Slow Havamal: 158

[kylec]

In verse 158, Odin says he knows a thirteenth spell: If he throw water on a young man, that man will never be killed by violence, not even in battle.

There’s some uncertainty in this verse, because it can be translated as referring to throwing a larger amount of water onto a young man, or due to the requirements of alliteration, could also be seen as sprinkling water on a newborn, i.e. baptism. Crawford sides with the former in this translation, though not without reservations.

The effect of the spell is the same, even if it takes a little longer to be put to the test in the baptism instance. Odin has a method to protect certain warriors in his favor. We’ve already seen several such spells. Clearly, protecting certain people in battle is an important responsibility to Odin, and he would have been a good god to invoke for that purpose.

I don’t know what the water has to do with it other than to say that anointing people and objects has a long tradition in many faiths. Water is apparently an effective medium for subtle energies to be transferred through. It shouldn’t surprise us, and probably needs no more explanation. But water is also healing, and we can think of the young man as being healed from violence before it happens, or flowing through it unharmed as water moves around everything in its path. The word throw suggests a quantity, though the metrical requirements of the poem might have forced an unusual choice. This would appear to be one of the spells inaccessible to men, unless a human provides the physical vector for the water transfer and asks Odin to bless the water, but I doubt it would matter unless Odin himself selected the recipient.