Wanderer's Havamal

Jackson Crawford holds an MA in linguistics from the University of Georgia and a PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 2011 to 2020 he taught the Old Norse language, as well as courses in Norse mythology and Old Norse saga literature, at major universities including UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Colorado Boulder. During that time, he also served as a consultant on a popular video game, television programs, and major Hollywood films. Since 2020 he has been an independent educator, using his YouTube channel and popular translations of Norse myths and sagas from Hackett Publishing to reach hundreds of thousands of viewers and readers with well-sourced information about Norse language, mythology, and runes. His research interests today focus on the relationship of the runes to Mediterranean alphabets, as well as the use of linguistic criteria to determine the date of Old Norse texts.

"Hávamál, ‘Words of the High One’—purportedly delivering the wisdom of Odin in his own voice—is one of the most important mythological poems of the Poetic Edda and simply the most important witness to early Norse cultural ethics. Jackson Crawford has now given us a clean text and a new facing-page translation in contemporary idiom. A highly trained linguist, Crawford has already published with Hackett a complete translation of the whole of the famous ancient anthology, the Poetic Edda, and acquired many fans for his YouTube videos teaching Old Norse. Crawford is a poet in his own right with a recognizably Western voice. A scholarly commentary on the whole poem is an accomplishment made palatable for the general reader by Crawford’s informal style. All in all, a fresh start on the mysteries of this classic."—Joseph Harris, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and Professor of Folklore, Emeritus, Harvard University