Havamal

The manuscript presents a continuous poem, but the material inside it does not behave as one. There is a long stretch of practical counsel about guests, hospitality, drink, friendship, wealth and reputation, in a plain proverbial voice. There is a passage of bitter reflection on being deceived by a woman and another on Odin's own deception in obtaining the mead of poetry. There is a set of counsels addressed to a named listener, marked off by a repeated formula. And there is the account of the tree and the runes, followed by a list of charms.

Scholars have divided this into constituent poems in various ways, and no division is agreed. What is agreed is that the sections differ in metre, in voice and in outlook, and that a compiler joined them, probably attracted by the fact that all of them could be presented as the speech of Odin. The gnomic sections are the part most often quoted and the part least like religion. They advise moderation in drink, caution with strangers, keeping one's own counsel, giving gifts to keep a friendship in repair, and not outstaying a welcome, and they end by praising reputation after death as the one thing that never perishes. That is a worldly ethic concerned with how to survive among people, recorded in a mythological frame and attributed to a god, and its tone is closer to a book of proverbs than to anything cultic.

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.