Huginn and Muninn: Odin's Ravens
Discover Huginn and Muninn, Odin's ravens representing thought and memory, their flights around the world, and their place in Norse mythology.
Huginn and Muninn are the two ravens of Odin, the chief of the Aesir. Their names, in Old Norse, are Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“memory” or “mind”). According to the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the Poetic Edda, the two ravens fly out from Odin at dawn, fly all over the world, and return at night to report everything they have seen and heard. The image of the chief god sending out two ravens to gather news is one of the most evocative in the entire Norse mythological corpus, and the names of the two ravens — thought and memory — emphasize that Odin is a god of the mind as much as a god of war and wisdom.
The Names and Their Meaning
The names Huginn and Muninn are derived from Old Norse words that are part of the same root family as the modern English words “think” and “mind.” The Old Norse verb hugga means “to think” or “to comfort,” and the noun hugr means “thought,” “mind,” or “courage.” The Old Norse verb muna means “to remember” or “to keep in mind,” and the noun munnr or minni means “memory” or “remembrance.” The two names are, in the original language, paired: the active and the receptive, the gathering and the keeping, the thought and the memory.
The pairing of the two is structurally similar to the pairing of the two wolves of Odin, Geri and Freki (“the ravenous” and “the greedy”), and to the pairing of Odin’s two ravens. The wolves represent Odin’s hunger; the ravens represent Odin’s mind. The two pairs together represent the chief god as a being of appetite and intellect, both of which are central to the Norse imagination of the divine.
The names are sometimes translated into English as “Thought” and “Memory” or “Mind” and “Memory.” The 19th-century philologist Jacob Grimm argued that the two names are an ancient German poetic pair, and that they reflect an old Germanic understanding of the mind as having both a forward-looking and a backward-looking dimension. The reading appears in the medieval sources, and has been the dominant reading in academic study.
Huginn and Muninn in the Poetic Edda
The most explicit poetic reference is in the Grímnismál (stanza 20), one of the Poetic Edda poems preserved in the Codex Regius. The poem is a vision of the universe, in which Odin, in disguise as the wanderer Grímnir, tells a young king the secrets of the world. Stanza 20 is the most explicit:
“Huginn and Muninn fly every day over the vast earth. I fear for Huginn, that he may not return, but I fear more for Muninn.”
The stanza is often quoted and is, perhaps, the most famous single verse in the entire eddic corpus. The line “I fear for Huginn, that he may not return, / but I fear more for Muninn” has been widely studied for centuries. The asymmetry of Odin’s fear — that he fears more for Muninn, the memory, than for Huginn, the thought — implies that memory is more important to the chief god than thought, or that the loss of memory is the deeper danger. The reading matches with the Norse interest in the preservation of the past, in oral tradition, in the cultivation of the kind of wisdom that is held in the mind over time.
The 20th-century scholar Ursula Dronke argued that the stanza reflects an old Norse understanding of the mind as having two components, one of which is more vulnerable than the other. The reading is suggestive but not directly supported by the surviving sources. The most direct reading is that the two ravens, like the two wolves, are attributes of Odin, and that the names themselves imply the attributes.
Huginn and Muninn in the Prose Edda
Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, in Gylfaginning (chapter 20), describes the two ravens in the context of the divine attributes of Odin. According to Snorri, Odin has two ravens, which he has trained to speak. The two fly all over the world, gathering news, and return to Odin at night, telling him everything they have seen and heard. Snorri identifies the two ravens as Huginn and Muninn, and he describes them as being “his [Odin’s] messengers.”
Snorri’s account is the most detailed in the surviving sources, and it includes the identification of the names. The Younger Edda’s Skáldskaparmál lists Huginn and Muninn in the kennings for Odin, and the Hávamál (stanza 138) and other eddic poems include references to the two ravens in passing.
The Prose Edda’s account also describes Odin’s other attributes: the spear Gungnir, the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, and the ring Draupnir. The ravens are part of a larger set of attributes that define Odin as a god of war, wisdom, and the gathering of news. The list is an important source for the medieval Icelandic understanding of the chief of the gods.
The Ravens and the World Tree
The image of the two ravens, flying out from Odin and returning to him, is structurally similar to the image of Odin himself, sitting on his high seat Hliðskjálf and looking out on all the worlds. The ravens are an extension of the chief god’s perception, just as the high seat is. The two are the same act: the god sees the world through the ravens, and through the high seat, and through the gathering of news.
The ravens are also associated with the World Tree, Yggdrasil. The Grímnismál (stanza 19) describes the tree as the great ash, and stanza 20 follows immediately. The juxtaposition implies a connection: the ravens sit on the tree, the tree is the support of the worlds, and the ravens fly out from the tree to gather news. The reading matches with the medieval Icelandic understanding, in which the high seat and the World Tree are both supports of divine perception.
The Symbolism of the Raven
The raven is, in Old Norse literature, a bird of both good and bad omen. The word hrafn (“raven”) appears in many Old Norse poems and is associated with both heroic action and death. The most famous raven poetry in Old Norse is the Hrafnsmál (“Raven’s Poem”), a skaldic poem in which a raven discusses the heroic death of a king. The ravens are also associated with the battlefields of the great sagas: in Beowulf, the hero’s body is carried off by the birds; in the Saga of the Ynglingar, Odin himself is described as a raven-god who determines the outcome of battles.
The association of the raven with death and with the battlefield is one of the most enduring in Old Norse literature. The two ravens of Odin, gathering news from the world, are a specific instance of the more general association: the ravens are the eyes and ears of the god of the slain, the bringer of news from the field of battle and from the realm of the dead.
The raven is also associated, in medieval Scandinavian folklore, with Odin as a wandering figure. The medieval Icelandic narratives describe Odin as appearing in disguise, often as an old man with a wide-brimmed hat and a staff. In some narratives, the disguised Odin is accompanied by ravens. The image of the wandering god, accompanied by two ravens, is one of the most familiar in Old Norse folklore.
The Material Culture: Ravens in Viking-Age Art
The raven is one of the most common motifs in Viking-Age art. The 6th-century Vendel-era helmets of Sweden feature a raven on the crest, and the 7th-century Valkyrie brooches of the same period depict ravens. The Gotland picture stones of the 8th and 9th centuries often include ravens in their iconography, and the rune stones of Scandinavia sometimes depict ravens as well. The 9th-century Rök stone in Sweden, one of the most famous runestones, includes a reference to a figure called Hafþi who is sometimes identified with Odin in connection with the raven. The image of the raven-god is, in the archaeological record, a vivid and consistent one.
The most famous image of Huginn and Muninn in Viking-Age art is on the Stora Hammars stone of Gotland (c. 8th century), a picture stone that shows a figure (usually identified as Odin) with a spear, accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. The stone is one of the clearest images of Odin in the archaeological record, and it has drawn scholarly interpretation for more than a century.
The Continental Germanic Sources
The raven is also a central figure in the continental Germanic sources. The 1st-century Roman historian Tacitus, in his Germania (c. 98 CE), describes the Germanic peoples as having a particular devotion to “the raven-god” — a description that has been identified with Odin. The raven is also mentioned in the Old English poem Beowulf (c. 8th century) as a bird of omen, and in the Dream of the Rood as a bird of death.
The Old English name for Odin is Wōden (corresponding to Old Norse Óðinn), and the figure of Wōden in Anglo-Saxon England is associated with a similar attribute. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem (c. 9th century) does not specifically describe the ravens, but the continental sources confirm the depth of the raven motif in the older Germanic religion.
The most explicit medieval continental description of Odin’s ravens is in the Prose Edda, but the Völsunga saga and the Hervarar saga also include references. The image of the two ravens, flying out from the chief of the gods to gather news, is one of the most persistent in the older Germanic imagination.
Huginn and Muninn in Modern Culture
The two ravens have had a significant impact on modern popular culture. The names are used in fantasy novels, video games, and tabletop role-playing games. The two ravens appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the ravens of Odin, and they have been a focus of many works of modern fiction. The image of two ravens flying out from a god, gathering news from the world, is a powerful one in modern imagination, and it has been used in many works of contemporary art and literature.
In modern Asatru and Heathenry, Huginn and Muninn are sometimes invoked in ritual. The two ravens are seen as the messengers of the chief god, and the act of invoking them is sometimes understood as an invocation of thought and memory. The practice is not universal, but the image of the two ravens is a familiar one in modern Heathen practice.
The Significance of the Pairing
The pairing of Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, is structurally one of the most important in Old Norse mythology. The Norse imagination conceived of the mind as having two complementary dimensions, and the two ravens are the mythological embodiment of the two dimensions. The image is suggestive of a more general Norse interest in the structure of the mind, and it is one of the places where the Old Norse sources can be read as a kind of early philosophy of mind.
The pairing is also one of the most enduring in Norse mythology. The names are well known, the ravens are widely depicted, and the image of the two ravens flying out from Odin is a standard image in modern depictions of the Norse cosmos. The pairing has, in this sense, survived the conversion of Scandinavia and the modern revival of interest in the Norse sources.
The Two Ravens and the Two Wolves
The pairing of Huginn and Muninn is best understood in the context of the larger set of Odin’s animal attendants. Odin has two ravens (Huginn and Muninn) and two wolves (Geri and Freki). The four animals are described in the Grímnismál and in the Prose Edda as Odin’s constant companions. The wolves sit at Odin’s feet, eating the meat set before him; the ravens fly out and return. The four together represent the chief god as a being of hunger and intellect, with the ravens as the mind and the wolves as the appetite.
The pairing of the ravens and the wolves is one of the more curious features of the Norse mythology, and it has been the subject of scholarly interpretation. The most common reading is that the two pairs represent two complementary aspects of the divine mind: the mind as the gathering of information (the ravens) and the mind as the will to act (the wolves). The reading appears in the medieval sources, and has been the subject of modern interpretation.