Among the many strange stories told of Odin, the Allfather of the Norse gods, none is stranger or more profound than the story of how he won the runes. According to the Eddic poem Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), Odin hanged himself on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights, wounded with a spear, without food or drink, “given to Odin, myself to myself.” At the end of his ordeal he looked down, saw the runes, took them up screaming, and fell from the tree.
This is Odin’s greatest act of self-sacrifice for knowledge, even greater than the eye he gave at Mimir’s well (see Why Does Odin Have Only One Eye?). It is also one of the most mysterious passages in all of Old Norse literature.
The Rúnatal
The story is told in a section of the Hávamál known as the Rúnatal (“the rune-list” or “the account of the runes”), stanzas 138 to 145. The Hávamál is a long poem preserved in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, and it combines practical wisdom about life with mystical lore spoken in the voice of Odin himself.
The central stanzas may be rendered:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, given to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no one knows
from what roots it rises.They gave me no bread nor drink from a horn;
I peered downward.
I took up the runes, screaming I took them;
then I fell back from there.
The Windy Tree
The tree is not named in the poem, but it is universally understood to be Yggdrasil, the great ash at the centre of the Norse cosmos, whose roots reach into the worlds of gods, giants, and the dead. The name Yggdrasil itself is usually interpreted as “Ygg’s horse” — Yggr, “the terrible one,” being one of Odin’s names, and “horse” being a poetic word for the gallows, on which the hanged man “rides.” The world-tree, in other words, may be named after this very event: it is the gallows on which Odin hanged.
The phrase “no one knows from what roots it rises” emphasizes that the tree reaches beyond knowledge — beyond even what Odin, at this point, can see.
Nine Nights
The number nine runs throughout Norse myth. There are nine worlds. Heimdall has nine mothers. Odin’s ring Draupnir drops eight new rings every ninth night. The great sacrificial festival at Uppsala, described by the German chronicler Adam of Bremen around 1070, was held every nine years and lasted nine days; nine males of every species, including humans, were sacrificed and hung in the sacred grove beside the temple.
Nine nights on the tree, then, is a complete ritual period — the time required for a transformation.
”Myself to Myself”
The most enigmatic phrase in the passage is “given to Odin, myself to myself.” Odin is both the sacrificer and the sacrifice, the one who offers and the one who receives.
In Norse religion, victims sacrificed to Odin were often hanged and stabbed with a spear. The sagas describe the practice: King Víkarr in the Gautreks saga is killed by the hero Starkaðr in a mock sacrifice that becomes real, as a reed becomes a spear and a calf’s gut becomes a rope. Odin was called Hangaguð (“god of the hanged”) and Hangatýr, and in poetry the gallows was “Odin’s horse.” Some bog bodies from Denmark, such as the famous Tollund Man (c. 400 BCE), were hanged before being placed in the bog, and some scholars have connected them with such sacrifices, though they predate the recorded Odin cult by many centuries.
By hanging himself and wounding himself with a spear, Odin performs the very rite that his worshippers performed for him. He sacrifices himself to himself because there is no higher power to whom he can offer. The god of sacrifice must become the sacrifice.
No Bread, No Drink
Odin receives no food or drink during his ordeal. The fast, the hanging, and the wound all suggest an initiation — an ordeal of suffering and near-death that transforms the initiate and grants secret knowledge. Many scholars have compared it to shamanic initiation in the cultures of northern Eurasia, particularly among the Sámi and Siberian peoples, in which a shaman undergoes symbolic death, dismemberment, or suffering in a trance, often climbing a sacred tree that connects the worlds, before returning with new powers.
Seizing the Runes
At the end of nine nights, Odin looks downward — perhaps into the depths beneath the tree, into the well at its roots — and sees the runes. He takes them up “screaming.” The Old Norse word œpandi, “screaming” or “shrieking,” conveys both pain and triumph. Then he falls from the tree.
The runes (rúnar) were the letters of the Germanic peoples, used from around the second century CE for inscriptions on stone, metal, bone, and wood. But the word rún also meant “secret” or “mystery.” For the Norse, the runes were not simply an alphabet. They were powerful signs capable of magic: healing, protection, cursing, binding, love, victory.
Odin does not invent the runes. He finds them. They already exist, hidden in the depths of the cosmos, and he wins them through ordeal. The poem suggests that the runes, like the knowledge in Mimir’s well, belong to the deep structure of reality.
What Odin Gained
The following stanzas of the Hávamál describe the results of his ordeal. Odin learned “nine mighty songs” from the brother of his mother Bestla, and he drank the precious mead poured from Óðrerir, the vessel of poetic inspiration. “Then I began to be fruitful and to be wise, to grow and to thrive; word from word sought word for me, deed from deed sought deed for me.”
The poem goes on to list eighteen charms (the Ljóðatal) that Odin knows. They include spells to:
- help in sorrow and sickness,
- blunt the weapons of enemies,
- free himself from chains,
- stop an arrow in flight,
- turn a curse back on the sender,
- quench a fire,
- calm the wind and the sea,
- make a hanged man walk and talk with him,
- protect a warrior in battle,
- win the love of a woman.
The last charm, Odin says, he will teach to no one, “except to the one who holds me in her arms, or who is my sister.”
Parallels with the Crucifixion
The image of a god hanging on a tree, pierced by a spear, sacrificing himself, and winning something for the world has inevitably been compared to the Crucifixion of Christ. The Hávamál was written down by Christians, and some scholars believe the passage was influenced by Christian ideas. Others point out that the details — hanging, the spear, the nine nights, the self-sacrifice, and the runes — fit pagan Norse ritual too closely to be simple borrowings.
The most likely answer is that a genuinely pagan myth was preserved in a Christian age, and perhaps shaped in its telling by the resonance its audience would have felt. Either way, the two images came to coexist in the Viking world: on the Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, pagan and Christian imagery appear side by side.
The Runes Today
The Norse legend of Odin and the runes has had a long afterlife. Rune-casting for divination, though poorly attested in the historical sources, became popular in the twentieth century. The runes are central to modern Heathenry. They appear in fantasy literature, most famously in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, whose map is inscribed with Anglo-Saxon runes. And the image of the god who hangs on the tree for knowledge remains one of the most powerful in world mythology: an image of wisdom bought at the price of suffering.
Last reviewed: September 2026.