The sumbel (also symbel) is the ritualised drinking rite of the Germanic and Norse world, in which a horn or cup of ale or mead is passed around a seated company and each participant, in turn, speaks over it, a toast to a god, a boast or vow, or a remembrance of the dead, before drinking. The medieval evidence is literary and indirect: scenes in Beowulf and allusions in the Eddic poems and sagas, from which scholars have reconstructed a formal drinking ceremony distinct from ordinary feasting, one in which words spoken over the horn were held to carry weight and obligation.
Modern Heathenry, which took organised shape in the later twentieth century, revived the sumbel as a communal rite, typically in three rounds, to the gods, to ancestors and heroes, and to open toasts, and treats it, alongside the blot, as a central act of the reconstructed tradition, while remaining aware that its exact old form cannot be recovered.