The best known passage is short and strange. Odin says he hung on a windswept tree for nine nights, wounded with a spear, given to himself, on a tree whose roots no one knows; that no one gave him bread or drink from a horn; that he looked down, took up the runes, took them screaming, and fell back. Then he describes the benefits that followed, and lists eighteen charms he knows without setting out what they are. The passage has been read against two very different comparisons, and both need care. The self sacrifice, the wounding, the tree and the descent and return resemble the initiatory pattern described in accounts of shamanic practice elsewhere, and the sacrifice of a god to himself on a tree, pierced by a spear, has obvious resemblance to the crucifixion, which was known in the north when the poem was written down.
Whether either resemblance indicates influence is disputed and unresolved. What is not in doubt is the passage's importance to the tradition it belongs to. It grounds the runes in an act of ordeal rather than in invention or gift, and it makes knowledge something obtained at cost by a god who suffers for it. Later esoteric rune systems have leaned heavily on these stanzas, sometimes taking the list of eighteen charms as a key to a rune row, which is a modern reading rather than anything the poem states.