What the High One Says a Thousand Years Later
Hávamál was composed about a thousand years ago and reached us in a single manuscript. We first measured how the voice sounds – without God, with an I that remembers – and then read the poem as it asks to be read: as advice to a person. On arriving as a guest, on loneliness and friendship, on gifts and sacrifice, on sleepless nights, on old age and on being remembered – and what remains for whoever reads it today.
Hávamál, "the words of the High One", is the North's most quoted poem: one hundred and sixty-four stanzas of advice, warnings, love adventures and magic. Scholarship dates most of the poem to the tenth century, but it reached us in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, written down in Iceland around 1270. Whoever reads the poem today is reading something thought out about a thousand years ago, by people who did not know we would exist, and who nevertheless address us as "you". That situation is what this article is about: what points of contact such an old text can have with a reader a thousand years later.
We did one thing before reading. We measured the voice – against Christian poems in the same metre and against pagan ones – to know who is speaking and what kind of advice it is. That takes one short section. The rest is a reading, stanza by stanza, translated as literally as we can.
Whose voice is it?
We set Hávamál against three groups of poems in the same metre, ljóðaháttr: the pagan dialogue poems (Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Skírnismál, Lokasenna, Alvíssmál, Sigrdrífumál and Fjölsvinnsmál) and two Christian ones, Sólarljóð, a vision poem about a dead man who sees punishment and grace, and Hugsvinnsmál, a Christian adaptation of the Latin wisdom book Disticha Catonis – like Hávamál, advice from a father to a son.
Three things showed. Hávamál has not a single word from the Christian vocabulary – guð, synd, sál, drottinn, náð – while Hugsvinnsmál has them 0.4 times per hundred words and Sólarljóð 1.6. That is David Evans's old observation (1986) in numbers. (The word bæn occurs once, but in stanza 36 it means 'begging': þat er þó betra en bæn, 'that is still better than begging'.) But the ethics of friendship and gifts does not separate pagan from Christian: words for gift and repayment stand 0.42 times per hundred words in Hávamál and 0.42 in Hugsvinnsmál, words for friend 0.51 against 0.56, but only 0.09 and 0.04 in the pagan dialogues. Repaying gift with gift and tending one's friends belong to wisdom literature, not to belief; it is the thought Marcel Mauss built his study of the gift on, here measured.
The third is how the advice is given. Hávamál compares: the word betra, 'better', stands 0.71 times per hundred words in the guest wisdom against 0.13 in Hugsvinnsmál (13 hits against 4, a difference chance gives about once in 640 – a hint, not proof). The advice is seldom commands and mostly trade-offs between the worse and the better. And the I remembers instead of judging: in Hugsvinnsmál the I is hygg ek and tel ek, 'I think', 'I count', five of its eight ek; in Hávamál it is Ungr var ek forðum (47), 'young I was once', and Fullar grindr sá ek (78), 'full folds I saw'. Repayment stands between people, glík skulu gjöld gjöfum (46), not, as in Hugsvinnsmál, before God: gjǫld af guði hygg ek gumnar taki.
So this is the voice that meets the reader: no judge, no promises about anything after death, a person who has been through things and weighs one against the other. That is also why the poem can still be read as advice. It asks no belief of the listener.
Coming in through the door
The poem does not begin with wisdom but with a door. Stanza 1:
Gáttir allar, áðr gangi fram, um skoðask skyli, um skyggnast skyli, því at óvíst er at vita, hvar óvinir sitja á fleti fyrir.
All doorways, before going forward, one should look around in, should peer into; for it is uncertain to know where enemies sit on the bench inside.
Then the poem turns and speaks for the host. Gefendr heilir! (2), 'hail, givers!' – a guest has come in, where shall he sit? The one who has come in is cold about the knees and needs fire (3), food and clothes after the journey over the mountain, and water, a towel and a friendly welcome (4). The last item on the list of what the guest needs is the strangest: orðs ok endrþögu, 'a word – and silence in return'. To be allowed to say something and be listened to.
It is a list that has not aged. Replace the mountain with a flight or a move, and the one who comes in through the door still needs exactly this: warmth, food, a place to sit, and someone who keeps quiet while they tell. Hávamál's first advice to whoever receives a stranger is to listen.
Man is man's joy
Most of what the High One says is about other people, and the most quoted line is in stanza 47:
Ungr var ek forðum, fór ek einn saman, þá varð ek villr vega; auðigr þóttumk, er ek annan fann, maðr er manns gaman.
Young I was once, I travelled alone; then I lost my way. Rich I felt when I found another: man is man's joy.
One of the greatest dangers in Hávamál is not death but loneliness, and stanza 50 says so with an image from the forest:
Hrörnar þöll, sú er stendr þorpi á, hlýr-at henni börkr né barr; svá er maðr, sá er manngi ann. Hvat skal hann lengi lifa?
The pine that stands by the village withers; neither bark nor needles shelter it. So is the person whom no one loves. Why should such a one live long?
The remedy is conversation. Maðr af manni verðr at máli kuðr (57), 'a person becomes known to a person through speech', as fire is kindled from fire; whoever speaks with no one becomes dælskr af dul, dull from seclusion. And it is maintenance work. Stanza 119: far þú at finna oft, go often to see your friend, for on a road no one treads, brush and tall grass grow. Loddfáfnismál adds what may be the poem's tenderest line, stanza 121: sorg etr hjarta, ef þú segja né náir einhverjum allan hug – sorrow eats the heart if you cannot tell someone your whole mind.
A reader today recognises all of it, perhaps more than any generation before us. We have more ways of reaching each other than any other age, and more people who still have no one to tell everything to. Hávamál has no answer to that, but it has the diagnosis: the road grows over if no one walks it, and the one who cannot speak falls ill of it.
Gift for gift – and the blót
Friendship's maintenance has its bookkeeping, and it stands in stanza 42:
Vin sínum skal maðr vinr vera ok gjalda gjöf við gjöf.
To his friend a man should be a friend and repay gift with gift. Those who give and give back, says stanza 41, remain friends longest. That is the poem's economy: no one owes anyone anything forever, and so friendship can live. And the gift need not be large. Stanza 52: með halfum hleif ok með höllu keri fekk ek mér félaga – with half a loaf and a tilted cup I got myself a companion.
The same thought returns in one of the poem's strangest words, blót. In stanza 144 the High One asks eight questions – veistu, hvé rísta skal, 'do you know how to carve' – and one of them is veistu, hvé blóta skal, 'do you know how to sacrifice'. One answer stands in stanza 145, and it is the same reciprocity:
Betra er óbeðit en sé ofblótit, ey sér til gildis gjöf.
Better not asked than over-sacrificed; a gift always looks for its return. The blót is thus nothing foreign and solemn but friendship's bookkeeping turned upwards: one gives in order to get, and one should give in measure. The poem warns against excess, but just as plainly against stinginess: mildir, fræknir menn bazt lifa, 'generous, brave men live best' (48).
The costliest gift in the poem is the High One's own. In stanza 138 he hangs nine nights in the tree, gefinn Óðni, sjalfr sjalfum mér, 'given to Odin, myself to myself', and in stanza 139 he gets neither bread nor drinking horn. What he buys is the runes, and he takes them æpandi, 'screaming'. What makes the sacrifice great is not that it is lofty but that it costs.
What do we sacrifice today? That is a question the poem does not ask, but its words make it reasonable, and here we allow ourselves an interpretation that is not the poem's own. We sacrifice something every day. What costs has simply become something other than cattle and mead: for us the precious has become our time and our attention, and we give them away all day long, often without asking what we get back. Then the High One's question is not an archaic demand but a sharp question about one's own life: do you know how to give away your days, and what does the gift expect of you? Ey sér til gildis gjöf. And the warning applies here too: betra er óbeðit en sé ofblótit. One can sacrifice too much of one's attention to things that never give anything back.
The night when everything is as it was
There is a stanza in Hávamál that could have been written last night. Stanza 23:
Ósviðr maðr vakir um allar nætr ok hyggr at hvívetna; þá er móðr, er at morgni kemr, allt er víl sem var.
The unwise man lies awake all nights and broods over everything; so he is weary when morning comes, and all the misery is as it was.
A thousand years before the word anxiety, here is its whole clinical picture: the wakefulness, the brooding that seizes everything, the tiredness and the bitterness that nothing got better for it. The High One offers no cure, but he puts the brooding in the unwise man's column, and that is itself a kind of advice: it does not help to know more at night. The same voice says in stanza 12 that ale is not as good as it is said to be, því at færa veit, er fleira drekkr síns til geðs gumi – for the one who drinks more knows less of his own mind.
It belongs with the poem's most unexpected advice, not to know too much:
Meðalsnotr skyli manna hverr, æva til snotr sé … örlög sín viti engi fyrir, þeim er sorgalausastr sefi.
Moderately wise should everyone be, never too wise … let no one know their fate in advance; then the mind is freest from sorrow (54, 56). Stanza 55 says that the heart of the all-too-wise is seldom glad, and stanza 131 has the same balance: varan bið ek þik vera ok eigi ofvaran, 'wary I bid you be, but not over-wary'. The poem that praises knowledge warns against too much of it. For a reader who can know nearly everything about nearly everyone, all the time, and lie awake over it, that may be the poem's most timely line.
Attention is still the poem's first lesson: sá ek ok þagðak, sá ek ok hugðak, hlýdda ek á manna mál (111), 'I saw and kept silent, I saw and thought, I listened to the speech of men'. The order is to see, be silent, think and listen before speaking. The same stanza is the starting point of the essay Korpen som heter Minne (in Swedish).
Old age, the body and what is good enough
The poem is also plain about what we would rather not talk about. Stanza 16 says that the coward thinks he will live forever if he avoids fighting – en elli gefr hánum engi frið, þótt hánum geirar gefi, 'but old age gives him no peace, even if the spears do'. There is no slipping away.
But stanzas 69 and 71 turn it around:
Er-at maðr alls vesall, þótt hann sé illa heill; sumr er af sonum sæll, sumr af frændum, sumr af fé ærnu, sumr af verkum vel.
No one is wholly wretched, even if in poor health: one is happy in sons, one in kinsmen, one in ample wealth, one in good deeds. And stanza 71: the lame rides a horse, the handless herds the flock, the deaf fights and is of use; blind is better than burned – nýtr manngi nás, 'no one has use of a corpse'.
It is a hard voice, but not a cold one. It does not measure a person by their injury but by what they can still do, and it lists four different ways of having a good life without ranking them. For an age that likes to measure people on a single scale, that is an unusually roomy view of what is good enough.
The verdict on the dead – and the stones by the road
The measure of a life is in the end what remains of it. Stanzas 76 and 77 are the poem's most famous:
Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjalfr it sama, en orðstírr deyr aldregi, hveim er sér góðan getr.
Cattle die, kinsmen die, oneself dies the same; but the word-fame never dies for the one who earns a good one. And stanza 77 says what it is that endures: ek veit einn, at aldrei deyr: dómr um dauðan hvern – I know one thing that never dies: the verdict on each dead person.
That is exactly the thought that raised every runestone, and the poem knows it. Stanza 72 says that memorial stones seldom stand by the road unless kinsman raises them for kinsman – the custom that the thousands of stones in Vitki's corpus consist of, raised by roads and bridges by kinsmen for kinsmen. The reader who stands before a runestone today is standing before Hávamál's stanza 77 in stone: someone's verdict on someone dead, cut to outlive them both. It has. We are reading it.
But this is a voice that does not make itself faultless. In stanza 105 the High One says of Gunnlöð, who gave him the mead:
Gunnlöð mér of gaf gullnum stóli á drykk ins dýra mjaðar; ill iðgjöld lét ek hana eftir hafa síns ins heila hugar, síns ins svára sefa.
Gunnlöð gave me, on a golden stool, a drink of the precious mead; bad repayment I let her have for her whole heart, her heavy mind.
He who has taught repaying gift with gift admits here that he himself repaid a gift badly. It is the same I that hung nine nights in the tree, and he counts his own faults as openly as his sacrifices. A wisdom that can say ill iðgjöld lét ek is harder to dismiss than one that never errs – and easier to take to heart a thousand years later, because it does not speak from above.
Taking it to heart – or letting it stand still
After all this one question remains: should we take Hávamál to heart today, or let it be a picture of our ancestors, frozen in time? The poem is honest that much in it belongs to its time. The advice never to go a step from one's weapons in the field (38) belongs in a world without police, and the advice never to trust a woman's word (84) is a distrust we do not want to carry with us – even though the same voice in stanza 91 says openly that it is men's hearts that are unreliable towards women. Whoever takes the whole poem literally gets both wisdom and hindrance.
But what belongs to its time is the answers, not the questions: how do I receive the one who comes in through the door, how do I avoid loneliness, what do I give for what I get, how much should I know, what do I do with a night that will not end, what am I good for when the body fails, and how will I be remembered? And the poem itself asks to be used, not preserved. The refrain of Loddfáfnismál promises benefit to the one who receives: njóta mundu, ef þú nemr, 'you will benefit, if you take it in'. The last stanza calls the words allþörf ýta sonum, 'of great use to the sons of men', and closes with blessings on the one who spoke, the one who knows, the one who has learned and those who listened: njóti sá, er nam (164), 'may he enjoy who has learned'. A picture frozen in time is of use to no one.
Wisdom, then, is bound to its time in its answers but not in its questions, and it survives only as long as someone tests it against their own life. Stanza 119 anyone can test tonight, by getting in touch with a friend one has not heard from in a year. Stanza 4 can be tested the next time someone comes in through the door: a word, and silence in return. That is our reading of what it means to take Hávamál to heart.
Sources and data
- Hávamál: Guðni Jónsson's normalised edition of the Codex Regius text (Eddukvæði, Sæmundar-Edda), via heimskringla.no.
- Hugsvinnsmál: Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, 1912–15, via heimskringla.no. Sólarljóð and the pagan dialogue poems: Guðni Jónsson's editions, via heimskringla.no.
- Edition and commentary: David A. H. Evans, Hávamál (Viking Society, 1986). Dating: Mikael Males, Maal og Minne 2024:1, pp. 81–117.
- The ethics of the gift: Marcel Mauss, 'Essai sur le don', L'Année sociologique 1923–24.
- Analysis code and results: utdata/Edda in Vitki's repository.
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, public domain, with credits in the captions.