Mímir

Mímir ("the Rememberer") keeps the well under the root of Yggdrasil that reaches toward the frost-giants, and drinks its wisdom every morning from the horn Gjallarhorn. When Odin came asking for a single draught, the price was an eye — which lies in the well still. Wisdom, in the North, is always bought.

Sent to the Vanir as a hostage with Hœnir after the first war, Mímir was beheaded when the Vanir felt cheated by the trade. Odin embalmed the head with herbs and sang spells over it, and it speaks: before Ragnarök, Völuspá shows the Allfather in murmured conference with "Mím's head" one last time. The god of knowledge survives as knowledge does — disembodied, consulted, indispensable.

The well beneath the world-tree

Snorri's Gylfaginning maps the cosmos by the three roots of Yggdrasil, and under the root that stretches toward the frost-giants — where Ginnungagap once yawned — lies Mímisbrunnr, Mímir's well. "Wisdom and understanding are hidden there," Snorri says, and Mímir is full of ancient lore because he drinks from the well every morning. Völuspá adds the detail that made the image immortal: the seeress knows where Odin's eye is hidden — "in the famous well of Mímir," where Mímir drinks mead each morning "from Valföðr's pledge." The eye of the god of wisdom, sunk in the water of wisdom, has become part of what the well contains; every draught Mímir takes now includes what Odin paid.

The bargain itself is told by Snorri: Odin came and asked for a single drink from the well, and did not get it until he laid his eye down as a pledge. No negotiation is recorded, no protest. This is the Norse theory of knowledge in one transaction — wisdom is real, it is located somewhere, and it costs something you cannot get back. Odin gives an eye for insight, hangs nine nights on the tree for the runes, and steals the mead for poetry; Mímir is the being who sets the first of those prices, which makes him, in a sense, wisdom's banker.

Who is Mímir — god, giant, or something else?

The sources never settle it. Snorri counts him among the Æsir when he is sent as a hostage; his association with the frost-giants' root, and Odin's habit of naming himself "friend of Mímir," have suggested to many scholars a being older than the Æsir–jötnar division — a primeval uncle-figure, perhaps Odin's maternal kinsman (Odin's mother Bestla is a giant's daughter, and one difficult stanza of Hávamál mentions learning songs from "Bölþorn's famous son," whom some identify with Mímir; the identification is speculative and the text never says so outright). There is a further genuine puzzle: Völuspá speaks of "Mímir's sons" who rise or stir at Ragnarök, and no source explains who they are. The name itself is related to memory and mindfulness — cognate with Latin memor — so "the Rememberer" may always have been less a personality than the personification of what the mythology values most: the deep past, retained.

The beheading and the talking head

After the Æsir–Vanir war, hostages sealed the peace. The Æsir sent the handsome Hœnir accompanied by Mímir, "the wisest of men." Ynglinga saga tells the rest with dry comedy: whenever Mímir was absent from the assembly, Hœnir — installed as a chieftain — answered every hard question with "let others decide." The Vanir, feeling swindled by the exchange, seized Mímir, cut off his head, and sent it to Odin.

What Odin did next is one of the mythology's defining images. He took the head, embalmed it with herbs so it would not rot, and chanted spells over it — and the head spoke, telling him "many hidden things." Ynglinga saga says Odin kept Mímir's head with him ever after; Sigrdrífumál in the Poetic Edda shows the head "speaking wisely" as runes are revealed. The keeper of the well of memory becomes a preserved memory himself: consulted, portable, impossible to silence. It is hard to find a better emblem of what the medieval Icelanders were doing when they wrote these myths down.

At Ragnarök

Mímir attends the end of the world twice. First through his horn: Heimdallr raises the Gjallarhorn — the same horn associated with Mímir's morning draught — and its blast opens Ragnarök. Then Völuspá gives Odin his last quiet scene: while Heimdallr blows and Yggdrasil shudders, "Odin speaks with Mím's head." We are not told what the head says. There is nothing left to learn that can change anything — Odin has known his fate all along — and the final consultation reads less like strategy than like an old habit of wisdom: the Allfather and the Rememberer, murmuring together one last time before the wolf.

In the primary sources

Mímir appears in the Poetic Edda in Völuspá (the eye in the well; Mímir's sons; Odin's last conference with the head), Sigrdrífumál (the speaking head), and obliquely in Hávamál; in the Prose Edda in Gylfaginning (Mímisbrunnr, the eye-pledge, the Gjallarhorn) and Skáldskaparmál (kennings — Odin is "Mímir's friend"); and in Heimskringla's Ynglinga saga (the hostage exchange and beheading). Whether the well-keeper and the beheaded hostage were originally the same figure is debated — Snorri seems to assume it, and most retellings follow him, but the two story-strands sit together awkwardly and some scholars think two Mímirs were merged. The tree-name Mímameiðr in Fjölsvinnsmál, probably Yggdrasil itself, carries his name too.

Legacy

Mímir's afterlife is mostly literary and lately spectacular: from Wagner's Mime in the Ring cycle (a dwarf-smith remodelled from the related Mímir of German legend) to the amiably sardonic severed head who advises travellers in modern games and film. The pattern always survives translation — wherever a story needs a repository of ancient knowledge that the hero must pay to access, Mímir's well is being drawn from again.