Every morning Odin sends out two ravens, Thought and Memory, and every day he waits for them to come back. On Huginn and Muninn, the eye he gave away, and the fear that lives quietly inside wisdom.
Of all the gods of the north, Odin is the one who is never quite at rest.
He owns a high seat, Hlidskjalf, from which he can look out over all the worlds. He has the wolves at his feet and the dead warriors at his table. He is called the Allfather, the lord of the slain, the god of poetry, the wanderer in a wide-brimmed hat. And still it is not enough. He wants to know. That wanting is the thread that runs through every story told about him.
So every morning, before the light has properly come, he lifts two ravens from his shoulders and sends them out over the world.
Thought and Memory
Their names are Huginn and Muninn. Hugr in Old Norse is thought, mind, intent; munr is closer to memory, or the mind's longing. Thought and Memory. They fly all day across the lands of men, over the farms and the fjords and the battlefields, and they come back to him with everything they have seen and heard, and they sit on his shoulders and say it into his ears.
That alone would be a fine image of a god who knows everything. But there is a line in one of the old poems, the Grímnismál, that turns it into something else. Odin, speaking in disguise, says that every day he worries that Thought will not come back to him. And then he says that he worries more for Memory.
We have always found that line very moving. It is the most powerful being in the northern world admitting the smallest, most ordinary fear there is. Not that he will be defeated. Only that something he sent out in the morning will not come home.
Anyone who has grown old, or sat with someone who has, knows which of the two ravens is harder to lose.
What he paid
Odin's knowledge was never free. The stories are very clear about that.
Beneath one root of the world tree lies the well of Mímir, and in it is wisdom. Odin went to drink from it, and the price of one drink was an eye. He paid it. From then on he is one-eyed in every telling, and the missing eye is said to lie at the bottom of the well, looking up.
Another poem, the Hávamál, has him speak of hanging on the windswept tree for nine nights, wounded with a spear, given to himself, with no bread and no drink, until he looked down and saw the runes and took them up, crying out, and fell. It is one of the strangest passages in all of northern literature: a god sacrificing himself to himself, for letters.
Wisdom, in these stories, is something you are changed by. You give something up. You come back with less of one kind of thing and more of another.
Birds of the battlefield
Ravens were not a gentle choice. To the people who told these stories, ravens were the birds that came after the fighting, black against the snow, patient, clever, unafraid. Poets called Odin the raven-god. Warriors carried raven banners. The bird that eats the dead was also the bird that knows where the dead are, and what happened to them, and who was brave.
There is a hard honesty in that. Knowing everything means knowing the worst things too.
Where we put the gold
When we carved our Odin, the question that took longest was where the gold should go. Gold is the brightest thing on a piece; wherever you put it, the eye goes first. Most images of Odin put it on the crown.
We put it over the wound. The patch over his missing eye is fire-gilded and engraved with a spiral knot, and it catches the light before anything else. The most precious thing on the pendant marks what he gave up, not what he won. His remaining eye is gilded too, looking straight out.
The two ravens sit low on either side, wings open wide enough to frame the beard, heads turned outward as if they have just been sent. Only their beaks are gilded. Two small points of gold, open, mid-cry. Thought and Memory, leaving in the morning. It is a pendant in solid silver, a round shield in miniature, carved seven millimetres deep; but when we look at it, what we see is that line from the poem, the one about waiting.
I fear for Thought, that he may not come back. But I fear more for Memory.
We do not know a better description of loving anything.
Odin Necklace, Sterling Silver Viking Pendant · Norse Mythology Jewelry
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