We’ve reached Samhain, the season when the veil is said to grow thin, when magic feels close at hand and the dead are remembered among the living. It seems a fitting time to tell another tale from Norse mythology, one of sacrifice, suffering, and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge. As we continue our series on the runes, it’s worth remembering that while these symbols began as a means of writing and were primarily used as such, they eventually became tools for divination and magic. Words were very important to the peoples of the Nordic region. They had power and impact depending on which were used. Harnessing those concepts, layering them, and empowering them allowed for the runes to become magical. The myths offer us one brief tale of how that transformation might have begun.
We know that Óðinn [OH-thin] sacrificed an eye for wisdom, and we know that he later endured nine nights of suffering in pursuit of the runes. The old sources give us the bones of the tale, but, as usual, they leave much of the experience untold. What did he see? What thoughts carried him through? Today, we’re exploring one possibility: a story of what may have happened during those nine nights, when the Allfather made a terrible sacrifice in pursuit of knowledge that could not simply be given to him. So settle in, lovely little heathens, and walk with me down the witches’ road toward the taking up of the runes.
***DISCLAIMER***
It came to my attention recently that a young, new heathen decided to connect with Óðinn by attempting to recreate the myth the tale below references. Please, Óðinn is a god and the test nearly killed him. As a human, it is HIGHLY inadvisable to recreate the tales within the lore in reality. We are human. We break easily. And like that young, new heathen – attempting these feats will kill us. Do NOT try this at home!!!!
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Óðinn had already learned what it meant to pay for wisdom.
At Mímisbrunnr [MEE-mis-broonr], he had surrendered one of his eyes in exchange for a drink from its waters. The price had been steep, but he had accepted it willingly. He had walked away with knowledge few beings could hope to comprehend, carrying the consequences of his choice with him every day. Every glance reminded him of what he had given, and whenever the world narrowed beneath his remaining eye, he was reminded that wisdom did not come without a cost.
Yet the sacrifice at the well had revealed something he had never expected. During the days of waiting for the well to speak, Óðinn had glimpsed the Norns [NORNS]. There, where the roots disappeared into darkness and the boundaries between the worlds grew thin, the Norns tended the workings of existence at Yggdrasill [IG-druh-sil]. Urðr [OORD], Verðandi [VEHR-than-dee], and Skuld [SKOOLD] were ancient beyond the reckoning of kings. They were not servants to be summoned or teachers who could be persuaded to reveal every secret. Their work reached into the very structure of the worlds and those that lived within them.
The Norns did not merely record what had happened. In the strange patterns of their work, Óðinn sensed something deeper: connections between lives, choices, beginnings, and endings, woven into a fabric whose full design remained hidden from him. He had tried to read their movements. He studied the threads and followed their crossings, searching for some rule that might explain how the patterns were made. Each time he thought he had found an answer, the meaning slipped away. He could see the threads, but he could not understand their language. The harder he tried to grasp it through observation alone, the more distant it seemed to become.
He had watched them weave their strange, luminous threads and carve unfamiliar symbols into slips of wood and the living surface of the great tree itself. The marks were unlike anything he had seen before, and though he could not read them, he could feel their power. They seemed to hum with something older than speech, a force that stirred the air around them and reached into the very foundations of the worlds. He had no name for these symbols, nor any understanding of what they could accomplish, but their mystery stayed with him long after the vision faded. Then, as he drank from the sacred waters, from the depths of Mímisbrunnr, came a word that settled into his mind like a seed.
Runes.
The name was all he had been given. It brought no explanation of their workings, no instruction in their use, and no promise that he would ever understand the power he had sensed in those strange markings. Still, Óðinn knew he had glimpsed something extraordinary. He had learned that the runes existed, but knowing their name was not the same as possessing their knowledge. The symbols remained beyond his reach, like a door he had discovered but could not yet open.
From his high seat, Hliðskjálf [HLITH-skyalf], Óðinn could look across the Nine Worlds and watch the movements of gods, giants, and men. His ravens, Huginn [HOO-gin] and Muninn [MOO-nin], traveled far and returned with news from places he could not visit himself. He sought counsel from the wise, questioned the dead, and gathered every scrap of knowledge that might help him understand the world around him. He knew more than most, perhaps more than any other being alive, and yet there were still mysteries that refused to yield.
The runes were one of those mysteries. As he had seen at Yggdrasil, they were more than marks scratched into wood or carved into stone. They carried meaning, and in the right hands they could become instruments of power: used to protect, to heal, to bind, to influence the world in ways ordinary speech could not. Óðinn could not stop thinking about what they might allow him to do. Their possibilities drew him like a distant fire glimpsed through the trees, close enough to awaken his desire but too far away to warm his hands.
He began asking questions. Surely someone knew how the symbols worked. Surely someone could explain the principles that lay behind them, or show him how to call upon their power. Yet those he approached gave him no easy answers. Some spoke of knowledge that had to be earned. Others treated the subject as something that could not be separated from the person who worked it, a power that required more than memorizing symbols or learning the proper words.
The runes were bound to a kind of magic Óðinn had not mastered. It belonged to old traditions of knowledge and working with unseen forces, traditions in which women held a place of particular power. Seiðr [SAY-thr], the magic associated especially with women and with the goddess Freyja [FRAY-yah], was not simply another name for rune magic, but the two occupied a world where knowledge, intention, and the shaping of unseen forces could meet. Óðinn had watched, questioned, and learned what he could. He could not make anyone hand over the rest.
The answer, he began to suspect, was not found in another hall full of wise counselors or in another drink from an ancient well. It would be found at the base of Yggdrasill [IG-druh-sil] itself. For the first time in a long while, Óðinn found himself before a mystery that would not yield to patience, cunning, or the sheer force of his will.
He had returned to Ásgarðr [AHS-gar-thr] with the unanswered questions following him like shadows. He had tried to set them aside, turning his attention to the ordinary business of the gods, but the runes had begun to take root in his thoughts. He would find himself staring into the fire, wondering what those symbols could accomplish. He would watch the wind stir the branches outside and imagine the unseen forces that might be reached through them. The desire did not fade with time. It sharpened.
He returned to the roots again and again, carrying his questions into the dark. One night, beneath the immense branches of Yggdrasill, he heard something that seemed to rise from the earth itself. It was not a voice he could locate, nor could he tell whether it came from the roots, the well, or the silence between one breath and the next.
The message was simple, and it chilled him more deeply than the wind.
The language of creation cannot be taught. It must be taken up from the abyss of what has not yet come into being.
Óðinn stood motionless, turning the words over in his mind. If they were true, no bargain with another being would be enough. No teacher could hand him the knowledge he wanted, and no offering of gold, blood, or treasure could purchase it on his behalf. He could not send another in his place. The sacrifice had to be equal to the knowledge, and there was only one offering left that he had not yet made.
Himself.
The thought followed him home. He considered his spear, Gungnir [GOONG-neer], and the power that had accompanied him through countless battles. He thought of his ravens watching from their perches, and of the throne from which he surveyed the worlds. He considered the authority he held among the gods and the wisdom he had spent so long gathering.
All these things belonged to the life he knew. None of them could make the runes his. He could remain the king who watched and questioned, gathering whatever knowledge he could from the safety of his halls. He could accept that some doors would remain closed, that some powers would belong to others, and that he would have to make do with what he already understood. Or he could step beyond the limits that had kept the runes beyond his reach.
There was no certainty the sacrifice would succeed. He might endure the pain and receive nothing in return. He might discover that the price was greater than even a god could pay. The ordeal might leave him broken, or it might end his life altogether. Yet Óðinn understood that he could not demand the deepest secrets of existence while refusing to place anything of equal worth upon the scales.
To gain the knowledge, he would have to surrender the one thing no other being could offer on his behalf: himself, with all his strength, wisdom, pride, and fear. He would offer Óðinn the king to become Óðinn the rune weaver.
Before dawn, while the halls of Ásgarðr still slept, he gathered what he needed and set out alone. He told no one he was leaving or what he was planning to do. He crossed the realm of the gods and made his way toward Bifröst [BIF-rust], the rainbow bridge that connected Ásgarðr with the worlds beyond. At its threshold stood its guardian, Heimdallr [HAYM-dahl], whose watchful eyes missed little that passed between the realms. He saw the spear in Óðinn’s hand and the determination in his face. He did not ask where the Allfather was going, nor did he try to turn him aside. Óðinn crossed beneath his gaze and descended into the worlds beyond, leaving the familiar halls behind.
The journey to Yggdrasill was long. He traveled over lands where the wind swept unhindered across barren ground and forests stood dark beneath the gathering clouds. There were quicker ways to approach the World Tree but Óðinn felt that the longer route held purpose for the journey and sacrifice ahead. And the farther he went, the less the concerns of Ásgarðr seemed to matter. No throne could command the tree to spare him. No title could bargain with the darkness beneath its roots. Even his great wisdom offered no promise that he would return.
At last, he reached his destination. The immense trunk rose before him, disappearing into the shadow of its branches. The crown was impossible to see. The roots sank into the earth and vanished into places where even the light seemed reluctant to follow. The wind moved through the high boughs with a voice that seemed to come from every direction at once.
Óðinn secured his pack to his back and climbed until he found a strong branch high above the ground. There he secured a rope around his body and fastened it to the branch, arranging it to bear his weight. It would have to hold for who knew how long thus he secured the knots tightly. This would be no comfortable place to rest, and no shelter stood nearby to break the weather from where he would swing. There would be no fire to warm his hands, no food to sustain him, and no companion to speak words of reassurance.
He looked down once, toward the darkness beneath the tree. Lowering himself until he hung freely from the branch, he then took Gungnir into his hands and drove it deep into his own side. The pain came sharply enough to strip away every thought that did not belong to the moment. His body jerked against the wound, and the branch shifted beneath him. The spear had pierced his flesh, but it was the rope that held him suspended. The wound was his chosen offering; the rope ensured that he would remain hanging, exposed to the wind and the elements, unable to ease himself down when the pain became difficult to bear. For a moment, all the wisdom he had gathered seemed very far away. There was only the wound, the rough pull of the rope, and the terrible knowledge that he had chosen this place and could not undo the choice simply because the suffering had begun.
He remained there. No one came to help him. No god climbed the tree to ease his burden. No voice called up from the roots to offer encouragement, and no hand brought him water. Even Heimdallr, who had watched him leave, did not follow. He kept his silence and told no one what the Allfather had chosen to do. Óðinn had not come to the tree to demonstrate his courage before an audience. He had come because he wanted the runes, and he had accepted that the price would be paid without assistance. If the sacrifice was to be his alone, then no one could be allowed to make it easier.
The first night passed slowly.
The wind moved through the branches, tugging at his clothing and shaking the tree beneath his weight. The wound throbbed with every movement, and the rope pressed painfully against his body. He tried to keep his thoughts fixed upon the purpose that had brought him there, but pain has a way of reducing even the greatest intention to something immediate and consuming. He had spent ages seeking wisdom, yet he could not think his way out of the suffering he had chosen.
He waited for the knowledge to come. It did not.
The second night brought no answer. The third passed beneath a sky that seemed to stretch endlessly above him, its stars distant and indifferent. Óðinn drifted in and out of a troubled half-sleep, his body stealing brief moments of unconsciousness whenever exhaustion overwhelmed him. Each time he began to slip away, a sudden movement of the branch, a shift of the rope, or the sharp flare of pain dragged him back into awareness. He could not settle into rest, and he could not remain fully awake by force of will alone.
Yet the runes remained hidden.
By the fourth night, the cold seemed to have settled into his bones. His strength was fading, and hunger and thirst had become impossible to ignore. His body, which had carried him through battles and long journeys, now struggled simply to endure its own condition. The wind dried his mouth, and every swallow seemed to remind him of the water he could not reach.
He thought of the gods in Ásgarðr, of the halls where food and drink were shared, and of the ordinary comforts he had left behind. He remembered the warmth of a fire, the familiar presence of his wife, and the weight of a cup in his hand. Such things had once seemed unremarkable. Now they belonged to a world he could no longer reach.
He could still stop. Perhaps he could find a way down from the tree, tend to his wound, and return to his former life. No enemy had forced him to climb Yggdrasill. No one had driven the spear into his side. The choice had been his, and it remained so. That was what made the ordeal so difficult. He could not blame another for the pain or convince himself he had no choice but to endure it. He had placed himself here because he wanted something that could not be obtained by any easier means he had yet found.
The fifth night passed, and Óðinn remained.
On the sixth, his thoughts began to slip away from the familiar paths along which he had always guided them. He tried to remember the patterns he had watched beneath the roots, the movements of the Norns, the threads that seemed to bind one event to another. Yet each time he reached for those memories, they changed beneath his attention. What had seemed clear from a distance became uncertain when he tried to look directly at it.
His mind, worn down by pain, thirst, and exhaustion, began to turn against him. Shadows moved at the edges of his vision. Thoughts and memories colliding with one another causing him to wonder which were real and which were figments of his rapidly fracturing mind. The branches seemed to twist into unfamiliar shapes, and the wind carried whispers that vanished whenever he tried to listen.
The boundaries around his world grew less certain. The branches above him, the abyss below, and the wind against his skin no longer seemed like separate things. His thoughts wandered, broke apart, and returned in unfamiliar shapes. For the first time, Óðinn wondered whether the sacrifice might take from him the very mind he had spent so long trying to enlarge. What use would the runes be if he could no longer understand them? What good was knowledge if the one who sought it could not survive to carry it? The questions moved through him without answers, and the wind swallowed whatever words he tried to speak.
On the seventh night, the darkness beneath him seemed to open.
Óðinn looked down and saw something move where no living thing should have been. It was not a creature climbing the roots or a spirit rising from the depths. It was a pattern, faint at first, then brighter as he watched. Lines crossed and separated but did not hold their shape. Angles formed and vanished. Each mark seemed to belong to something larger, as though the darkness itself held a structure his eyes had never been able to recognize. He tried to follow the images, but they disappeared whenever he reached for them with his thoughts. The vision faded, leaving him with nothing but the wind and the pain of the seeping spear wound. He waited for it to return.
The eighth night came, and with it the last of the strength he had relied upon. Óðinn could no longer take comfort in the thought that he had endured so much already. The previous nights could not guarantee he would survive the next. His body was failing, his thoughts had become difficult to hold, and the purpose that had seemed so clear before now hovered at the edge of his awareness.
He had offered himself to rebuild himself, but what remained of that man who had made the original choice? The king who had left Ásgarðr seemed distant. The wanderer who had searched the worlds for wisdom felt like another being entirely. Even his own name seemed to belong to someone he could no longer quite reach. There was no throne here, no title, no gathered company of gods to remind him of his place. There was only the wounded figure hanging from the tree, caught between life and death, waiting for knowledge he could not command and uncertain whether the ordeal would ever end. Perhaps this was the final price: not merely pain, hunger, or the threat of death, but the surrender of every certainty he had brought with him. The wind moved through Yggdrasill, and Óðinn hung in its grasp.
Then came the ninth night.
The darkness beneath the roots had changed. The faint shapes he had glimpsed before no longer vanished as soon as he looked toward them. They gathered in the depths, sharp and distinct against the void. Lines crossed, broke apart, and joined again. Each symbol seemed to carry a presence beyond its shape, a meaning that reached into the world around him and into the hidden spaces he had spent so long trying to understand. Óðinn could not explain what he saw. He could only recognize that this was what he had come to find. The runes.
They were not offered to him in a neat row, nor did a voice rise from the depths to name each one. They appeared as something both strange and familiar, as though he had been searching for them across countless journeys without understanding what he was seeking. The shapes belonged to the roots, to the branches, to the turning of the worlds themselves. They were marks, but they were also a way of seeing, a language that reached beyond the words he had spoken and the questions he had asked. He gathered what remained of his strength. The effort was almost beyond him. His body had little left to give, and his mind wavered at the edge of the silence into which he had fallen. Yet the runes were there, and he understood that he could not remain forever in the place where he had found them.
He had endured the ordeal to obtain this knowledge. Now he had to reach for it. Óðinn looked down into the abyss and with the last of his strength, he reached toward the darkness, screaming with the effort. The symbols rose to meet him, lifting from the depths as though they had been waiting for his hands. They circled his fingers in threads of pale light, turning around his wrists and winding along his forearms. One by one, their shapes flared against his skin before passing beneath it, their light tracing paths through flesh and bone until they seemed to settle somewhere deeper than memory.
The sensation was not gentle. It burned through him, not like a blade cutting flesh, but like a fierce truth forcing its way into a mind that had spent too long shut against it. The symbols moved through him in flashes of light and meaning, each distinct, each carrying possibilities he could feel but could not yet comprehend. He could not hold them at arm’s length or study them as he had studied the Norns. They were becoming part of him, scorching him through and rebuilding his very essence. The darkness had answered his cry. For one impossible moment, the runes shone around his hands and arms, then sank from sight, leaving their shapes alive within his awareness. Beyond them, the Norns stood among the roots.
Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld watched without speaking. Their hands were still, their faces unreadable, yet there was something in their eyes that Óðinn understood even through the haze of pain and exhaustion. They had seen the offering. They had witnessed the price. And now, as the last of the symbols passed into him, they acknowledged what had been done with the smallest inclination of their heads. The knowledge had not been handed to him. He had reached for it, endured for it, and taken it up at a cost no one else could pay on his behalf. Then the vision broke.
Óðinn’s grip faltered. The rope that had held him through the long nights, weakened by the wind and the strain upon it, finally gave way. His body fell from the branch, and the world rushed past him. He struck the frozen earth beneath Yggdrasill, the impact driving what little breath remained from his lungs. Gungnir fell beside him, its shaft striking the ground as he landed. For a time, he could do nothing but lie where he had fallen. The sacrifice was over, but his suffering had not magically disappeared. His side burned where the spear had pierced him, and every attempt to move sent fresh pain through his limbs and opened the wound anew. His body was pale and trembling, his mind still tangled in the remnants of visions he could not yet separate from the world around him. He had nearly reached the end of his life hanging from the branch, and now on the cold ground he could not even gather his thoughts into a shape he recognized.
He had imagined that the moment of revelation might bring some immediate release, that completing the sacrifice would lift him from the darkness as surely as the runes had emerged from it. Instead, he lay alone upon the frozen earth, wounded and scarcely able to move. Even a god could be injured. Even a god could die. Óðinn knew he could not remain beneath the tree. He forced himself to draw a deeper breath, then another, waiting until the worst of the dizziness eased. His hands shook when he tried to push against the ground. The first attempt failed. He rested, fighting the darkness that threatened to pull him under again, before trying once more.
At last, he managed to turn onto his side and drag himself forward.
The ground was hard beneath his hands, and the journey away from the tree seemed longer than any road he had traveled before. He moved slowly, stopping whenever his strength failed, gathering himself again whenever he could. There was still no food, no water, and no companion to support him. The world had not changed its demands just because he had gained new knowledge. His body remained wounded and weary, and he had to find a way to carry it home. The runes were with him now, though he could do little more than sense their presence beneath the confusion in his mind. Their shapes returned in fleeting impressions, and when he closed his eye, he could feel them waiting within him. He had gained a beginning, a doorway into a kind of understanding he had not possessed before. Mastery would come later, through study, practice, and the long work of discovering what each symbol could do. For now, he needed to survive the journey home.
By the time he reached Bifröst, a much shorter journey for the way back, the strength that had carried him from the tree was nearly spent. He stumbled onto the bridge and braced himself against its surface, unable to take another step. Heimdallr stood at his post, watching the battered figure approach. For a moment, neither spoke. Heimdallr looked at the oozing wound in Óðinn’s side, the trembling hands, and the exhaustion etched across his face. He understood the cost from his own sacrifices to the Tree. The Allfather had gone beyond the reach of comfort and counsel, and whatever he had sought beneath Yggdrasill, he had paid for it with his own body. Without a word, Heimdallr offered him a horn of water and a piece of bread. Óðinn accepted them with hands that could barely hold steady. He drank slowly, allowing the water to ease his parched throat, then managed a few bites of bread. Heimdallr did not question him, and Óðinn offered no explanation. There was nothing to be gained by putting the ordeal into words before he had even recovered from it.
When Óðinn could stand again, he returned to the road. The journey to Ásgarðr was slow. His body remained pale and gaunt, his side in pain, his strength diminished. He could not simply summon his former vitality and stride home as though nothing had happened. Each step reminded him that the sacrifice had been real, and that the knowledge he carried had not come cheaply. Yet he was no longer the same god who had left his halls. When he finally passed through the gates, the familiar world seemed both unchanged and newly strange. The halls still stood. The gods still gathered beneath their roofs. His ravens watched from their perches. Nothing in Ásgarðr had paused to mark the nine nights he had spent hanging from Yggdrasill. Óðinn had to carry that knowledge himself.
Frigg [FRIG-ga] saw him before he had gone far into the hall. She had always possessed a way of looking beyond what was offered to her eyes, and Óðinn had never been able to hide everything from her. Her gaze moved over his wounded side, his exhausted face, and the strange stillness that had settled behind his remaining eye. She saw that he had returned carrying something more than the injuries of a terrible journey. She knew better than to demand an answer he was not ready to give. She had her own mysteries, her own knowledge, and her own power. The old arts were not his by right simply because he desired them, and the runes he now carried had not come to him through a blessing or a gift. He had taken a path that could not be undone. For a long moment, she watched him in silence. There was no need for accusation, and no comfort that could reverse what had been done. Whatever she understood of his choice, the deed was finished. The runes had entered him, and he would have to learn what it meant to carry them. She quietly tended to his needs as the healing began, no questions asked and no answers offered.
Óðinn returned to his place among the gods, eventually healing from his wounds and deprivation. The mystery of those runes continued to unfold before him day by day. He would learn their uses, discover the ways they could be carved and spoken, and explore the possibilities they offered for magic. The sacrifice had opened a door, but it had not brought an end to his seeking.
As the nights lengthen and the year turns toward its darker half, this is a fitting story to turn the wheel once more. Not because pain should be romanticized, but because this particular myth asks us to look at the price of knowledge without turning away from it. Óðinn’s sacrifice is not tidy or comfortable. It is an act of extraordinary resolve, carried out in solitude, with no promise that the desired knowledge will ever come.