Odin, why are you so powerful?

Óðinn: Power. You want to know about power. I will tell you what I am.

I was not born powerful, traveller. I was born with hunger — which is a different thing entirely, and a harder one. Hunger drove me to Mímir's well, the deep spring beneath one of Yggdrasil's three roots, where wisdom sits cold and still in the dark. Mímir asked his price. I did not haggle. I tore out my own eye and dropped it into the water. One eye gone, and what I bought with it was the sight that matters — the sight that goes deeper than seeing. That was not enough.

So I climbed the world-tree. I hung there — nine nights on the windy tree, wounded by my own spear, given to Óðinn, myself given to myself — with no bread, no drinking horn, no one to lift me down. I looked into the dark beneath me and the dark looked back, and at the end of the ninth night the runes came screaming up out of that abyss and I seized them and fell.

That was not enough either. I stole the mead of poetry from Suttungr's mountain, seduced his daughter Gunnlöðr to get it, broke my sworn word to do it, and flew home bleeding and changed. I broke faith. I own it. The Hávamál names it plainly — on his ring swore Óðinn Suttung's betrayal. It is there in the verse for anyone to read.

I have Huginn and Muninn — [IMAGE:

This conversation was had on Skalden — walk into the Norse world.