08.29.07
Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:47 am by marion
Geyr nú Garmr miök
fyr Gnipahelli–
festr mun slitna,
en freki renna.
Fiöld veit hón frœða–
fram sé ek lengra,
um ragna rök
römm, sigtíva.
Dronke’s translation:
Now Garmr bays loud
before Looming Cave–
the fetter will break
and the ravener run free,
Much she knows of old knowledge,
ahead I see further,
over the fate of the powers,
virulent fate of victory’s gods.
An exact repetition of Stanza 44 (except that the Codex Regius and another manuscript have a small error in the first half-line of Stanza 44–om for nú); and the Codex Regius scribe actually abbreviates Stanza 46.
One manuscript went to town with that refrain at the end of the stanza, repeating it several more times and skipping stanzas. Clearly this is a side effect of the impact of the repeated stanza, which brackets the high point of the poem–after this comes the dizzying slide in the fortunes of the gods. Dronke makes strangely little of this unusually blatant emphasis in her analysis, although she teases out carefully the interlace of the various refrains within stanzas and the counterpoint of the tenses (simplified in the Prose Edda) and the pronouns. In performance, the repetition would have been a very dramatic marker indeed.
What has changed since Stanza 44? Humanity has sunk into debauchery and self-slaughter, and the gods have been summoned by Heimdall’s horn. Concerning Stanza 45, I discussed Dronke’s dismissive attitude toward Óðinn as he consults Mímir’s head for the last time, and concerning Stanza 44, I discussed the common attitude that Dronke at least partially shares, that regarding destruction of the bonds of kinship as disastrous is more Xian than heathen morality and that kindness and social cooperation are more characteristically Xian than heathen. Underlying both of these issues is the relationship of the heathen gods to order and morality, and the concomitant view of wyrd. If the gods ensure by their existence that there is order in the cosmos, then of course Óðinn must consult Mímir’s head yet again, and of course the imminent demise of the gods and destruction of Midgard will be felt both as tearing of the social fabric and as quaking of the Tree that joins the worlds. If on the other hand the gods are mere councillors and false prophets, as a Xian will view them, they will sit futilely in their judgment seats once their time is up. Does their being subject to wyrd negate their divinity? That was the crucial question in the conversion era.
By reifying the doom of the doomspeaking gods–ragna rök–the poet crosses the line into depicting the counsel of the gods not as determination, but as mere rede. Into the Xian view that that which has an end cannot be divine. “World without end,” the Xians say.
We will see later in the poem that the poet is nonetheless heathen–even if we include the most blatantly Xian part of the poem, the half-stanza added to Stanza 61 in one manuscript, the poet depicts the resurgence of not only the earth and humanity, but some of the gods and all the goddesses. However, his view of divinity and its relation to ultimate law and to fate had clearly been affected by Xian thought. The two religions have very different views of the implications when their gods die; the bravery of this poem lies in confronting it, and that is what the repeated stanza sets in place as the capstone of the poem, in my view.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:46 am by marion
Leika Míms synir,
en miötuðr kyndiz
at en[o] galla
Giallarhorni.
Hát blæss Heildallr
–horn er á lopti–
mælir Óðinn
við Míms höfuð.
Skelfr Yggdrasils
askr standandi,
ymr it aldna tré
en iötunn losnar.
Dronke’s translation:
Mímr’s sons sport,
but fate’s measure is lit
at the sound of the clear-ringing
Clarion Horn.
Loud blows Heimdallr
–the horn points to the sky–
Óðinn talks
with Mímr’s head.
Yggdrasill shivers,
the ash, as it stands,
The old tree groans,
and the giant slips free.
Like Stanza 44, 45 is extra-long for emphasis. (The Codex Regius text has the last two pairs of half-lines in reverse order, but they are present in all texts). In fact, the repetition of Stanza 43 as Stanza 46 following it marks these two stanzas, 44 and 45, as the emotional peak of the poem. Strangely, Dronke does not seem to see the impact of this, since there are so many refrains woven throughout the poem, but it is the center point of the pattern.
“Mímr’s head” occurs more often in the lore than “Mímir’s”; Dronke suggests, in fact, that the story of the Vanir beheading Mímir and Óðinn pickling his head was invented by Snorri. There are definitely mysteries here; does Míms synir refer to giants, or as Dronke has decided, to humans–just like mögo Heimdallar in Stanza 1? References to holt Hodd-míms–Hoddmímir’s Holt–in Vafþrúðnismál and to Mimameiðr–Mimi’s Tree–in Svipdagsmál, plus Stanza 2 with its mysterious reference to being fostered/borne by 9 wood-ogresses under the ground, make Dronke think Heimdallr in some sense is the Tree, and that Mímir or Mímr is a figure who grew out of the old story of “why the sun is one-eyed.” But Óðinn is not the sun; Heimdallr is not Mímir, despite Snorri’s peculiar story about his having been run through with a man’s head, so that “a sword can be called ‘Heimdallr’s head’”; and none of these gods is the Tree, as a re-reading of the stanza makes clear. Apparently Mímir and Mímr are variant forms of the same name, but who are his sons? The interpretation that worls for me is: the gods. Mímir and Hœnir, the Æsir sent to the Vanir as hostages, are both mysterious figures, but in Stanza 18, Hœnir was one of the three gods giving Askr and Embla the gifts of humanity–elsewhere, the three givers were Óðinn and his brothers, Vili and Vé. And the Vanir sent their best as hostages; so Óðinn’s two brothers would have been appropriately distinguished hostages from the Æsir. Hence, there is some justification for regarding Mímir/Mímr as Vili or Vé by another name, one of the co-creators of humankind but also one of the oldest Æsir. This interpretation would replace the bitterness Dronke sees in leika–humans “playing” by slaughtering their own kin, committing incest and murder–with a bitter reference to the gods gaming with their golden tafl pieces and throwing everything they can find at Baldr. Rather than sitting in their judgment seats, the poet now depicts them grown complacent, effete, and frivolous. Dronke regards Óðinn consulting Mímr’s head after the call to battle has already rung out as his being a slave to habit, for there can be nothing more he needs to know; I think we know better than to imagine Valfather would ever be silly, and thus that it is desperation and the knowledge that information is always an advantage that will drive him to ask for more advice.
In Stanza 2, the Tree was referred to as mjötviðr–”tree of good measure” in Dronke’s rendition. Here we have a “measure”–mjötuðr–being kindled or kindling itself to fire. Dronke has explicitly introduced in her translation the word “fate” that is only implied in the Norse. The idea is of course of a candle burning down–once it is lit, it burns only for a specific time. Dronke points out that in medieval Iceland, candles were made to the measure of an ailing person–for a problem pregnancy, a candle the length of the woman’s girdle; for a bad head, a candle the length of its circumference; candles as tall as the sick person himself–and burned for a cure (presumably with everyone praying madly all the while). And in Nornagests Þáttr a candle marks the “measure” of a life. In Anglo-Saxon, meotodsceaft is “fate” and Meotod is a name for the Xian god that may go back to terms for our gods, or may just reflect the Xian notion that their god determines wyrd (destiny). But there is also the underlying notion of orlög as laid down in advance, and we know that in the Norse world the prevailing model of wyrd was the norns stirring the waters of of the Urðarbrunnr, laying down strata of clay that were then drawn up through the Tree and whose moisture returned to its waters as dew falling from the leaves. So Tree and wyrd are associated in Norse heathen thought. And the Tree will go up in flames as Ragnarök unfolds. The poet has elided that event, but surely that is why he immediately speaks of it shivering and groaning. There is an implicit image of the Tree itself as the candle, even before Surtr enters the picture with his flaming sword.
To Dronke, the “measure” words imply that the allotted time is up and the Tree, and the gods, showing decrepitude. I think this is influenced by more numerical-based ideas of fate than ours–such as the Indic numbering of yugas, or great ages, or Biblical reckonings of how long it will be until the second coming. I do not think “measure” implies a predictable time; who knows how long a tree will stand, and a candle cannot burn down until lit (and allowed to burn, as it was not in Nornagests Þáttr). It implies that there is fate, and that once things begin, they will eventually take their course.
The jötunn who slips his bonds has to be Loki, unless there is an earlier mythos of Surtr being restrained within his own world. The Tree shivering makes us think of Loki shackled deep under the earth, causing earthquakes as he writhes in agony from the snake venom dripping onto his face when Sigyn turns away to empty the basin in which she has been catching it. Dronke talks of him as “the god-turned-giant.” But this sounds awfully like the Devil being released from his prison deep beneath the earth after the allotted thousand years, in Wulfstan and other millennialist Christian writers. Either those last two half lines where an error has occurred in the primary manuscript have been changed to be more Christian, or this is transitional heathenry, identifying Loki with the Devil. Loki was not mentioned in the poet’s account of Baldr’s death. He will be mentioned as he guides the sons of Muspell to the fray in Stanza 48; and he was depicted in his bonds in Stanza 34, which looks interpolated. I do not know whether the original poet of Völuspá is responsible for this Christian-influenced view of Loki, but it does seem clear that it is Christian-influenced. Possibly the influence of a god gone bad was the only way a devout heathen could explain the misfortunes of heathenry in the tenth century.
The name of Heindall’s horn, Gjallarhorn, refers to its loud sound (as does that of the river Gjöll). It’s a possessive form, like Fenrisulfr for the wolf Fenrir, so presumably the horn could also be called simply Gjöll–Noisy. Dronke takes it that he lifts the end of the horn to the heavens to blow the alarm all the more loudly. But of course it could also be because the gods are thought of as being up there. Whether this is also influenced by Christianity is worth pondering.
What has provoked Heimdallr to sound the horn? The cock crowed and Garmr barked, but then the poet turned to human depravity, implying that that was the signal. But possibly he intercut the depravity as simultaneous and it is the signals from Hel’s Realm and Jötunheim that Heimdallr will respond to.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:46 am by marion
Brœðr muno beriaz
ok at bönom verða[z],
muno systrungar
sifiom spilla.
Hart er í heimi,
hórdómr mikill
–skeggöld, skálmöld
–skildir ro klofnir–
vindöld, vargöld–
áðr veröld steypiz.
Mun engi maðr
öðrom þyrma.
Dronke’s translation:
Brothers will fight
and kill each other,
sisters’ children
will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world,
whoredom rife
–an axe age, a sword age
–shields are riven–
a wind age, a wolf age–
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another.
A horrifying vision of the dissolution of the human world. Note that the Old Norse veröld literally means “age of mankind”–i.e.: it literally refers to a time, not a place, indicating that this world is temporary. It–this Midgard–exists because of the gods. As their end comes, things fall apart. This verse–one of those stretched for extra emotional intensity–depicts that falling apart. In fact this verse could be seen as the emotional peak of the poem. The repetition of “öld” constitutes a unique internal refrain; with the next verse, this one is bracketed by the repetition of Verse 43 to form Verse 46; and in Verse 47 the armies will move into position for the battle itself.
Many readers have taken the first and second pairs of half-lines as equivalent in meaning, both signifying that kin will kill kin. But as Dronke is careful to show and endeavors to make clear in her translation, the second refers to incest: spilla was often used of dishonoring a woman sexually, and sifjaspjall occurs as a noun for incest. Hórdómr does in fact mean what it sounds like–the hor- stem is Common Germanic, related to Latin carus, “beloved.” However, I have seen the opposite done, taking each reference to an “age” in this verse as a distinct period of time: first an axe age, then a sword age, then a wind age, then an age of outlaws or wolves. This seems equally wrong to me. The terms are heaped up. There is no “then” or “and.” I think as such we are to take it as one age of every kind of horror and destruction. Its length will be neither measurable nor meaningful, since one moment can be an eternity when one is being tortured, and dead men do not have calendars in any case. Dronke’s “go headlong” is well put–steypiz, “plunge, tumble.” The poet may be consciously trying to reify that ancient and therefore somewhat tired metaphor of “world–age of mankind” and may have to overcome the same indifference to a common word that we tend to have toward “collapse.” The world cannot stand when it is riven from within. The verse is composed to make us think about what this will be like.
Dronke notes that this harrowing vision is interrupted by Viking exuberance: “Shields are cloven!” Yet she takes it as Xian. True, there is a body of Xian sibylline texts, notably the Prophetia Sibyllæ Magæ, on which she gives a lot of detail, that the poet almost certainly had some familiarity with and was influenced by. True, there is kin-killing in the sagas, and the whole matter of the Völsungs. But does it follow that mention of moral violations in the end time, and lamentation over kin-killing, constitute Xian thinking? Those on Náströnd are precisely the oath-breakers, the murderers (those who killed immorally), and the sexual violators; that coupling of destruction of bonds by killing and by fornication has there a close heathen parallel. The world as a temporary construct, strictly speaking a time rather than a thing, an embodiment of human society, is more heathen than Xian. And above all, the idea that the gods embody the laws and without them the world ceases to exist is heathen. The last pair of lines probably fit both world-views. Helping neighbors and friends is a heathen virtue (although often forgotten when one focuses on the fun of shield-cleaving) and without it, few would have survived the harsh winters of the North. And charity and mercy are of course mandatory in Xianity. If the poem was recast by a Xian, one could see those lines being added–medieval Xians were taught that kindness was introduced into society by Xianity. But it could as easily be the poet’s own sadness at the descent into self-defeating anarchy of a society that abandons all decency.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:45 am by marion
Geyr [nú] Garmr miök
fyr Gnipahelli–
festr mun slitna,
en freki renna.
Fiöld veit hón frœða–
fram sé ek lengra,
um ragna rök
römm, sigtíva.
Dronke’s translation:
Now Garmr bays loud
before Looming Cave–
the fetter will break
and the ravener run free,
Much she knows of old knowledge,
ahead I see further,
over the fate of the powers,
virulent fate of victory’s gods.
The last three half-lines here form another refrain: they repeat at the end of Stanza 46 and Stanza 55. (In fact, Stanza 55 will be a repetition of this stanza in its entirety.) There is a sharp contrast here between this “I”–what Dronke calls the “living völva”–and the “she” (Dronke’s “prophetic völva”) of the preceding half-line, the one who knows much of ancient times. Dronke sees this as drawing attention to a reversal of roles. The “prophetic völva” foresaw Baldr’s death–but to the “I” völva, that has already happened, so now she, the living one, relegating her ancient source to the past, looks ahead herself–”avidly,” in Dronke’s words. In Stanza 56 this reversal of roles will fold in on itself as another “she” sees the new world rise to replace the old–thus the alternation of narrators can be seen as related to the recursiveness of the creation, destruction, and replacement of worlds. But that lies far ahead in the poem. What is immediately present to us as to the original hearers is the emulation of the spæ situation. So I think the interchange of “I” and “she” and the dramatic contrast here between the “she” of ancient knowledge and the “I” who sees far, far ahead is more directly related to the seeress getting a clear vision–standing on her predecessor’s/ancestress’/spirit guide’s shoulders, so to speak. The “she” provided visions of other worlds; the speaker, the “I,” gradually realized that doom was coming–now a long vista of the future has opened up to her. Or rather, this is the dramatic evocation of the spæ situation that the poet has created.
And there is the content of those three half-lines. What she foresees is . . . the doom of the gods. We all knew this was what was coming, but this is the first time it is made explicit (unless one sees Stanza 40 as having already foreseen the deaths of the gods, which I think is a misreading). The choice of the word sigtíva, victory gods, to parallel ragna is of course wrenching irony–it will be a crushing defeat. Römm, the other word in the half-line, is potently negative: Dronke lists the following meanings for it: “strong; supernaturally potent, intractable; bitter (to the taste).” It will be a bitter rök; the gods will not pass judgment this time, they will fall victim to it. Whether a moral judgment for reneging on oaths or the inevitability of wyrd (a deeming or simply a doom) is immaterial here. I note, also, that whereas this poet usually calls them by the collective words regin and goð, and has three times called them Æsir (including in the previous stanza), here he calls them tívar. This is the plural of Týr’s name and is cognate with the Latin god-word deus. (It is also cognate with Zeus’ name, which was originally Dyaus.) Like æsir it is a normal plural, of a masculine word, not an unchanging neuter plural, so it does not have the same collective force. It was also emphatically not used for either the Xian god or the heathen gods after the conversion, in any Germanic language: the “god” words (and for “false god,” afguð in Norse, abgot in Old High German) were used. So there were heathen connotations to this word that the Xian writers wished to avoid–possibly simply because of Týr/Tiw/Ziû. Other than that, we do not know the connotations of the word as against other words the poet could have used. Perhaps sig- was a normal prefix with that word and not with other words. But it is telling that it is not one of the collective words. The gods go to their doom individualized, shorn of their collective might. They are not absolutes when they die–more like greater people. Whatever the poet’s attitude toward the gods may have been–and it was undeniably complex–adding this term, and its heavy irony, to the ragna rök that may have become faded in impact for the hearers as it tends to be for us reifies it. The regin themselves will be defeated and die; the force behind all laws will become individuals who are doomed; the victory-givers will lose the final battle. Ineluctably and bitterly.
In Stanza 31, there was an interruption of the alternation of tenses and for the first and only time in the poem, the “I” völva saw in the past tense. What she saw was Baldr set up as a bloodstained sacrifice, and the word used was tívor. This is obviously related to tívar. I wonder how immediate the echo between the terms would have been to the audience and whether the effect is deliberate? It could also be argued that this echo and the aberrant tense in that stanza are evidence of interpolation, probably by someone with the parallels with Christ firmly in mind. I don’t think the poem can be torn apart like that; but the possibility deserves mentioning since many scholars have seen it, and the entire Baldr story as encoded in it, as Xianized heathenry. I do suspect the original hearers heard the echo, and that the connotations of sigtívar were “those to whom sacrifice is made for victory.” So we should note that Óðinn/Wóden/Wodan was called Heriaföðr, “Father of Armies,” in the previous stanza. I believe a single poet is laying on the irony–rather than two or more poets laying on layers of meaning as they forge and recast the poem.
Garmr is the hound of Hel; Dronke relates his name to an Anglo-Saxon verb gyrman, “howl,” seeing it as characterizing his bark, or bay–he “bells.” In the Prose Edda, he kills Týr; that is not stated here. Some, notably in the Rydberg tradition, have theorized that Garmr is Fenris’ son; while Fenris kills Óðinn/Wóden/Wodan, who gave the order for him to be bound, his son kills the god who fed him and betrayed him. But the poem does not mention that. One presumes that the “ravener” is Fenris and not Garmr himself; freki is a traditional epithet for a wolf and indeed the name of one of Óðinn/Wóden/Wodan’s two attendant wolves. The Prose Edda calls Garmr “the worst of monsters”; the poem does not characterize him. All he does in the poem is bell. Clearly the emphasis is on the breaking of fetters. Especially given the repetition of the stanza (which strangely, Dronke does not seem to remark upon.) Gnipahellir occurs nowhere else. A hellir, as Dronke says, is a cavernous opening. It is evident from Norse references to the dead that the earliest belief was that they went underground–into a mound, or a subterranean world. Valhalla–Valhöllr–was probably originally Valhallr, the mountain of the slain, and became a “hall” as the concept of the gods ruling in “halls” developed. Think of the Icelanders who believed they would enter Helgafell, Thor’s holy mountain, after they died. And of Barbarossa sleeping under the Kyffhäuser mountain in Germany. And of the Venusberg, which in one report (the trial of Diel Breull for witchcraft) is the abode of Holda, not Venus. Hel’s realm is still conceived of as subterranean–her name, frequently used in texts for her realm or simply for death, is related to hellir and to hallr–and it is at the mouth of this great cavern of the dead that Garmr is chained. Dronke relates the gnipa part of the word to gnapa, “to jut out, loom over”–the cavern is under a crag. It is after all under all the mountains in the world. (It may be relevant that the Lapp realm of the dead is also under the mountains, but who influenced who or whether this is common perception from journeying is hard to establish.) I think the poet’s emphasis is on the opening of the land of the dead. Perhaps there is Xian influence here; other than those gathered in by Óðinn/Wóden/Wodan as einherjar (and, one presumes, those Freyja/Fréo has likewise chosen), the dead have no known role in Ragnarök, whereas their raising is an important part of Xian eschatology. But maybe the whole point is the horror of being a helpless shade as the underworld is riven along with all the other worlds.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:45 am by marion
Gól um ásom
Gullinkambi–
sá vekr hölða
at Heriaföðrs–
en annarr gelr
fyr iörð neðan,
sótrauðr hani,
at sölom Heliar.
Dronke’s translation:
Over the Æsir crew
Comb of Gold
–he wakes the warriors
at War Sire’s dwelling–
while another crows
beneath the earth,
a rust-red cock
at the halls of Hel.
This is the point where I always wish I had already stopped reading.
The warriors of “Armies-Father” as it literally is here–we are more familiar with the name in he singular, Herföðr or simply Herjan–are of course Óðin’s warriors, the einherjar in Valhalla.
Dronke has little to say here. But what is the role of the second rooster in this stanza? Is it rousing the dead–the hosts of Hel–to fight against the gods? The echo between “rust-red” in this stanza and “gleaming red” in the preceding stanza would suggest so. But in the next stanza, Garmr barks and breaks loose. Can it be that the second cock was crowing to wake him? Or was his waking an unintentional by-product of the reveille? I think if the second half of the stanza had been meant to refer to enemies being roused, there would have a been a clearer parallel to “the warriors at Armies-Father’s dwelling” than “the halls of Hel.” No people are mentioned. I don’t think the poet was envisaging a second army pouring out from Hel’s realm to engage the host of Valhalla, or I think he would have said that. But I do suspect someone took it that way and that was the genesis of Stanza 41 with its bright red rooster crowing above the giantess’ exultant herdsman. Some have taken Stanza 52 as evidence that the dead fight on the wrong side, along with Hel’s father, Loki; but the last stanza can be seen as evidence that they are simply rendered homeless and helpless when the worlds are sundered.
The present tense here is clearly dramatic present in literary terms, report of a vision as one sees it in spæ terms.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:44 am by marion
Sat þar á haugi
ok sló hörpo
gýgiar hirðir,
glaðr Eggþér.
Gól um hánom
í Galgviði
fagrrauðr hani,
sá er Fialarr heitir.
Dronke’s translation:
There sat on the grave-mound
and struck his harp
the ogress’s herdsman,
happy Eggþér.
Above him crew
in Gallows Wood
the gleaming red cock
that is named Fialarr.
Note for Americans: Dronke means a rooster crowed.
This could almost be pastoral–the happy shepherd playing his harp–but it’s clear from the mention of the barrow in the first line (Dronke has introduced the article “the,” but it is definitely a barrow and not a natural hillock) that it is foreboding.
Dronke translates most names. But Eggþér and Fialarr didn’t strike her as significant enough. Fialarr is used in a couple of Eddic kennings as a generic for “giant,” the way Týr and Ull’s names can be used as generics for “god,” and in stanza 16 it appeared as a dwarf name. So little can be said about it other than that it was evidently ancient and well known–which is the basis on which those two god names predominate in kennings. Eggþér is the name of a Finnish or Lappish adversary of Swedes in Saxo Grammaticus’ history, and Väinamöinen’s kantele might have recalled the harp the giant plays here; but it’s a Germanic name, related to Béowulf’s father’s name, Ecgþeow. We seem to be missing traditional knowledge here that the poet expected us to have.
The manuscripts disagree on whether it is a Gallows Wood or a Gosling Wood (the latter would imply Óðin’s goslings, ravens); the same alternation exists in another Norse MS so Dronke has gone with the less ambiguous reading. The ancient heathens tended to use trees as gallows, particularly in the mass sacrifices of the wars against the Romans, so a dark copse as a “gallows wood” would not be fanciful then.
One presumes that similarly, harp music could imply a threat as well as a relaxation of tension. “Harp” seems to have been used for any kind of lyre, i.e.: for the normal instrument a skáld would have used to accompany his poems. So the connotation is not that the instrument is alien–although Cleasby-Vígfusson points out that they were used in the early Icelandic churches. Harpa was also the name of the first summer month (mid-April to mid-May) in the ancient calendar, and this may color the picture. But I think the primary connotations are that the herdsman is galdring. We sometimes forget that skáld derives from the same word as English “scold” and that galdr implies chanting or singing. And he is, after all, seated on a barrow. This picture would, then, have very different emotional resonance from the “sweet song of the harp” in Héorot that drives Grendel the damned outsider mad with envy. The contrast has something to tell us about Xianized England versus late heathen Iceland–and about outside versus inside.
The tense has changed to past. Another cock will crow–and the tense will thereafter return to the prophetic present–in the next stanza. This stanza comes after the refrain, yet unless the audience knew unspecified things of Eggþér and Fialarr, all this stanza adds is more smearing of the giantess (presumably the same person as the “old one” two stanzas ago–if not, a giantess would be correct, but this would still be anti-giant). So I am suspicious of this stanza. Dronke thinks the herdsman is rousing the giants to war. I suspect someone else added the stanza with that intent, to underline the idea of a battle between forces of good and evil.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:44 am by marion
Fylliz fiörvi
feigra manna,
rýðr ragna siöt
rauðom dreyra.
Svört verrða sólskin
of sumor eptir,
veðr öll válynd.
Vitoð er enn, eða hvat?
Dronke’s translation:
It sates itself on the life-blood
of fated men,
paints red the powers’ homes
with crimson gore.
Black become the sun’s beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.
Do you still seek to know? And what?
The repetition of the refrain signals the end of the section. It has slid down an emotional slope from the vision of the underworld/otherworld to the realization that the end is coming, and in this stanza we have death foretold in gory terms. Those in the gods’ halls are killed once more and finally, their blood smeared on the walls in a ghastly parody of the daubing of the sacrificial hlaut on the walls of the hof at a blót. And the sun goes black–the world the gods set up for us to live in has become a deadly, dying world, “treacherous” indeed.
In Anglo-Saxon poetry, especially with Béowulf looming over it as it does, the man doomed to die, whom wyrd has condemned, the man who is fæg, is a very common topos. The mood of “Well, this is the end–all things must die, so I will face it like a man” sometimes seems virtually pervasive. Not so in Norse, so this vision of men who are feigr and the gods unable to protect them, and the whole world declining under a dead sun . . . is more unusual than we might realize. The far more normal Viking Age literary attitude is, “It is a good day to die and get into Valhalla.” And the sagas, of course, are typically laconic and understate or leave out the emotions. I suspect the elegiac attitude, the preoccupation with doom, is a product of the encounter with Xianity–probably of the experience of the conversion rather than of Xian teaching as such, which would not become so gloomy until the Black Death. However, it may come from millennial preaching–perhaps in this isolated Icelandic occurrence, it may even go back to one lone crazed Hellfire preacher.
In fact many readers, including Dronke, have taken the blood-smearing as applying equally to the very gods–slain in their beds like and along with humans, by the wolf who devours the moon and then the sun. The gods will die. But the interpretation of this stanza as including their deaths conflicts with the later more orderly assignment of death at the hands of different monsters to different gods in the account of the last battle. Not to mention making the poem even more shocking than I think it is.
However, there is a disjunction between the acceptance of the völva’s mind ranging over worlds–which makes them dimensions, in modern terminology–and the implication in this passage that Asgard is located up in “heaven” with the sun and the moon, which is a Xian conception that excludes what the völva is doing in the poem. Dronke has also pointed to some parallels between the poem and Greek texts, the Sibylline Oracles. The signs of the end in the latter include, in her words:
drops of blood fall on the earth, stones speak, a battle is seen in the clouds; sun will sink into ocean and rise no more; in a great famine men will eat their parents; after the evil wars the sea will be so crammed with human flesh that it will be easy to count the few men and women left alive; in the last age there will be the premature senility of man: children will grow grey-haired in their sleep, men will be imbecile of wit and women barren . . . . Weeping and dirge will be the sounds of their last days . . . , and indeed the Sibyl may see her whole Oracle as a lament . . . . It is the seasons in conflict, a war of constellations and signs of the zodiac, which rages until Ouranos strikes down the fighters. Falling, they set all the earth ablaze. The sky is left starless. (102-03)
Starting with this stanza, we can see parallels between about half of this and Völuspá. So literary influence is certainly possible (and indeed I think was assumed by the scholars who first translated völva as “sibyl.” This poet is a complex thinker and writer, and this poem is unusual in tone, as well as in other ways, within our lore. So I lean toward a general influence of events as well as of teachings and things read and heard–rather than a straightforward influence by one point of view such as millennialism or the Xian missionary view that the gods would be defeated and killed by their god through them. Also, Dronke does point to one Norse parallel–Eyrbyggja Saga ch. 140 has bloody rain and darkening of the sky as death-portents. So I believe it was the age that caused this mood of dwelling on such things–which have of course always been foretold in the prophecies that eventually wolves will swallow up sun and moon and the gods themselves die.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:43 am by marion
Austr sat in aldna
í Iárnviði,
ok fœddi þar
Fenris kindir.
Verðr af þeim öllom
einna nøkkorr
tungls tiúgari
í trollz hami.
Dronke’s translation:
In the east she sat, the old one,
In Iron Wood,
and bred there
the broods of Fenrir.
There will come from them all
one of that number
to be a moon-snatcher
in troll’s skin.
Dronke points out that this deceptively calm-opening stanza ends in the horror of the insight that the world will be destroyed; and that the details are all disturbingly unnatural: the old woman bearing young, the new life coming about in a sterile place (a metal forest), the interbreeding of anthropomorphic giant and wolf in the offspring’s kinship to Fenrir. She sees it as a crescendo to the point where nature itself is crippled.
Dronke assumes that the “old one” is a giantess. She is probably right–”old” and “Fenrir” both suggest giant involvement–but she gets it from the location, since Háleygjatál calls Skaði a native of the Iron Wood. The giantesses in stanza 2 were “wood ogresses,” íviðjur. And I recall Thor’s giantess lover is called Járnsaxa, Iron Seax. But I am not persuaded the poet and his original audience would think “Iron Wood–ah, a giantess.” Rather, I think the Iron Wood is largely metaphorical, of rage, of war, of implacability, and that the idea she is a giant comes from what she is doing with whom, where being merely part of it.
There is an anti-female bias or fear of females here that is very clear in late heathenry, in Norse texts at least–it has already reared its head in the poem in the appearance of the giant brides to play the gods at chess, and obviously in the Gullveig-Heið episode, and examples from elsewhere include all the hectoring females in the sagas who drive disastrous revenge-taking (the extreme being the Hjaðningavíg, the feud without end) and Þökk, who refuses to weep for Baldr. But this cannot have been the original heathen attitude. Compare the attitude in the texts toward Freyja when she sleeps with four dwarves to obtain the Brísingamen. She loses her husband by so doing. But nobody except the convert Hjalti Skeggjason upbraids her for it. Rather, we watch her weeping for Óðr as she traipses through the worlds in search of him. Her action is treated much as Óðin’s dalliance with and desertion of Gunnlöð is. Regrettable breach of morality–but necessary. And compare the account of how Fenrir himself came to be. No suggestion is made that the mother of Hel, Jörmungandr, and Fenrir should be punished for seducing Loki. Yet two of these will kill gods at Ragnarök–just as in this stanza the völva glimpses that one of the wolfish brood is Mánagarmr (as Snorri calls him in the Prose Edda), who will devour the moon as Ragnarök arrives. And the völva–and the other völva or völur to whom she alludes–is of course a woman. There is an awkward tension here between the reverence for goddesses and women of insight–women who, in some cases, can tell Óðinn what he did not know!–and a blaming of women for the downfall of men and mankind that smells a little influenced by Eve and Pandora. Similarly, although this stanza lacks an explicit reference to giants, the poem does seem to demonize them (and Snorri has extended the process, referring to Ymir as evil). Yet the gods–the Sons of Bor at any rate–are descended from the giants. It is that kinship that enables the “old one” in this stanza to produce a brood of world destroyers.
In the eeriness of this section, we have an idea what a genuine vision must be like. In the horror of this stanza, we see the cosmos sliding inexorably into unnaturalness and finally destruction. In the association of this with human sin, and the indications of the imposition of a good-evil oppositional view, particularly in the laying of blame on females, we see the influence of Xian thinking on the poet and his contemporaries.
There is some confusion over the stories of sun and moon and what the wolves are doing. Dronke thinks the poet is combining the idea that a giant–”troll,” in the last line here–seeks to steal sun and moon (for example Þrymr in Þrymskviða) with the idea the sun will finally be swallowed by a wolf. Snorri has further neatened things up. But as she points out, his producing a name suggests he knew a folk tradition. And that may well have been the shared belief tradition that the poet was also alluding to. His emphasis is on the realization that from the goings-on in Iron Wood will come the destruction of the heavenly bodies. (Tungl could be any orb of the heavens, but as Dronke says, the references to the sun that follow, plus Snorri’s version of the story, indicate this is the moon. However, I think the poet was being deliberately general.)
Giants and wolves are closely associated, as Dronke observes as she teases out the references to sun- and moon-destruction. Fenrir himself may be the source of this association, but since one of the words for “wolf” (vargr) is also the word for an outcast (we had it in the previous stanza, with uncertain meaning but definitely nasty connotations), and in view of Óðin’s wolves and the nigh-obsession with wolves and ravens tearing corpses in Anglo-Saxon poetry, it seems more likely there is an ancient cultural stratum here. Giants may be associated with wolves because of the predatory associations of wolves, rather than the other way around. Or wolf vs. dog may be a very ancient opposition–in which case Garmr, mentioned a few stanzas after this, would be a puzzle, or an example of Snorri changing or adding details. Wolf and bear are the two forms warriors possessed by extreme battle-frenzy may take (berserkr, ulfheðinn). Wolves occur relatively frequently as fetches (fylgjur). So perhaps the wolf itself is an ancient creature of power with complex associations. Just as giants are more complex than words such as “ogress” suggest. In effect, therefore, I am not sure the original audience would have seen the old one here producing “kin of Fenrir” as “miscegenation” as Dronke suggests. Rather–as hostile to order and to the gods. But Dronke’s view of nature here, and of what giants do, seems a bit tinged by the post-Romantic view of Nature. After all, there are nine worlds, all natural, and the one we live on is only one of them.
Along the same lines, í trollz hami actually means “faring forth in the guise of a troll” or in the language of other modern religions, “journeying psychically having taken the form of a troll.” The hamr, A-S hama, is the part of one’s soul complex that journeys. The vast majority of the troll belief–as opposed to the lore of giants–is post-heathen. So perhaps we see its beginnings here, and the poet meant that a troll is a malign form a giant, or wolf, can take on when traveling extracorporeally, i.e.: working magic? One of the themes of this stanza may be that the world is undone by sorcery. As we saw with Gullveig, the poet dreads sorcery.
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:42 am by marion
Sá hón þar vaða
þunga strauma
menn meinsvara
ok morðvarga
ok þannz annars glepr
eyrarúno.
Þar saug Níðhöggr
nái framgengna,
sleit vargr vera.
Vitoð ér enn, eða hvat?
Dronke’s translation:
She saw there wading
onerous streams
men perjured
and wolfish murderers
and the one who seduces
another’s close-trusted wife.
There Malice Striker sucked
corpses of the dead,
the wolf tore men.
Do you still seek to know? And what?
It seems pretty clear that this stanza still concerns Náströnd, which is after all a shore, not just a hall. But usually “there” in the first line is interpreted to mean that these are the people who are punished in the hall. (Dronke, however, takes them to be wading in the river, rather than the poison from the snakes.) Dronke rightly emphasizes that this stanza–and also 44, which is likewise concerned solely with punishment of humans–is open to suspicion of Xian influence, possibly even interpolation. But the emphasis on oathbreaking fits heathen ethics, and heathen values make a distinction between murder and justifiable killing that is not apparent in Xian ethics except to those who know the Hebrew original of the commandment usually translated “Thou shalt not kill.” The fact that the word vargr–a word for the wolf as destroyer that came to be used primarily in its metaphorical sense of an outlaw cast out from society as the equivalent of such a predator–is used in a compound characterizing the kind of killers as well as in the last line for the actual predatory beast–suggests heathen thought. And as Dronke says, scholars have suggested that the second pair of half-lines, menn meinsvara ok morðvarga, looks like a legal formula, an ancient alliterating pair reflecting tradition. In fact there is a very close parallel in Anglo-Saxon: Wulfstan’s hér syndon mánsworan and morþorwyrhtan, “Here are perjurers and plotters of murder.” Unless the Anglo-Saxon tradition had had time since the conversion to generate new formulæ of this type that bowled over Norsemen such as the poet (or a reviser) and changed their thinking–and we must recognize that Anglo-Saxon writings were the pre-eminent source of Xian influence in all other Germanic languages at the time, including Norse–this suggests antiquity.
But who is the wolf in the last line? Níðhögg is a dragon–the Prose Edda tells us he lives among the roots of the Tree and gnaws them. We may have here a snippet more of heathen thoughts on torment–a wolf as well as a dragon–or the wolf may be a telltale sign of Anglo-Saxon, probably Xian, influence: Anglo-Saxon poetry is obsessed with the “beasts of battle,” wolf, ravan, and eagle, ever ready to prey on human bodies. Even so, that would not signify a Xian stanza; we know this poet had been exposed to Xian thinking and to Anglo-Saxon writings. And I suppose it is possible he is using vargr in its metaphorical sense here and it is a reference to the dragon; but this poet is precise with his language even in the context of a poetic tradition that prizes verbal adroitness, so I think it unlikely he would be so loose with his terminology.
Dronke thinks the two half-lines about seducers are an interpolation. She compares Hávamál, which does indeed have a much more specific focus on human ethics, and points out that it contains the only other occurrence of eyrarúna, literally “a woman who whispers secrets in your ear.” But she has introduced the specification of “wife” into her translation. The original refers to the woman as simply eyrarúna–confidante. In fact the word could mean “a woman into whose ears you have poured your secrets.” (As an aside here, since Hávamál has been mentioned, Óðinn there reserves his greatest secret for his sister.) So Dronke has imported a Xian specification–that there has been a wedding–that may not have applied in the mind of the poet or his hearers. The phrase applies to seducers of other men’s women, period. And we know that Icelanders became uniquely puritanical about seduction within a couple of centuries of the conversion–banning the local equivalent of the Courtly Love lyric (mansöngr) as dangerous to the morals of their women. So the preoccupation with seduction that strikes Dronke as out of place here may reflect local thinking rather than Xian thinking. At the worst, I imagine the two half-lines may have been changed to strengthen them; I am inclined to take this stanza as a whole. As a whole, I am not sure of its authenticity. (I wonder about one detail Dronke does not mention, the use of framgengna, “the departed,” rather than some less euphemistic term for the dead.) But someone, whether the poet or a redactor, thought it necessary to define who inhabited the hall on Náströnd, rather than the tapestried and cushioned halls of Hel. That in itself is heathen; in Xian terms there can be no pleasant underworld, and for the völva to glimpse heaven would be rare indeed and clearly signaled topographically. And the lengthy dwelling on the torments of evil men builds the tension and sense of doom before the poet goes into the run-up to Ragnarök; that is a plausible reason for the excursus on humanity, and Stanza 44 can be seen as a similar manipulation of the emotions. So I am inclined to accept this stanza; and it is generally used as a basis of heathen ethics.
Accordingly, it is worth pointing out that menn in Old Norse refers to all human beings, not merely males; Dronke’s “men” is oldfashioned in its inclusiveness. (The gender of eyrarúna does, however, show the poet not imagining seductresses.)
Dronke notes that she has followed the reading Níðhöggr, “Malice Striker” in her translation, rather than the variant Niðhöggr, “Striker in the Dark.”
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Posted in Marion does Völuspá at 8:42 am by marion
Sal sá hón standa
sólo fiarri,
Náströndo á,
norðr horfa dyrr.
Fello eitrdropar
inn um lióra.
Sá er undinn salr
orma hryggiom.
Dronke’s translation:
A hall she saw standing
remote from the sun
on Dead Body Shore.
Its door looks north.
There fell drops of venom
in through the roof vent.
That hall is woven
of serpents’ spines.
The mix of tenses here–she saw it, but it is–clearly expresses, to my mind, the fact that regardless of who witnesses this Otherwhere, and when, it is eternal, shared experience of anyone able to get down there. As before, Dronke’s practice of translating placenames helps us appreciate the force Náströnd would have for a native speaker–to most modern heathens it has become just a name, and the name of the hall, at that. Presumably we should be thinking of a shoreline littered with washed-up corpses.
The northward-facing door presumably betokens cold winds blowing in, and no heat from what meager sun there is. After the curious Ókolnir, “Never Cold,” of the previous stanza, we return to cold as a theme of the bad parts of the Norse underworld; and we could use this detail of the door direction to bolster the argument that north was not a sacred direction to the ancient heathens.
Why is the poet dwelling so much on afterlife torment–in this and the following stanza? I suspect influence from the Xian vision literature, or just from “fire and brimstone” sermons. But there is also an artistic appropriateness in setting up the harrowing of the lands of the dead that will be incidental to Ragnarök. And foreshadowing the suffering in the lands of the living that will lead up to Ragnarök. It has been plausibly argued that these things in themselves owe something to Xian preoccupations. Certainly I think the poet’s emphasis on such things, and on Ragnarök itself, is a product of his era and the Xian influences on it–although how mixed that makes his faith, or how much of the influence was from events as opposed to mere rhetoric, cannot be determined. Dronke is interested in the progression of ideas from the general layout of the underworld to the focus on the punishment of evil humans; since I see this section of the poem as having originally arisen from the mention of Hermöðr’s ride, I am more interested in the failure to mention the welcoming parts of Hel’s realm, the hall prepared for the festive banquet welcoming Baldr and Nanna. In other words the doom of Ragnarök hanging over all the worlds is, I think, the reason for the way the account slides into torment . . . unless as Dronke suggests there is heavy influence from Xian visions. She thinks the next stanza is an interpolation.
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