Friendship and Trust

What keeps a friendship alive, and how much should you trust anyone? This trail follows those questions through nine entries from three collections: two runes, two tarot cards and five passages from the Hávamál.

The entries do not agree. The poem praises a friend you can tell your whole mind to and also advises guardedness towards someone you do not trust. The tarot cards put the weight on mutual recognition and steady loyalty, and the runes on partnership. Hávamál stanzas are from Olive Bray’s 1908 translation. The connections are editorial choices made for this site, not a claim that the old sources formed one system. Nothing here tells you whom to trust.