Odin
Allfather.
The One-Eyed · The Hanged God · The Father of the Slain
Chief of the Aesir. Patron of kings, poets, madmen, and the war-dead. He gave an eye for wisdom and hung himself on his own tree for the runes. The god of paying the price before the price is asked.
He hung himself on his own tree.
Pierced by his own spear, given to himself, he hung for nine nights with no food and no water. On the ninth night, the runes rose out of the well beneath the tree and gave themselves to him. Begin the vigil to see what he saw.
Himself to himself.
The Hávamál — The Words of the High One — is a poem spoken in Odin's own voice in the Poetic Edda. In stanza 138, Odin tells you directly what he did for the runes. He does not say the runes were given to him. He says he took them. The translation matters: the myth is a story of a god paying a price for a power the gods did not yet have.
The ancient Norse did not have a god of gifts. They had a god who understood that every worthwhile thing is paid for before it is collected. A wedding feast is paid for in the offered alliance of families. A harvest is paid for in the labor of spring. Wisdom is paid for in an eye. The runes are paid for in nine nights of hanging on a tree you yourself planted.
This is not a Christian framework. There is no redemption here. The hanged god is not crucified for his people — he is crucified for himself, to bring back the tool he will then use to help them. He did not pay the price with someone else's suffering. He paid it with his own. That is what made him the Allfather.
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear,
dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes,
screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
The other price.
Before the runes, there was the eye. The well of Mímir sits beneath the second root of Yggdrasil and holds the water of wisdom. Odin came to the well as a younger god and asked for a drink. Mímir named the price: an eye. Odin did not argue. He cut out his own eye and dropped it in the well where it remains to this day, looking back at whoever comes to the water.
This is the god the Norse built. He is not the richest of the gods, not the strongest, not the most beautiful. Thor is stronger. Balder is more beautiful. Freyr is wealthier. Odin is the one who gave things up to get what the others could not have. He is the patron of those who understand the trade. He is also the patron of those who have already made it.
The Norse warrior going to battle was not asking Odin for protection. Odin does not protect. The Norse warrior was asking Odin for a good death, and for the poetry that would be sung afterward. That was the only thing the Allfather had to give that the other gods did not.
He had more than 170.
Odin has more names than any other Norse god — more than 170 survive in the written record, and those are only the ones that got copied into medieval manuscripts before the oral tradition died. Each name is a role. Vegtamr is the wanderer. Grímnir is the masked one. Har is the high one. Bölverkr is the evil-worker. Yggr is the terrible one.
The Norse understood something that modern branding forgets. A single deep name cannot hold every version of the thing it refers to. Odin when he is drinking with his warriors is not Odin when he is wandering disguised through a mortal court asking riddles. They are the same god. They need different names.
This is also the practical reason for the proliferation. A Norse poet — a skald — could not use a god's name twice in the same verse. The rules of alliterative poetry required substitutions. An entire vocabulary of kennings grew up around each god, each one a small window into a different aspect of his character. The god had to have enough names to fit into every verse.
The patron of those who already paid.
Odin is not the god you call when you want something. He is the god you understand when you have already given up what was asked. He is for the founder who mortgaged the house and is now standing in an empty office waiting for the first customer. He is for the parent who gave up a career and is now raising a daughter who does not yet know what that cost. He is for the artist who lost the marriage because the work came first and the work was not even sure, at the time, that it was worth the loss.
The myth does not tell you the price was worth it. The myth tells you that Odin ate, and drank, and hung, and saw, and lost, and took the runes anyway. Whether they were worth the eye and the nine nights — that question does not get answered in the Hávamál. You have to answer it yourself, from the other side of whatever you have already given up.
If Odin is the god you keep thinking about, you are past the part where you decide whether to pay. You are in the long middle where you are waiting for the runes to rise from the water. They rose for him on the ninth night. The myth does not promise they will rise for you. But it does not say they won't. And it was willing to hang for nine nights on the chance.