page_title: Hávamál
section_title: Rúnatal
hierarchical_section_title: Hávamál / Contents / Rúnatal
caption_attribution_description: The god Odin hangs in the tree, having sacrificed himself to himself as described in Hávamál. The list of illustrations in the front matter of the book gives this one the title Odin's Self-sacrifice.
context_page_description: Hávamál is presented as a single poem in the Codex Regius, a collection of Old Norse poems from the Viking age. The poem, itself a combination of numerous shorter poems, is largely gnomic, presenting advice for living, proper conduct and wisdom. It is our most important source on Old Norse philosophy.
  The verses are attributed to Odin; the implicit attribution to Odin facilitated the accretion of various mythological material also dealing with the same deity.
  For the most part composed in the metre ljóðaháttr, a metre associated with wisdom verse, Hávamál is both practical and philosophical in content.
  Following the gnomic "Hávamál proper" comes the Rúnatal, an account of how Odin won the runes, and the Ljóðatal, a list of magic chants or spells.
context_section_description: Rúnatal or Óðins Rune Song, Rúnatáls-þáttr-Óðins (stanzas 139–146) is a section of the Hávamál where Odin reveals the origins of the runes.
  In stanzas 139 and 140, Odin describes his sacrifice of himself to himself:
  
  "Vęit ec at ec hecc
  
  vindga meiði a
  
  nętr allar nío,
  
  geiri vndaþr
  oc gefinn Oðni,
  
  sialfr sialfom mer,
  
  a þeim meiþi,
  
  er mangi veit,
  
  hvers hann af rótom renn.
  Við hleifi mic seldo
  
  ne viþ hórnigi,
  
  nysta ec niþr,
  
  nam ec vp rv́nar,
  
  ǫpandi nam,
  
  fęll ec aptr þatan."
  I know that I hung on a windy tree
  nine long nights,
  wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
  myself to myself,
  on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.
  No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
  downwards I peered;
  I took up the runes,
  screaming I took them,
  then I fell back from there.
  
  The "windy tree" from which the victim hangs is often identified with the world tree Yggdrasil by commentators. The entire scene, the sacrifice of a god to himself, the execution method by hanging the victim on a tree, and the wound inflicted on the victim by a spear, is often compared to the crucifixion of Christ as narrated in the gospels.
  The parallelism of Odin and Christ during the period of open co-existence of Christianity and Norse paganism in Scandinavia (the 9th to 12th centuries, corresponding with the assumed horizon of the poem's composition) is also evident from other sources. To what extent this parallelism is an incidental similarity of the mode of human sacrifice offered to Odin and the crucifixion, and to what extent a Pagan influence on Christianity, or vice versa, may have occurred, is a complex question on which scholarly opinions vary.
caption: "Odin's Self-sacrifice" (1908) by W. G. Collingwood.
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