Huginn and Muninn, Odin's ravens of thought and memory

Every morning, Norse mythology tells us, two ravens leave Odin's shoulders, fly over the world and return before evening to whisper in his ear what they have seen. They are called Huginn and Muninn, and their names are already an interpretation: they mean thought and memory, the faculties through which the supreme god of the ancient Scandinavians knows everything that happens.

The medieval sources

The main information comes from two Icelandic texts of the thirteenth century. The first is the Grímnismál, one of the poems of the Poetic Edda, in which Odin himself says he fears every day that Huginn may not return, but fears even more for Muninn. The second is the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written around 1220, which in the section called Gylfaginning describes the two ravens perched on the god's shoulders.

Snorri adds that this is why Odin was called Hrafnaguð, the «raven god». The name Huginn derives from Old Norse hugr, thought or intention, while Muninn is linked to the verb muna, to remember, and is usually rendered as «memory» or «mind». The god's fear of losing Muninn has been read by many interpreters as an image of the fragility of memory.

Ravens, wolves and battlefields

In the Germanic imagination the raven was also the bird of battle, feeding on the fallen beside the wolf. Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry often uses the triad of raven, wolf and eagle, the «beasts of battle». Odin, lord of war and of the dead, also owns two wolves, Geri and Freki, to whom, according to Snorri, he gives all the food from his table, for he himself lives on wine alone.

This closeness explains the success of raven banners. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 878 a standard called Raven, belonging to a Viking band, was captured in Devon. Some Icelandic sagas also relate that the Orkney earl Sigurd the Stout, who died at the battle of Clontarf in Ireland in 1014, owned a raven banner woven by his mother, which according to legend brought victory to the army but death to the man who carried it.

Images and interpretations

Archaeological depictions confirm the antiquity of the motif. On some gold bracteates of the Migration Period, of the fifth and sixth centuries, a male figure appears accompanied by birds, and on the plates of some Vendel-period helmets, in Sweden, an armed horseman is flanked by two birds in flight. Many scholars recognise in them Odin with his ravens, although the identification is not always certain.

Some interpreters have linked the two ravens to the ecstatic practices attributed to Odin, who in the Ynglinga Saga travels in spirit while his body lies as if asleep: the two birds would then be an image of the mind leaving the body in order to know. This is a hypothesis, but it fits the portrait of a god who sacrifices an eye at the well of Mímir to obtain wisdom.

The raven is an intelligent animal, able to imitate sounds and to recognise places and people, and the peoples of the North had observed it closely. In Odin's two companions that observation became a philosophical image: knowledge of the world depends on the thought that explores and the memory that preserves, and the wisest of gods fears above all to lose the second.