The Triple Horn of Odin
Pronunciation: The symbol’s common name is modern English, so there’s nothing to sound out — but the three mead-vessels of the myth it evokes are Óðrerir (OH-threh-reer), Boðn (BOTHN), and Són (SOHN).
Name and etymology
The Triple Horn of Odin — sometimes called the horn triskelion — is a design of three drinking horns interlocked in rotational symmetry, each horn’s curve woven through the other two. Unlike most entries on this site, no Old Norse name for the design survives, and that absence is the first honest thing to say about it. “Triple Horn of Odin” is what we call it; what the carvers who cut it into stone called it, and precisely what they meant by it, went unrecorded.
That makes this symbol the mirror image of the Ægishjálmur. There, the name and the power are ancient and the visual form is early modern. Here, the visual form is authentically Viking Age — and the interpretation attached to it is ours. Both symbols are legitimately part of the tradition. They just wear their history in opposite ways, and knowing which way your symbol wears its history is what separates practice from merchandise.
Textual and material sources
The design itself is attested in stone. The Snoldelev Stone, a ninth-century Danish runestone, bears three interlocked drinking horns arranged in exactly the triskele pattern the symbol carries today — carved a full four centuries before the Eddas were written down. Related horn imagery appears elsewhere in the Viking Age material record, notably among the Gotland picture stones, where drinking horns figure in scenes of welcome and reception. So when you wear this symbol, you are wearing a genuinely old design. What you cannot claim — because no source says it — is that its carvers were depicting the Mead of Poetry. That connection is a modern reading, and it’s a good one, because three horns beside the god of poetry’s myth of three drinks is not a difficult inference. But an inference is what it is, and I’d rather hand you the distinction than the certainty.
The myth the symbol now evokes is told in full in the Skáldskaparmál of Snorri’s Prose Edda, and it is one of the great stories of the lore. At the truce of the Æsir and Vanir, the two tribes of gods seal peace by mingling their spittle in a vat, and from it create Kvasir — the wisest of all beings, who travels the world teaching. Two dwarves, Fjalar and Galar, murder him and mix his blood with honey, brewing a mead that makes a poet or a scholar of anyone who drinks it. They store it in three vessels: the kettle Óðrerir and the vats Boðn and Són — the myth’s own three containers, and the likeliest referent of the symbol’s three horns. Through a further murder the dwarves forfeit the mead as wergild to the giant Suttungr, who hides it inside the mountain Hnitbjörg under the guard of his daughter, Gunnlöð.
Odin’s acquisition of it is a long con. Under the name Bölverk — “evil-worker,” and the poem means us to notice the name — he engineers the deaths of nine thralls, works a summer in their place for Suttungr’s brother Baugi, and claims a drink of the mead as wages. Refused, he has Baugi drill through the mountain with the auger Rati, slips through the hole as a serpent, and spends three nights with Gunnlöð — who grants him three drinks of the mead. In three drafts he drains all three vessels, takes eagle-shape, and flees to Asgard with Suttungr in pursuit, spitting the mead into the gods’ vats. Snorri adds the tradition’s best joke: in the chase some of the mead was lost out the other end, and that portion — the poetaster’s share — is where bad poetry comes from. No one guards it, and anyone may have as much as they like.
The Hávamál corroborates the core of the story in Odin’s own voice, and adds the moral bill. He recounts Rati gnawing the passage, the risk of the giants’ halls, and “well-bought” mead — but also Gunnlöð, who gave him a drink of the precious mead from her golden seat, and whom he left betrayed: he repaid her heavy-heartedness, the poem says, and her grief of spirit (st. 104–110). Then comes the extraordinary verse where the tradition indicts its own chief god: Odin swore a ring-oath, the poem observes — how shall his word be trusted? He left Suttungr cheated and Gunnlöð weeping (st. 110). Elsewhere in the same poem Odin admits the mead’s own weapon caught him too, confessing he was fettered in the ale at Gunnlöð’s hall (st. 13–14). The god of wisdom keeps the receipts on himself.
Reading the symbol
The three interlocked horns carry the myth’s meanings in compressed form. Wisdom, inspiration, and poetry stand first — the mead is the lore’s image of creative and intellectual power itself, brewed from the wisest being who ever lived, and the pursuit of it is the pursuit of knowledge and expression. The symbol equally evokes Odin’s journey: the god’s defining pattern of paying enormous prices for wisdom — a summer’s labor, a serpent’s squeeze through stone, three nights, a broken oath, a desperate flight — of which the mead-quest is the most vivid single example. And it carries transformation: Odin becomes a serpent to enter the mountain and an eagle to leave it, changed in shape at both thresholds, as anyone is changed by passing through an ordeal to reach an understanding.
The interlocking matters too. The three horns are not stacked or adjacent; each passes through the others, inseparable — three drafts of one mead, three vessels of one brew, the way wisdom, inspiration, and the price paid for them cannot be pried apart in the myth or in a life.
A personal reading: the mead is for pouring
Set the two keepers of the mead side by side, because the myth has arranged them for comparison.
Suttungr gets the mead as compensation and does precisely nothing with it. He carries it into a mountain, seals it in stone, and posts his own daughter as its jailer. He doesn’t drink it. He doesn’t share it. The wisdom of Kvasir — brewed from the peace-pact of the gods themselves, made to travel the world teaching — sits in the dark accomplishing nothing, guarded by a man whose entire relationship to it is possession. If that pattern sounds familiar, it should: it’s Fáfnir on his gold, one entry over. The lore returns to this figure again and again — the hoarder whose treasure does nothing but be kept, and who is diminished by the keeping.
Odin steals it — and then does the one thing Suttungr never considered. He pours it out. The mead goes into the gods’ vats and from there, Snorri tells us plainly, to men skilled in poetry. That is why the myth is an origin story at all: because the mead circulated. Every poem since is a downstream cup of it. Inspiration hoarded is indistinguishable from inspiration destroyed; it only exists in the pouring. That’s the reading I carry in the symbol’s three open mouths — horns are vessels you drink from and serve with, not vessels you seal. Whatever mead you’ve been given — knowledge, craft, insight bought with your own hard summers — the Suttungr move is always available, and it is always the wrong one. Write it down. Teach it. Pour.
And then the harder half, because I promised you honest readings and this myth doesn’t permit a clean hero. The pouring came by way of a con, a seduction, and a broken ring-oath, and the tradition refuses to launder any of it. Hávamál looks straight at its own god and asks: he swore an oath and broke it — who can trust his word now? Gunnlöð, who gave freely, is left weeping, and the poem makes sure we know her grief was real and Odin knew it. The mead was won and the cost was paid by someone else, and the lore writes that down in Odin’s own confession. I find that as instructive as the theft itself: this is a tradition whose holiest text keeps honest books on its highest god. When I raise a horn to Odin, I’m honoring the relentless seeker of wisdom — and accepting the standing warning that seeking has ethics, that “I needed it” is not a settlement of accounts, and that even a god’s word, once broken, is broken. The tradition that audits Odin will certainly audit me. It should.
Historical and modern use
Beyond the Snoldelev Stone and its cousins, the drinking horn itself was central to Norse social and ritual life — the vessel of feast, oath, and welcome — so horn imagery carried ceremonial weight quite apart from any single myth. That old function survives directly in modern Heathen practice: the sumbel, the ritual round of toasts in which a horn is passed and words are spoken over it — boasts, oaths, tributes to gods and ancestors — is one of contemporary Heathenry’s central rites, and it is often held in three rounds. A symbol of three horns therefore sits at the intersection of the mead myth and the living ritual, which is much of why several modern Heathen organizations have adopted it as an emblem.
Today the Triple Horn is worn chiefly by those who honor Odin, and by the people the mead was ultimately poured for: writers, poets, musicians, scholars, and makers who mark their work as downstream of that first stolen draft. It appears in pendants, tattoos, and devotional art, and on many a sumbel horn itself. It is one of the less commercially saturated symbols of the modern revival — you’ll meet it on practitioners more often than on merchandise — which gives it, fittingly for the god of the well-earned drink, something of an insider’s quality: a symbol you tend to learn the story before you start wearing.
← back to Symbols