The account is Odin's own voice, in Hávamál's Rúnatal: 'I know that I hung on the 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.' No bread, no horn; he peered downward; 'I took up the runes, screaming I took them, and fell back from there.' Then the floodgates: nine mighty songs from his mother's kin, a drink of the precious mead, and word growing from word, work from work.
Every clause is a theology. The tree is Yggdrasil — whose very name means 'Odin's horse,' the gallows he rode. The spear is his own Gungnir; sacrifices to Odin were hanged and speared, and here the god performs his own cult on himself, as both priest and offering. And the runes are not invented but seized — pre-existing in the deep, waiting for someone to pay enough. Wisdom in this religion has a fixed exchange rate: an eye at the well, a hanging for the runes, and no discounts for gods.
Comparisons have hung on this passage for centuries — a god on a tree, pierced, thirsting, who descends and returns with salvation-knowledge — and scholars still argue about Christian influence versus shamanic initiation ordeal. The poem itself is untroubled: it files the event under education.
The strangest stanzas in the Edda
Hávamál — "The Sayings of the High One" — is mostly practical: when to speak, how to drink, whom to trust, how a guest should sit. Then, near the end, the voice changes. The proverbs stop, and Odin begins to speak about the time he died — or came as near to it as a god can come — and the poem climbs from etiquette to mysticism in a single stanza. This section, beginning "Veit ek, at ek hekk..." ("I know that I hung..."), is conventionally called the Rúnatal, the "tally of runes," and it is the closest thing Norse religion has to a founding revelation: the moment its highest god acquired the knowledge his whole cult was organized around.
Read slowly, the stanzas are a sequence of deliberate paradoxes. He hung on "the windy tree" nine long nights — nine being the mythology's charged number: nine worlds, Hermóðr's nine nights' ride to Hel, Thor's nine dying steps. He was wounded with a spear — his own weapon, Gungnir, the spear whose cast dedicates a battlefield's dead to him. He was given to Odin, myself to myself — the sacrifice's dedication formula folded into a loop, donor and recipient and offering all one person. He hung on a tree "of which no one knows from what roots it rises" — and no one knows the roots of Yggdrasil either, the world-ash whose very name is usually read as "Ygg's horse," Ygg ("the Terrible") being Odin: the gallows is called the hanged man's horse in Norse poetry, and the world-tree is named after this exact event. The cosmos's central pillar carries, in its name, the memory of the god who once swung from it.
They gave him no bread and no horn — no food, no drink; whoever "they" are, the poem does not say. He peered downward — the seer's posture, looking into the deep where hidden things live. And then the two most famous lines: he took up the runes, screaming he took them — and fell back from there. Not "learned," not "was given": took up, seized, the verb of grabbing something out of the dark. The scream is initiation, agony, and birth-cry at once. And the fall is release: the ordeal complete, the god drops from the tree with the alphabet of power in his fist.
What are the runes, that a god would die for them?
Historically, runes are the Germanic letters — the futhark — used for inscriptions from around the second century onward. But in the mythology and in much attested practice, they are more than writing: they are operative signs, letters that do things. The stanzas that follow the Rúnatal in Hávamál make this explicit. After the fall from the tree, Odin receives nine mighty songs from Bölþorn's famous son — his mother Bestla's kin, a giant uncle; the deepest lore in this cosmology keeps coming from the giants — and a drink of the precious mead, poured from Óðrerir, tying the tree-ordeal to the Mead of Poetry. Then growth: "word grew from word for me, work grew from work." Knowledge, once seized, compounds.
The poem's later stanzas catalogue what rune-craft covers — Odin asks whether you know how to carve, how to read, how to stain, how to sacrifice — and closes Hávamál with the Ljóðatal, eighteen spells the High One knows and mostly refuses to teach: songs to blunt blades, break fetters, quench fire, calm seas, turn witches, win women — and one to make a hanged man walk and talk with him. The god of the gallows, having ridden the gallows, can now interrogate its other riders. Eddic and saga literature confirm the picture everywhere: runes carved on ale-horns against poison, victory-runes on sword-hilts, birth-runes, sea-runes, and in Sigrdrífumál a valkyrie teaching rune-lore to the hero Sigurðr. Writing, in the North, arrived wrapped in power — and the myth of its arrival is a god paying for it with his body.
Himself to himself: how the sacrifice works
The Rúnatal is not describing an exotic invention but the god's own historical cult turned inward. The sources on Odin-worship agree on the method of his sacrifices: the victim hanged, and pierced with a spear. Odin's names include Hangaguð, "god of the hanged," and Hangatýr, "lord of the gallows." In Gautreks saga, a king is given to Odin in a ritual that begins as mock-hanging with a calf-gut and a reed — and the gut becomes a noose, the reed becomes a spear, at the words "now I give you to Odin." The Rúnatal shows the god performing this exact rite with himself in both roles: priest and victim, giver and receiver, "given to Odin, myself to myself." Nothing of value moves between persons — and yet everything changes, because the price of the runes was not the transfer of a life but the experience of death. Odin goes to the edge of it, hangs in the wind between worlds for nine nights, looks down into the deep — and the deep, apparently, is where the runes had been all along, waiting for anyone willing to pay the entry fee.
This is of a piece with everything else in Odin's résumé. He gave an eye into Mímir's well for a drink of wisdom; he later hangs a pickled head (Mímir's own, after the hostage exchange soured) as his standing consultant; he seduced and betrayed for the mead; he rides to Hel to shake answers out of dead seeresses. The Rúnatal is the summit of the pattern: wisdom in this religion has a fixed exchange rate, the currency is pieces of yourself, and the market makes no exception for the chief of the gods.
Shamanic ordeal, Christian echo — or both?
Two big comparative debates have hung on this passage for over a century.
The shamanic reading points north and east: in the initiation ordeals of circumpolar shamanism, the candidate undergoes ritual death — suffering, fasting, symbolic dismemberment, a climb of the world-tree — and returns with power over spirits and hidden knowledge. Odin's profile fits startlingly well: the ecstatic trance (his very name derives from óðr, frenzy/inspiration), the shape-shifting, the spirit-animals (ravens, wolves, the eight-legged horse — eight-legged mounts appear in Siberian shamanic lore), the seiðr-magic he practices though it is "unmanly," and here, the tree-ordeal that ends in seized knowledge. On this reading, the Rúnatal preserves, in high poetic form, a genuinely archaic initiation pattern.
The Christian reading points south: a god hangs on a tree, pierced by a spear, thirsting, given as a sacrifice, who cries out, dies (or nearly), and returns bearing salvation-knowledge for gods and men. Hávamál was written down in Christian Iceland; parts of it may have been composed within earshot of the story of the crucifixion, and some scholars hold that the Rúnatal's shape borrows from it. Against this stand the differences, which are not small: Odin sacrifices himself to himself, redeems no one, suffers for knowledge rather than for love of anyone, and comes back not with forgiveness but with eighteen spells and a grudge-free appetite for more. The gallows-and-spear rite is independently attested as Odinic cult; the tree, the nine, the mead are all native furniture.
The honest position — held by most scholars now — is that the question cannot be closed: an old native ordeal-myth may have been shaped, in the telling or the writing, by poets who had heard of another god on another tree. The poem itself, as ever, declines to be anxious. It does not present the hanging as passion or tragedy. It files the event, with perfect Odinic coolness, under education — the last and steepest lesson in a poem of advice, as if to say: this is what the tuition costs at the top.
In the primary sources
The self-sacrifice rests on a single, unrepeated source: Hávamál, stanzas 138–145 (the Rúnatal proper) with the Ljóðatal spell-list following, preserved only in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. Snorri, remarkably, never retells it — his Odin gives an eye at the well and steals the mead, but the Prose Edda is silent on the hanging, which is either an accident of his sources or a puzzle. Corroboration is oblique but real: Odin's gallows-names in skaldic verse, the spear-and-noose sacrifices described in the sagas and by medieval historians, Yggdrasil's name itself. The passage's isolation is part of its power — nine stanzas, one voice, no witnesses, exactly as the scene demands.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Odin hang himself on Yggdrasil?
To win the runes — the letters of power that underlie Norse magic and wisdom. The runes could not be taught or given; they lay in the deep and had to be seized, and the price of reaching them was a nine-night ordeal of hanging, spear-wounding, hunger, and thirst at the edge of death.
What does "myself to myself" mean?
Odin dedicates the sacrifice — his own body — to the god who receives such sacrifices: Odin. Victims offered to Odin were historically hanged and pierced with a spear; in the Rúnatal the god performs his own cult upon himself, as both priest and offering, so that the ordeal is complete and no one else pays.
How long did Odin hang on the tree?
Nine nights — "nights all nine," in the poem's words — without bread or drinking horn, wounded by his own spear Gungnir, on the windswept tree whose roots no one knows.
Did Odin die on the tree?
The poem leaves it at the threshold: he hangs at death's edge, screams as he seizes the runes, and "falls back" from the tree. Many readers and scholars take it as a ritual death-and-return; the text never uses the word "died." He returns transformed, with nine mighty songs, a drink of the precious mead, and knowledge that grows "word from word."
Is Odin's hanging based on the crucifixion?
Scholars have argued both ways for over a century. The parallels (tree, spear, thirst, sacrifice, return with knowledge) are obvious; so are the differences (self-directed, redeems no one, yields spells rather than salvation) — and the hanging-and-spear rite is independently attested as genuine Odin-cult. Most scholars see an archaic initiation myth, possibly colored in transmission by Christian imagery; the case remains open.
Where is the story found?
Only in Hávamál (the Rúnatal section, stanzas 138 onward) in the Poetic Edda. Snorri's Prose Edda never mentions it. Supporting evidence comes from Odin's cult titles ("god of the hanged"), sacrificial practice described in the sagas, and the name Yggdrasil itself — "Odin's horse," i.e., his gallows.