Settle in, and be comfortable, because tonight we are going to do something that has not often been done. We are going to follow one life from before the beginning of the world to after the end of it. It is the life of Odin — the Allfather, the one-eyed god, the old man in the blue-grey cloak with the wide hat pulled low — and though you may know pieces of it, a piece is not the same as the whole. A whole life is a different kind of story. So breathe out, and let the room grow quiet around you, and come back with me. Back before the first morning. Back before mornings.
In the beginning there was ice, and there was fire, and between them there was nothing at all — a gap of yawning silence called Ginnungagap. You have heard how the frost crept south and the sparks drifted north, and how, where they met, the melting rime quickened into the first living thing: the giant Ymir, huge and cold-blooded, from whose sleeping body the race of frost-giants grew. And you have heard of the great cow Audhumla, who fed Ymir with rivers of milk and fed herself by licking the salted ice — and how her warm tongue, working patiently through the frost, uncovered a buried shape: hair, then a head, then the whole of a man. His name was Buri, and he was the first of the line of the gods.
Buri had a son named Borr. And Borr took a wife from among the giants — for there was no one else in the world to marry — a giantess named Bestla, daughter of old Bolthorn of the frost. Hold onto that fact, because everything that follows grows out of it: the gods and the giants are one family. Every war that is coming is a war between cousins. And of Borr and Bestla three sons were born. The second was called Vili, and the third was called Ve, and the first — the eldest, the hungriest, the one who could never stop asking what lay behind things — was called Odin.
The three brothers grew up in a world that was all mist and rime and the enormous snoring of Ymir, and they looked at it the way young people have looked at their parents' world in every age since: they thought, we could do better than this. But between them and a better world lay the old giant himself, vast as a weather system, father and grandfather of all the frost that pressed in on every side. What happened next, the poems tell quickly and quietly, because there is no way to tell it slowly that does not hurt: the brothers rose up against Ymir, and they killed him. He was their own mother's kin. It was the first death in the history of everything — and the sea itself is the mark of it, for so much blood ran from the old giant's wounds that it drowned all the frost-giants but two, who rode away on a hollowed log to raise their family in bitterness, far to the east. Remember them too. The east does not forget.
Then the brothers did the thing that made them gods rather than merely killers. They took the great body into the middle of the void, and they built with it. His flesh they spread out as the good dark earth; his blood they ringed around it as the sea. His bones they raised up into mountains, and his broken teeth they scattered as boulders and scree. His skull they lifted over everything to be the dome of the sky, and set a dwarf at each corner to hold it — North, South, East and West — and his brains they threw up into the wind, where they drift and change shape to this day; you have watched them cross a summer sky. From his eyebrows, bristly and enormous, they fenced a safe green garden in the middle of the world for the people who were coming, and they called it Midgard, the middle yard. Then they caught the embers that Muspelheim's fire flung into the dark, and set them in courses to be the sun and the moon and the stars. And there was light, and there were mornings, and time itself began to tick, because now there was a sky for it to move across.
One day — perhaps the first day it was possible to walk on a beach, because the beach was that new — the three brothers went along the edge of the sea, and they found two trees washed up on the sand: an ash and an elm, lying together where the tide had left them. And here we see, for the first time, the thing that makes Odin Odin. His brothers saw driftwood. He saw what was missing from the world. The brothers stood the two trees up, and each god gave what he had. Odin leaned close and breathed into them, and the breath was life itself. Vili gave them thought and feeling — the little voice that wonders, the warmth that loves. Ve gave them faces, and speech, and hearing, and the quick colour of the living. The ash became the first man, Ask; the elm became the first woman, Embla; and every human being who has ever lived — you, listening to me now, in your warm bed inside the middle yard — is their child, and carries in your lungs, at this very moment, a little of the Allfather's first gift. You are breathing it in and out as you fall asleep tonight. That is his mark on you. He never asks for it back.
High above Midgard the gods raised their own bright city, Asgard, and joined it to the world of men with a bridge made of rainbow, and settled into the long noon of their youth. There was a golden age then — the poems remember it with an ache — when the gods played chess with golden pieces in a green meadow, and wanted for nothing, and laughed easily. Odin married Frigg, wisest of goddesses, the only being besides himself permitted to sit in his high seat and see all the worlds at once. They understood one another, those two, in the way of couples who both know more than they say. And children came: bright Baldr, best-loved of everything that has ever lived; blind Hodr; Thor of the thunder, whose mother was the earth herself; and more besides. The Allfather had built a world, filled it, fathered its future. A lesser god would have stopped there, satisfied.
But satisfaction was never in him, and this is the hinge of his whole long life: Odin could see just far enough ahead to know that everything he had built could fall. Perhaps it began with dreams; perhaps with the two ravens he had raised, Huginn and Muninn — Thought and Memory — who flew out over all the worlds each dawn and came home each breakfast-time to whisper in his ears, and whose news was not always good. Wolves breeding in the iron forests of the east. Old grudges growing new teeth. Somewhere out in the dark, the family of the drowned frost-giants, multiplying and remembering. Odin listened, and looked at his golden meadow, and understood the truth that has kept kings awake in every age: everything ends unless someone pays to postpone it. And so began the second great phase of his life — the buying. And the currency, he would learn, was always himself.
The first payment was an eye. Under one of the three great roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, in the cold country of the giants, there is a well whose water is not like other water: it holds everything that has been and everything that is becoming, and to drink it is to understand the world the way you understand a song. Its keeper was Mimir — the Rememberer — kin to Odin through his giant mother, and the wisest being alive, because he drank from the well every morning. Odin walked down the long root, and asked for one draught. And Mimir, who did not make exceptions even for kings of gods, named the only price that meant anything: an eye. Your own. Left in the water. Forever. And Odin — this is the part to carry with you — did not haggle. He understood at once, being already half wise, that the price was the point: wisdom belongs only to those who pay for it what it is worth. So the Allfather paid. When it was done he knelt and drank, and understanding came into him like light into a room, slowly and then all at once. His eye lies in the well still, gazing up through the dark water like a moon in a midnight lake — seeing everything from below, while its owner watches everything from above. From that day the wide hat came down low over the missing side; and from that day, in every carving and every tale, you will know him by it: the god who traded half of all he could see for the whole of everything there is to understand.
But an eye, it turned out, was only the deposit. For there was a deeper knowledge even than the well's, and it did not live in water. It lived in the runes — the letters that are not just letters but the load-bearing beams of reality, the shapes fate is written in. They existed before the gods. They belonged to no one. They lay in the deep, waiting for someone to pay enough. And the price of the runes was not a part of Odin. It was all of him.
So the god of breath came to the world-tree with his spear, and did the thing the poems still shudder to describe. He hanged himself. Nine nights he hung on the windy tree — Yggdrasil, whose name means 'Odin's horse,' the gallows he rode — wounded with his own spear Gungnir, dedicated as a sacrifice in the old way: given to Odin. Himself, to himself. No one brought him bread. No one raised a horn to his lips. Frigg, who knows all fates, must have known — and known too that she could not interfere; that is her particular sorrow, always. Nine nights of wind and dark, the tree groaning under him, the well glimmering far below with his own eye watching him from the water. And on the ninth night he peered downward into the deep, and saw the runes burning there, and reached — screaming, the poem says; he does not pretend it was dignified — he took them up, and fell back out of death into the world. Everything after that came in a flood: spell-songs and healing-charms, word waking word and deed waking deed. He had died a little, and come back knowing what the dead know. When people say wisdom costs, they are quoting, whether they know it or not, the ledger of that tree.
And still he was not done buying. The third theft — for by now he had learned that some prices are best not paid at the counter — was the Mead of Poetry. You may remember where that mead came from: when the two families of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, fought the first war in the world and made their strange peace by spitting into one vat together, the gods shaped from that mingled truce a being called Kvasir, who was wisdom walking, and two murderous dwarves killed him and brewed his blood with honey into a drink that turns whoever tastes it into a poet. Through further crimes the mead passed to the giant Suttung, who sealed it in three vats inside a mountain and set his own daughter, Gunnlod, to guard it in the dark. Wisdom, locked in a vault, earning nothing. To Odin this was not a treasure hoard; it was an outrage against the way things ought to flow.
So he went as a stranger — he was always going as a stranger now, hat low, name false — and worked a whole summer on a farm for the giant's brother, doing the work of nine men for the promise of one sip. Refused at summer's end, he changed his approach: bored a hole through the mountain's rock with an auger, made himself a snake, and slid through. Inside, in the gold-lit dark, was Gunnlod, the lonely guardian. He stayed with her three nights, and she came to love him — and for each night she granted him one sip of the mead. Three sips. But no one had thought to say how large a sip might be, and Odin's three sips were the whole of the three vats. Then he was an eagle bursting up out of the mountain into the dawn, and Suttung was an eagle behind him, and the chase ran hot across the sky to the walls of Asgard, where the gods set out every vessel they owned, and the Allfather made it home by a wingbeat and spat the mead of poetry out to be shared — with gods, and with those strange, occasional mortals whom the gift finds. That is where poems come from, every one; and if a little of the mead, in that desperate flight, went out the other end of the eagle — well, the skalds always said that was the share of the bad poets, and we may leave it with them. But Havamal remembers something else about that theft, in Odin's own voice, quieter: 'Gunnlod gave me, on her golden seat, a drink of the precious mead. Ill reward she had from me for her whole heart.' He kept the mead. He kept the guilt too. With Odin the ledgers are always complete.
Now picture him in the fullness of his power, in the middle of the long afternoon of the worlds. He sits at dawn in the high seat Hlidskjalf, seeing everything at once: the herring-boats of Midgard, the smoke of the giants' halls, the small wars of small kings. The ravens come home and murmur into his ears. At his feet lie two wolves, Geri and Freki, and he feeds them all his food, for he himself lives on wine alone — the god who paid for wisdom has little appetite left for anything simpler. In his hall, Valhalla — the hall of the slain, roofed with golden shields, with five hundred and forty doors — the greatest warriors of every human battlefield rise each morning, fight each day, are healed each dusk, and drink each night: the einherjar, his gathered army. For that is what all of it is for. The choosing valkyries on their air-treading horses, the half of every battle's dead brought home to him — it is all recruitment. Odin knows something the recruits do not learn until they arrive, and the knowing of it is the coldest fact of his biography: he is building an army for a battle he has already been told he will lose.
He knew, because knowing was the one thing he could not stop doing. He had ridden Sleipnir — the eight-legged horse, best of all horses, whose birth is Loki's strangest story and not tonight's — down the dark road to the gates of the dead, and waked a long-buried seeress from her grave, and made her talk. He had climbed, disguised, to the hall of the wisest giant alive, Vafthrudnir, and wagered his head in a quiz about the future, and won it by asking at the last a question only he could answer — 'What did Odin whisper in the ear of his dead son?' — a riddle he has never solved for anyone, and we shall come to the whisper soon enough. From every source — well, tree, corpse, giant, raven — the answers agreed. The wolf would swallow him. The fire would take the rest. A day was coming, and it had a name, and no payment would move it: Ragnarok, the doom of the powers. Other gods might have despaired, or feasted and forgotten. Odin did the third thing, the hardest thing: he kept working. If the end could not be cancelled, it could be furnished. Every hero who fell in Midgard was one more spear on the right side of the last field. If you have ever wondered why the god of wisdom is also the god of war and the god of poetry, that is the answer: they were all the same project. Songs to make men brave; battles to test them; wisdom to spend them well. Grim? Yes. But there is a warmth hidden in it, and the old poets knew it: he did not gather those men because he despised them. He gathered them because he could not bear to meet the wolf alone — and because, past the wolf, past the fire, he could see something the despairing never see. We will get there. Every good story earns its dawn.
But first the price of everything came due in the one currency Odin had never agreed to pay: his child. You know this story — it is the saddest one there is — but hear it now from the father's side. Baldr the bright began to dream of his own death, and the dreams did not stop. Frigg went out and took an oath of every thing in creation — fire and water, iron and stone, every sickness, every serpent, every tree — not to harm her son. Every thing but one: a little sprig of mistletoe, growing west of Valhalla, too young, she judged, to swear. And the gods, giddy with relief, made a game of the miracle: they stood Baldr up at the assembly and threw things at him, weapons, boulders, anything, and laughed as it all fell harmless, and Baldr laughed too. Only two beings in Asgard did not wholly laugh. One was Loki, who went away and came back knowing about the mistletoe. And one was Odin, who had heard too many prophecies to trust a loophole he could not see.
It happened at the games. Loki cut the sprig, and put it in the hand of blind Hodr, who had been standing at the edge of the fun the way blind men stand at the edge of everything, and offered kindly to guide his throw. The dart went through Baldr, and Baldr fell, and the light went out of the world — not all at once, like a lamp, but the way it goes out of a long afternoon. The gods stood in a silence that had never been heard in Asgard before. And Odin — the poems say it plainly — suffered worst of all, 'for he understood best what the loss meant': not only a son, but the proof that the doom was real, and coming, and on schedule. Grief and confirmation in one blow. They built the pyre on Baldr's own great ship. Nanna, Baldr's wife, looked at the flames being kindled and died where she stood, of a broken heart, and was laid beside him. And then the Allfather did the thing that has echoed down a thousand years of firelight: he bent low over his dead son's body, and he whispered something in Baldr's ear. No one heard it. No one knows it. It is the question he used to win wagers with giants, the one answer in all the nine worlds that belongs to him alone. The old and wise have their guesses, and tonight, at the very end, I will give you mine. Not yet.
Vengeance came, as it comes in the old stories, strange and swift: a son begotten for the purpose, Vali, who at one night old slew unhappy Hodr — as if that mended anything. Justice came too, in time: Loki bound in a cave on the entrails of his own child, venom dripping on his face until the end of the world; and if you think that sentence has less of law in it than of pain shared out, you have understood the late age of the gods exactly. Hermod the bold rode Sleipnir nine nights down to Hel to buy Baldr back, and Hel set her price — let all things weep for him — and all things wept, stones and metals and every beast and bird, except one dry-eyed giantess in a cave who was almost certainly Loki wearing a shape. So Baldr stayed with the dead. And here is the thing to notice about Odin in those years, the long grey years between the pyre and the end: he did not rage. He listened harder. He rode farther. He asked more questions of more corpses. The Allfather was reading to the end of the book, and what he found there was the reason he could bear the middle.
The end, when it came, came first as weather. Three winters with no summer between them — the Fimbulwinter, snow driving from all four directions at once, the sun giving light and no heat. Then it came as men: brothers killing brothers for greed, an axe-age, a sword-age, the bonds of kinship rotting before the bonds of the world did. Then the wolves that had chased the sun and moon since the first morning finally caught them, and the sky went dark, and the stars hid, and far away in the iron dark there was a sound of something old snapping — the fetter Gleipnir, parting at last — and the long-postponed bill of the family of Ymir was presented for payment. Heimdall, seeing what was on every road at once, set the great horn to his lips and blew the blast that is heard in all worlds. And in Valhalla, at last, the morning came for which every other morning had been the rehearsal: the einherjar arming in earnest now, eight hundred through each of the five hundred and forty doors, and at their head, on the eight-legged horse, in a helmet of gold and the blue-grey cloak, with the spear that never stops in its thrust — the old man himself, riding to the appointment he had spent the whole history of the world trying to be worthy of.
On the plain called Vigrid, a hundred leagues on every side, the lines met: fire-giants from the south under Surt with his sword like a rip in the sky; frost-giants from the east; the dead of Hel off their dreadful ship; the World Serpent flooding ashore; and loping ahead of them all, grown so vast that his lower jaw scraped the earth and his upper jaw brushed the heavens, the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods had raised in their own hall and bound with a ribbon and taught, in the way of every mistreated thing, exactly what to hate. Odin did not hesitate. Witnesses — the poem-vision of the seeress, which is all the witness there is — say only this: the Allfather rode first, straight at the wolf. Think of everything he knew as he rode. He had known for ages of ages how this particular meeting ended. He had bought an eye, a hanging, a whisper's worth of secrets, an army of the noble dead — and none of it, he knew, would save him in the jaws. He rode anyway, spear up, cloak flying, the ravens over him like torn pieces of the night. It is the whole meaning of the man, if a god may be called a man: courage is not the belief that you will win. Courage is what remains when you have read the ending and ride at it regardless. The wolf's mouth was wider than the world by then. And the wolf swallowed him. The old poems spend no more words on it than I just did. Some things are too large for decoration.
But the Allfather had planted even his own avenging. Vidar — the silent son, the god who had spent all the world's history saying nothing and growing strong, wearing on one foot a shoe built up from every scrap of leather men had ever trimmed from their shoes and thrown away — Vidar stepped into the wolf's gape, pinned the lower jaw to the earth with that patient shoe, seized the upper jaw in his hands, and tore the swallower of his father apart. Nearby Thor and the Serpent ended one another, as they were always going to. Surt flung his fire over everything, and the earth, having lost its defenders, sank burning into the steaming sea. The stars fell. The long story that began with ice meeting fire ended with fire meeting water. And if the tale stopped there, it would be a mighty tale, and a false one. It does not stop there.
The seeress who tells the whole history — the one Odin himself raised and questioned — looks past the fire, and this is what she sees: the earth rising out of the sea a second time, green and washed, waterfalls tumbling, the eagle hunting fish along the cliffs as if no age had ended. The sun's daughter, born before the wolf caught her mother, walking her mother's road in a new sky. And on the plain of Ida, where Asgard stood, the young gods gathering in the morning light: Vidar the avenger and Vali; Thor's sons carrying their father's hammer between them; and up from the world of the dead, blinking in the light, side by side and reconciled at last — Baldr, and Hodr. The bright one, back. They sit down in the wet grass, this remnant, this family of survivors, and they talk about all of it — the Serpent, the wolf, the old riddles — and there in the deep grass they find, glinting, the golden chess-pieces the gods had played with in the meadow at the very beginning of the world. Some things survive even the end of everything. And two human beings come out of hiding — Lif and Lifthrasir, Life and Life's-Yearner, who sheltered in the wood of the world-tree through all the burning — and from them the green world fills with people again: your ancestors, if the old ones had it right. Which means the story you are inside of tonight is the second one. The morning after the fire. It has all already been survived.
And Odin? Odin is not among the gods in the grass, and the poem does not pretend otherwise. He paid entirely, as he always did. But now, at last, I will tell you my guess — the guess the wise have whispered for a thousand years — about what the Allfather said into his dead son's ear on the pyre, the secret that won the wagers, the words no giant could ever name. I think, and older heads than mine have thought, that he whispered: 'You will come back.' The one fact the wolf could not eat. The reading of the last page that made the middle of the book bearable. He hung nine nights for the runes; he gave his eye for the deep sight; and what all that buying finally bought him was this — the certain knowledge that past the last battle there was a green morning he himself would never see, with his son alive in it. He rode at the wolf carrying that morning in his chest. That was the treasure in the treasury of the wisest of the gods; not a weapon, not a spell. A sunrise, folded up small, held onto in the dark.
So now you know the whole of it — the boy born of a giantess in the world's first cold; the builder; the breath-giver; the buyer of wisdom at every terrible counter; the father; the mourner; the general of the beautiful doomed; the rider at the jaws; the whisperer of the world's one comforting secret. When you see an old man in stories with one eye and a wide grey hat, you will know his whole history now, beginning to end and past the end. And when you drift off tonight — breathing in, breathing out, the oldest gift going in and out of you like a tide — you may let the last image be the one the seeress kept for the end: green grass growing where the battle was, golden game-pieces shining in it, and the light of the reborn sun on the faces of the young gods, laughing quietly at the morning the old man bought them, and never saw, and always knew was coming. Sleep now. The middle yard is fenced, and the watchman does not sleep, and the story is in good order. Goodnight.