Mythology & history
Odin's Nine Nights: the Secret of the Runes
What the runes really were — and the god who hanged for them
Runes of the Long Night reaches back to the oldest letters of the North. The word ‘rune’ means secret, or mystery — and the myth of how they were won is one of the strangest in all of Norse lore: a god who sacrificed himself, to himself.
A god hanged upon the world-tree
In the Hávamál of the Poetic Edda, Odin tells it in his own voice. He hung on the windswept world-tree Yggdrasil for nine long nights, pierced by a spear, given to Odin — himself to himself — with no bread and no horn of drink. He stared down into the depths until at last the runes rose to him. “I took up the runes,” he says, “screaming I took them — then I fell back.” Knowledge, in the North, was not given. It was suffered for.
Letters before they were mysteries
The oldest runic alphabet is the Elder Futhark — twenty-four signs, named (like ‘alphabet’) for its first letters f-u-th-a-r-k, in use from roughly 150 to 800 CE, before the Viking Age. The famous Kylver Stone from Gotland, around 400 CE, preserves the whole row carved in order. And for all their mystery, runes were mostly used for ordinary, human things: memorials to the dead, a maker's name on a blade, a charm, a claim of ownership. They were writing first — and magic only at the edges.
The music it inspired
Runes of the Long Night
Sails of bone and ash, shield walls in frost, whispers of the World Tree.
The long night runs through the record: “Runes Carved in Frost,” “Whispers of the World Tree,” “The Ritual of Blood and Iron,” and “Sails of Bone and Ash.”