Slow Havamal: 111

[kylec]

In verse 111, Odin opens up about the wise man’s chair at Urd’s well, where he saw and was silent, saw and thought, listened to men’s speech, and heard about the runes who have him counsel.

Odin, ever the seeker of wisdom, visits Urd—one of the female Norns, or Fates—who resides at the base of Yggdrasil. We don’t know what the wise man’s chair is, but presumably it could be a seat where one receives wisdom. I’m tempted to imagine Odin sitting in meditation. There are four actions he mentions: to see, to listen, to think, and to remain silent. These remind me to some degree of Eliphas Levi’s four magical virtues: to know, to dare, to will, and to be silent.

Let’s start with the last. Odin mentioned earlier in this very poem that you can’t learn with your mouth open. Wisdom is something we gain in a state of reception, one sharply opposed to the flappin’ of the yapper. The more of his own prejudices, habits, and demands he brings, the less he will get out of the experience. I think it was Charles Sanders Peirce who framed all learning as surprise. If fundamentally learning is an act of change, we will hardly change when we encounter what we expect. To learn, we must be surprised—something doesn’t add up the way our worldview said it would. We feel curious. We investigate. Slowly, a new framework of understanding forms to incorporate this latest datum. The process depends upon novelty introduced from outside, and the accurate perception of novelty depends upon shutting the hell up.

Odin sees. It may be right in front of him, or in his mind’s eye during meditation, but part of the way he learns is through images. There are many details we miss at a cursory glance. The wisdom-seeker would do well to scan patiently, to zoom in for detail, and to pan out for the big picture. We can extend that rule of silence to our mental chatter, and notice colors, shapes, patterns, and movement around us even in the most mundane settings. Through these data points we’ll build a more complete picture, an gain the capacity to notice more in the future. Particularly, he studies the shapes of the runes.

Odin listens to men’s speech. He hears what other wise men have said, but he probably also listens to fools and ordinary folk just the same. He stated earlier in Havamal that there is hardly a person so stupid that they have nothing to teach us. He also hears about the runes, and the very sounds they make. The runes themselves are images of men’s speech. The marriage of these two senses hardly strikes the modern reader, but imagine the leap it must have taken on the many occasions in human history in which people first put sound into writing. That ability was nothing short of a magical incantation for the initiated. He learns the character of the runes, of the many things men can say by seeing and by hearing.

Odin then ruminates on the impressions he’s received, again probably in meditation. It’s necessary to accept experiences without judgment at first if we mean to gain wisdom. But after a certain time, we can and should contrast what we encounter to our previous experiences. Does this add to our map? Revise it completely? To call back to Peirce, we have gone from the firstness of bare sense, to the secondness of memory and feeling, to the thirdness of rational reflection and categorization. Knowledge in the human sense of the word involves all three levels of a single process. Odin learns the runes at many levels before he can comprehend them.

As for what they had to say, we’ll find out in the coming weeks.