In her book The Norse Goddess, the Swedish artist and feminist Monica Sjoo identified aspects of Norse mythology of which she approved as ancient and authentic, while branding anything she disliked a patriarchal interpolation. Ingrid Kincaid writes on the back cover of her book on the runes that “The Runes Revealed will challenge you to remove the tainted, distorted, lens of patriarchal interpretation and start seeing the runes with clearer vision. Long before Odin, the Vikings or Christianity, the runes were.” Given that each rune is the key to an aspect of reality, I would agree, but I continue to hold that it was Odin who obtained and gave them to the world. Kincaid's book is intended to share her personal interpretations and responses to the runes, and her conclusions about their meanings are in fact not too different from my own. My feeling is that Odin doesn't care who gets the credit for finding the runes so long as you use them well.
The Tree and the Well
So where does the story about how Odin gained the runes come from? In Hávamál 138 (the Speaking of the High One), we find the following: “I know that I hung on the wind-tossed tree, nine full nights . . .” The “wind-tossed tree” is the Worldtree, Yggdrasil, “the horse of Ygg” (the Terrible One), another name for Odin. The god is therefore the Rider of the Tree.
In Völuspá 19, the seeress states,
An ash I know, named Yggdrasil,
a high tree, moistened with white mud,
from thence dews drip down into the dales.
ever green it stands over Urdh's well.
Since the Well of Urdh (Wyrd) is located at the base of the Tree, if Odin took up the runes after looking down, it may be in that Well, in which all that has been is preserved and all that is becoming is continually being “laid down,” that he found them. Or he may have encountered them in another dimension of consciousness.
In Völuspá, Yggdrasil is called an ash tree. However, according to Simek, F. R. Schröder has speculated that the name might mean “yew pillar,” based on a link between the Proto-Indo-European words for yew tree and support (Simek 2007, 375). Furthermore, in Old Norse, barraskr, the needle-ash, is another name for the yew. The Worldtree is also referred to as “ever green,” which would support its identification as a yew rather than the deciduous ash. For these reasons, although the ash is noble and beautiful, I rather favor the identification of Yggdrasil as a yew, which is the longest lived of European trees, with the age of some specimens estimated at 2,000 years old or more.
The yew was often planted in churchyards and held to be a link to the land of the dead. The flesh of the red berries of the yew can be eaten, but every other part of the tree, including the seed, is poisonous. I have been told that some people have developed headaches and hallucinations from sitting under a yew tree on a warm day. The wood of the yew is prized for making bows and also for magical staffs and wands. However, you should only work with it where there is good ventilation, especially when you are sanding it.
That said, in the trance journey that led to my first meeting with Odin, the tree up which Raven led me was the redwood, which to my Californian eyes seems more beautiful and impressive (as well as taller and older) than either the ash or the yew. Yggdrasil is the axis mundi that grows at the center of the spiritual dimension that lies within Midgard. In Siberia, the Worldtree is represented by the birch, by a saguaro among the Tohono O'odham of the American Southwest, and in Central America by the kapok. I think that in the world of the spirit, we see the Worldtree as the most impressive tree that grows in the forests of our home.
In the Norse cosmology, Midgard, our world, is in the center; the world of the gods above and the ancestors in Hel below. The configuration of the other worlds around them has been variously described. References in the lore put Niflheim in the north, slightly lower than Midgard. Jotunheim is in the east and Muspelheim in the south, which leaves the west for Vanaheim. Presumably the light elves live closer to Asgard and the svartalfar below.
From Völuspá, we know that three roots reach into the depths. Beneath one of them lies the Well of Urdh where the three Norns (figures analogous to the three fates of classical myth, though not exactly the same) dip up water to nourish the Tree. This is also the site where the gods sit in council. In his fascinating study of world and time in Germanic culture, Paul Bauschatz proposes that all the Otherworld wells described in the lore are connected. From the Well rises the Tree, containing all the worlds, whose events fall into the well in “seething, active strata” (Bauschatz 1982, 122). This creates a source of power that is drawn up through the tree to be released to the worlds.
To quote Völuspá (20) once more,
From there come maidens, knowing much lore.
Three, from the lake that's under the tree.
One is called Urd, the other Verdandi,
the third is Skuld. On wood they carved signs,
laws they laid down, lives they chose.
They worked ørlög for the sons of men.
Far from being a simple representation of past, present, and future, the Norns—Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld—represent a complex concept of time. My understanding of the discussion presented by Bauschatz (1982, 153–187) in The Well and the Tree is that the names of the first two Norns derive from tenses of the verb wairthan, “to be.” A simple preterite form of the verb gives us Urd, governing those actions from the primordial to a minute ago that have already been “laid down” in the Well. The word Verdandi is not only a present tense, but a participle that emerges from the past. The future, however, can only be expressed with the aid of a helping verb. Skuld, from a different verb, skulan, is added to another verb to indicate what shall or should happen as a result of what has gone before.
“They stress the proximity or real presence of the following action without specifically predicating it” (Bauschatz 1982, 183). I interpret this to mean that the past is fixed, and the present, the perpetual “becoming” in which we experience the world, is shaped not only by the past but also by the choices we make right now. Therefore, until those decisions become part of the past, the future can only be a probability.
The lore does not tell us on which branch of the Worldtree Odin was hanged, but it makes sense to me to place the event near the Well, where the inalterable past, the protean present, and the ever-mutating future coexist in the swirl of the cosmic cauldron that is the Well.
The Sacrifice
Here we enter the dimension of myth, where logic is transcended by meaning. In Hávamál 138, the High One speaks in both the first person and the third, observing his ordeal even as he experiences it.
By spear wounded, given to Odin,
myself to myself,
On that tree of which no man knows
the roots from which it rises.
The speaker is “given to Odin,” sjalfur sjalfum mér. To understand what a sacrifice to Odin entailed, let us consider the death of King Vikar in the complicated history of the hero Starkad, which provides much of the plot for Gautrek's saga. As the story goes, King Vikar's ship is becalmed, and divination tells them that Odin requires a human sacrifice to provide a favorable wind. Each time they cast lots, the choice falls on the king. Of course, no one wants to kill him, especially Starkad, who has been his friend and right-hand man since they were boys.
That night Starkad goes (or perhaps dreams he goes) with his foster father to a meeting in which all the participants are called by the names of (or are possessed by) the gods. “Odin” tells Starkad that he must “send the king to me.” In the morning, the men decide to perform a mock sacrifice of the king. “At that, Starkad let loose the branch. The reed-stalk turned into a spear which pierced the king, the tree stump slipped from under his feet, the calf guts turned into a strong withy, the branch shot up with the king into the foliage, and there he died.” (Pálsson and Edwards 1985, 157).
To hang a man and then to stab him would seem to be overkill, but the use of multiple methods for a single execution goes back a long way. Some bodies found preserved in northe
rn peat bogs appear to have been bound, clubbed, and stabbed before being sunk in the marsh. A young man killed sometime in the first century CE and found in Lindow Moss near Cheshire had been strangled and hit on the head before his throat was cut (Joy 2009, 45). This triple form of execution has resonances with “triple deaths” found in the stories of the Irish Suibhne, the Scots Lailoken, and Merlin, whose deaths included piercing, stoning, and drowning or burning.
In The Quest for Merlin, Nikolai Tolstoy proposes that the death of Llew Llaw Gyffes, the Welsh version of Lug whom Tolstoy believes to be cognate to Odin, is an example of the triple sacrifice. In the Mabinogion, Llew says he can only be killed if several impossible conditions are met and makes the mistake of telling his wife what they are. She tells her lover, who stabs Llew with a ritually fashioned spear while he is standing with one foot on the back of a goat and the other on the edge of a bathing tub. Llew turns into an eagle (an ability shared with Odin) and flies to a tree, where he sits, rotting, until he is found and healed by his uncle, the wizard Gwydion.
The men and animals sacrificed at Uppsala were hanged on trees. We do not know if they were also stunned and stabbed. The Odinic sacrifices feature only two methods of killing, which may have been the Germanic version of the custom. Some have proposed that the description of Odin's death on the tree was inspired by the death of Jesus. But the story of King Vikar suggests that it was a pre-Christian tradition in the north.
Certainly when the Germanic peoples encountered the story of the execution of Jesus, they saw in it a parallel to the ordeal of Odin. Although Jesus was crucified, not hanged, both were suspended on a gallows and speared. For a sense of how Germanic peoples viewed the Christian story, see The Heliand, a fascinating version of the gospels in Germanic terms written in Old Saxon in the 9th century. In this version, Jesus is portrayed as a warrior chieftain with his war band around him. The section on the crucifixion includes the driving of the nails, but thereafter Jesus is described as hanging from ropes on the gallows. “The Protector of the Land died on the rope” (Murphy 1992, 173).
Although some have portrayed Odin suspended by one foot like the hanged man in the Tarot cards, the evidence in the lore supports hanging by the neck. Certainly strangulation, which stops the breath, would be appropriate for a god of communication who, as we see in chapter 5, gave the gift of breath to humankind. However he was hanged, it is also important that Odin is suspended, a liminal state that allows him to move between the worlds.
As the rope uplifts the body, the spear opens it to receive the power. When a king cast a spear over an enemy army, he dedicated them to Odin and took no prisoners. The god's special weapon is the spear Gungnir, with which he dedicates his offerings. I believe that Odin is pierced by his own spear, though no one seems to know who dealt the blow.
They gave me no bread nor drinking horn,
I looked down below.
I took up the runes, screaming, I took them,
fell back after.
—Hávamál 139
Why does Odin go to the Tree? What exactly happens to him, and what does he learn? For nine days and nights the god endures, half starved, half choked, weakened by blood loss, and hanging between the worlds in a state of detached and altered consciousness. Conversations with friends whose allergies have nearly killed them have made me vividly aware of what happens when the throat is closed by anaphylactic shock. Interestingly enough, the adrenaline released by pain can slow the process, leading to interesting speculations on the balance that might be achieved by the simultaneous action of the noose and the spear.
Odin is effectively dead, but in that moment of ultimate awareness, he is able to perceive and “grasp” the runes, comprehending their essence and internalizing it. Writers like Mircea Eliade see in this story an analogue to an initiation in which the new shaman has a visionary experience of death and disintegration after which he is given a new, magical body by the ancestors or spirits. If Odin rides the Worldtree to his death, it is in quest of transformation.
These stanzas from a poem by Jennifer Tifft express the experience.
Wrist, waist, neck hemp-wound, taut on the tree
stricken through and intersecting worlds
Pierced and piercing, my throat rune-raw with screams
Words hammer in my heart, lie on my tongue,
Shape my breath
Double and single-sighted eyes look out, see in
Oldest and youngest
Perish never the desire: will to live
Dying to know
Fleeting wing-beats, demanding hardness:
The words are real
Untame warmth, unbridled strength:
The seeing is true
Phantom rope-wounds, remembered pain:
The knowing is all
Odin has no Gwydion to rescue him. It is not the spirits who resurrect the god but that other Self to whom he has been offered. One glimpses a higher self or an expanded consciousness that can only manifest when the less evolved portion has been cast away. In mythic time, all events take place simultaneously; therefore, Odin is always hanging on the Worldtree and always taking up the runes.
When we finish a round of my rune class, those who have fully absorbed their meaning may choose to experience an initiatory ritual that includes being tied to a tree for most of a night, during which, every ten minutes, those conducting the rite bless you with a new rune. The script and directions are included at the end of Taking up the Runes.
When it was my turn, I found that being fully supported by the ropes allowed me to relax into a trance state, while the delivery of a new rune at regular intervals kept trance from turning into sleep. The result was an altered state of consciousness that lasted for six hours, in which it was possible to contemplate all the runes simultaneously and thus to perceive the relationships and connections between them.
Odin, of course, went further. He offered himself to himself—but what does that mean? In Edred Thorsson's magical text, The Nine Doors of Midgard, the student is asked to emulate Odin, becoming not the god but “himSelf or herSelf. This is the true nature of the cult of Odhinn. The Odian does not seek union with Odhinn, but rather with his or her own unique self, a mirror of Odhinn's own godly task” (Thorsson 1991, xx).
This is essentially self-realization, a worthy goal, but I cannot help wondering how the student can understand which aspects of himself to reject until he has gained enough wisdom to glimpse what that true self, not to mention Odin's actual goals, might be. One has visions of young men blithely trying to transform themselves into the gung-ho warriors of the mannerbund (about whom we learn more in chapter 7), forfeiting the opportunity to encounter the other dimensions that Odin's sacrifice revealed.
My experience has been that most people who work with Odin did not set out to find him. When Odin calls, the question they ask is “Why me?” not “How can I gain your power?”
Working the Runes
Once you have the runes, what do you do with them? In Hávamál 142 and 144, respectively, the description of Odin's ordeal is followed by several stanzas discussing how to fashion the physical rune staves and use them.
Runes must you find, and meaningful staves,
Very mighty staves,
Very strong staves,
Which Fimbulthul [“Mighty Sage” or “Speaker,” a name of Odin] stained,
And the Ginnregin [“Great Powers”] fashioned,
And Hropt [“Tumult” or “Speaker,” a name of Odin]
carved from among the powers:
Do you know how to rist [cut/carve]? Do you know how to read?
Do you know how to stain [color]? Do you know how to test [or wield, or pray]
Do you know how to invoke? Do you know how to blót [sacrifice]?
Do you know how to dispatch [offer, send]? Do you
know how to slaughter [literally, “stop the breath”]?
These questions are followed by eighteen spells for healing, battle, protection from po
wers human and supernatural, and talking to the dead. Their purpose and effects are described, but the spells themselves do not appear. Are these rune spells? If so, apparently the rune master is expected to know which runes to use. What we are given is a description of carving and painting runes on wood or stone. We find the same pattern elsewhere in the lore. When Skirnir tries to scare the giant-maiden Gerd into agreeing to marry Freyr, he describes what the runes will do to her but not, perhaps fortunately, which ones he will use.
When Sigurd awakens the Valkyrie from her charmed sleep in the Icelandic version of the story (Sigrdrífumál), she rewards him with several pages describing how to inscribe the runes for various kinds of magic—Tiwaz for victory, Naudhiz to protect one's drink. The runes for the other purposes listed are not named. One stanza describes inscribing runes on wood, then scraping them off and mixing the shavings with mead. They may also be inscribed on weapons or gear, or worn on jewelry or on an amulet.
These are the book-runes
These are the protection-runes,
Also all the ale-runes,
And the splendid power-runes,
For those who can, unblemished and unspoiled,
Have them on their amulets.
Use them, if you've learnt them,
Until the Powers are destroyed.
—Sigrdrífumál 19
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