Hávamál
The hanged man speaks
The twelfth song makes a hanged corpse in a tree come down and speak, by writing and painting runes.
Reference: stanza 156 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems)
The text, stanza 156
156.
A twelfth I know: if I see in a tree
a corpse from a halter hanging,
such spells I write, and paint in runes,
that the being descends and speaks.
- Olive Bray (editor and translator), The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems (opens in a new tab) (1908), stanza 156 (Bray’s numbering) Rights: Public domain. Published in 1908, so in the public domain in the United States. Text as edited online by D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh.
In plain English
The twelfth song: if he sees a corpse hanging from a halter in a tree, he writes and paints runes so that the being comes down and speaks.
- Olive Bray (editor and translator), The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems (opens in a new tab) (1908), stanza 156 (Bray’s numbering) Rights: Public domain. Published in 1908, so in the public domain in the United States. Text as edited online by D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh.
Another hanging
Odin’s own hanging on the windy tree is told in stanzas 137 and 138 (see “Odin on the windy tree”). Stanza 156 is also about a body hanging in a tree; the poem does not say the two are connected.
- Olive Bray (editor and translator), The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems (opens in a new tab) (1908), stanza 156 (Bray’s numbering) Rights: Public domain. Published in 1908, so in the public domain in the United States. Text as edited online by D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh.
In the manuscripts and scholarship
The Hávamál is preserved in one medieval manuscript, the Codex Regius (c. 1270), where it follows the Völuspá. This is the only charm in the Ljóðatal that mentions runes directly. Because the Rúnatal comes just before it, modern commentators sometimes read the whole list as referring to the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark. Bellows thinks two of its lines were probably expanded from a single line.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936)
- Wikipedia, Hávamál (opens in a new tab)
Modern interpretation
Read today, this is the darkest of the charms. It is a power over the dead that the poem claims for its speaker. That is a modern reading.
Questions to sit with
- What would you ask someone who could no longer be asked? What do you wish you had asked while you could?