs something. That is a modern reading, not something the poem says.

Modern reflection

Questions to sit with

  • What do you know now that cost you something to learn? Was the price worth it, and who paid it?

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