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Elder EddaANONYMOUS

800

The Elder Edda is not a single continuous narrative,but a collection of poems, most of which are pre-served in the Konungsbók, or Codex Regius (King’sBook), copied in Iceland about A.D. 1270. Thepoems are the work of many poets. Their languagesuggests that they were composed between 800 and1100 A.D. and first written down between 1150 and1250 A.D. The poems are a rich source of informa-tion for culture and belief among the Vikings. Theyare not, however, purely Scandinavian. ChristianIrish influence is likely, while the Sigurd storydraws on actual events among the tribes that in-vaded the Roman Empire between 350–600 A.D.

The Elder Edda first came to scholarly atten-tion in the seventeenth century as antiquarian inter-est in the non-classical past was growing in Europe.It was published in its entirety just as intenseromantic and nationalistic interest in the perceivedtribal ancestors of the European nation states emergedtowards the end of the eighteenth century. Thisinterest, combined with the new science of philol-ogy, ensured popular and scholarly interest in textslike the Elder Edda. Some of the lays were availablein bowdlerized versions even for children by thelater nineteenth century. In the hands of RichardWagner, the Elder Edda became the foundation ofone of the century’s masterpieces. While northernlegends and the scholarship based on it were mis-used by the Nazis to develop and further their ideasof race, they are seriously misrepresented by suchideas. In the 1960s, the poet W. H. Auden in

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collaboration with an Old Norse scholar, Paul B.Taylor, produced a translation of sixteen of the poems.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

The Elder Edda is not a continuous narrative, but acollection of thirty-nine poems of varying lengthsand genres, including short narratives or lays, tradi-tional wisdom including what amounts to a manualof good behavior, and several dialogues in whichthe question and answers provide a glossary ofpoetic terms and myth. They form a history of theworld from creation to apocalypse, and like theShakespearean canon, high tragedy exists side byside with bumptious comedy. Thirty-four are pre-served in the Konungsbók, or Codex Regius (King’sbook), copied in Iceland about A.D. 1270, now inthe Royal Library in Copenhagen. The language ofthe poems as preserved in that manuscript suggeststhat they were composed between 800 and 1100A.D. but were first written down between 1150 and1250 A.D. The poems are the work of many poetsand some draw on historical traditions reachingback to the fourth century. Nevertheless, howevernorthern and pagan they may appear to be, theycontain much that suggests an interaction with bothGreco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture.

It is not known where in Iceland the CodexRegius was copied. The elegance of the scribe’swriting and its similarity to those of at least twoother Icelandic scribes of the period suggest itscopyist was connected with a fairly large scriptoriumwith high standards. Despite early attempts to con-nect the Elder Edda as a collection with a legendaryIcelandic scholar, Saemundur Sigfússon the Learned,(1056–1133), none of the poems can be connectedwith a named individual and were probably col-lected together only in the thirteenth century, per-haps only a generation before the production of theCodex Regius.

Nothing is known of the manuscript until theyear 1643 when it came into the possession ofBishop Brynjólfr Sveinsson. It was already dam-aged then, and no copy was made of it before themissing leaves were lost. In 1662 the bishop gavethe manuscript to the king of Denmark. In 1665 thetwo mythological poems Völuspa and Hávemálwere published by the Danish scholar Peder Hansen

Resen as part of an edition of Snorri Stulason’sProse Edda. The first full edition was prepared bythe Arnamagnaean Commission in Copenhagen be-tween 1787 and 1828.

PLOT SUMMARY

The Sibyl’s ProphecyAt Odin’s request, a prophetess predicts the

future from creation to fall and renewal. She beginswith a time when nothing existed; heavens and earthcome into existence, but in chaos. The gods, whocreate the arts and crafts, social life, and finally,mankind, impose order. She prophesies the warbetween the Aesir and the Vanir and their concilia-tion, the death of Balder through Loki’s trickery,Loki’s punishment, the dwarves’s golden home, therealm of the dead, and the punishment of the wicked.She foresees the final battle between gods andgiants that will end in their mutual destruction. Sunand stars fail, the earth sinks beneath the sea, but inthe final stanzas, she describes a second green earthrising from the waters. Balder and Hod, his blindbrother who accidentally killed him, will comeagain to rule. Then a mighty one, sometimes identi-fied as Christ, will come down to bring the deserv-ing to a hall more beautiful than the sun.

The Sayings of the High OneThis is a composite poem in which only stanzas

111–64 are in the voice of Odin the ‘High One.’ Itbegins with practical advice on behavior and atti-tude: “It takes sharp wits to travel in the world /they’re not so hard on you at home—Better to bealive than to be lifeless / the living can hope for acow.” Even among such homely advice, however, isfame, so important to the epic attitude: “Cattle die,kinsmen die, / One day you die yourself; but thewords of praise will not die.” The poem endswith Odin’s advice addressed to a young mancalled Loddfafnir.

The Lay of VafthrudnirOdin has a contest with the giant Vafthrudnir to

determine who has the greater knowledge of thegods, creation, and the future. Odin wins because healone knows what he whispered in Balder’s ear ashe lay on his funeral pyre. The lay serves as a

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glossary of the metaphors and images used in earlyNorse poetry.

The Lay of GrimnirHunding had two sons: Agnar and Geirrod.

They were fishing from a rowboat and were sweptout to sea. When they made land, a farmer took themin until spring came. When they arrived back home,Geirrod jumped out of the boat and pushed it and hisbrother back out to sea. Geirrod became king. Later,Odin and Frigg, his wife, were looking down atearth. Odin teased Frigg that Geirrod, whom hefavored, was king while Agnar, whom Frigg fa-vored, lived in the wilds. Frigg answered that Geirrodwas stingy. Odin bet her he would find him gener-ous to strangers. Frigg sends a message to Geirrodto beware of a wizard coming to his court, describ-ing Odin in disguise. Odin arrives and when herefuses to give more than an assumed name, Grimnir,he is seated between two fires to make him speak.Geirrod’s son Agnar thinks it wrong to mistreat aguest and brings him a drink. For this act, Odinblesses the boy and tells him his real name. Whenthe king hears, he jumps up to take him away fromthe fires, but stumbles and falls on his own sword.

Skirnir’s JourneyThis lay tells of the god Frey who saw and

loved a giant’s beautiful daughter. He sent hisservant Skirnir to persuade her to accept him as herlover. Skirnir cajoles and threatens her until shefinally accepts Frey.

The Lay of HarbardThe first of the comical lays. Odin disguised

himself as a ferryman and engaged Thor in a duel ofwords. Thor loses badly.

The Lay of HymirThe gods are feeling like a party and ask the

giant Aegir to brew beer for it. Thor unfortunatelyannoys Aegir. Aegir tells Thor he must borrow thegiant Hymir’s brewing vat. Thor and Tyr, Hymnir’sson, set out for Hymnir’s home where Hymnir’syoung mistress welcomes them. She warns themHymnir does not like guests and makes them hidewhen he comes. She tells Hymnir that his son hascome with a friend. Three bulls are cooked for

dinner. Thor eats two of them. Hymnir tells hisguests that they will go out hunting for supper. Thorsuggests that he will take a boat out and fish ifHymir provides the bait. Thor rows out, baits hishook with an ox’s head, and catches the serpent thatencircles the earth, drags it up into the boat, butthankfully, throws it back. Hymnir then challengesThor to crack his cup. Thor flings it; columns crashand stone splinters, but the cup is unbroken. At themistress’s suggestion, he flings it at the giant’s headand it breaks. Thor grabs the kettle and kills thepursuing giants. Aegir brews the beer.

The Insolence of LokiLoki infuriates the assembled gods and god-

desses by bringing up past scandals. His storiesgrow more and more vile until he is finally fright-ened into leaving with the threat of Thor’s hammer.He curses the gods as he leaves.

The Lay of ThrymThor’s great hammer, Mjollnir, is stolen. Loki

discovers that the giant Thrym has it. Thrym tellsLoki that he will give it back only if he can marryFreyja. Not surprisingly, Thor has no luck in con-vincing Freyja that she should marry a giant. Acouncil of the gods and goddesses is convened andHeimdal suggests that they dress Thor as a bridewith Loki as her maid. Thor does not like it, but hemust have his hammer to keep the giants out ofAsgard. Thrym is beside himself with joy when theyarrive, but after a comical passage in which Loki hasto explain the bride’s incredible appetite and fright-ening eyes, Thor gets his hands on his hammer andkills his prospective in-laws.

The Lay of VolundVolund, the most famous smith of the north, is

taken prisoner by Kind Nidud who lames him.Volund makes himself wings, avenges himself bymurdering Nidud’s sons and raping his daughter,and flies away.

The Lay of AlvisThe dwarf Alvis tries to steal Thor’s daughter,

but is tricked into such a lengthy display of hisknowledge, which amounts to a catalogue of poeticsynonyms, that he is caught by dawn and dies fromexposure to sunlight.

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Balder, whose death is depicted here, was the son of Odin and Frigg and a favoriteof the gods. The blind god Hod, deceived by Loki, killed Balder by hurling mistletoe,the only thing that could hurt him.

The First and Second Lays of HelgiHunding’s Bane and The Lay of HelgiHjorvar’s Son

The Helgi lays are incomplete and confused.Taken with the notes attached to them, they recounta story of two lovers who are reborn again andagain. The first and second lays are the story ofHelgi, Sigmund’s son. Helgi is loved and protectedby the Valkyrie, Sigrun. Helgi must fight Sigrun’sfather, brothers, and suitor to save her from anunwanted marriage. He kills them all except for herbrother Dag, whom he spares. Dag swears peacewith Helgi, but sacrifices to Odin for vengeance.Odin lends him his spear, and Dag kills Helgi.Sigrun is inconsolable. A maid tells her Helgi’sspirit is in his burial mound. Sigrun goes to his graveto be with him one last night, dying of grief soonafter. Later, they are both reborn, as Helgi Hunding’sBane and Kara. In the ‘The Lay of Helgi Hjorvar’sSon’ another Helgi is loved by a Valkyrie, Svava,who marries him. His brother Hedin confesses thathe made a drunken vow to marry Svava. Helgireplies that his vow may be good for both of them;he is about to go into battle and does not expect tosurvive. Helgi, as he foresaw, is mortally wounded.

Dying, he asks Svava to marry Hedin. She refuses,but Hedin promises her he will avenge Helgi. Thelay breaks off in the manuscript with a note that “Itis said of Helgi and Svava that they were born again.”

The Prophecy of GripirIronically, the only straightforward version of

Sigurd and Brynhild’s story is in the form of aprophecy. Sigurd asks his uncle what he sees instore for him. Gripir tells him that he will be a greathero. Sigurd questions Gripir further. Gripir tellshim he will avenge his father, kill Fafnir the dragon,the evil Regin, and win Fafnir’s treasure. He willwake a sleeping Valkyrie and learn her wisdom.Gripir then breaks off. Sigurd asks him if he seessomething shameful. Gripir reassures him and fi-nally continues. Sigurd will fall in love with Brynhild.They will swear to be faithful, but Sigurd will betrayher, because of Queen Grimhild who wants Sigurdmarried to her daughter, Gudrun, and Brynhild toher son, Gunnar. Sigurd will forget Brynhild andpromise Gunnar and Hogni that he will win her forGunnar. Sigurd will live happily with Gundrun, butBrynhild will plot her revenge for his betrayal.Gunnar and Hogni will fall in with her plans and

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murder Sigurd. Gripir consoles his nephew that atleast he will be fortunate in his fame. Sigurd leavessaying, “You would have been glad to say goodthings of what is coming if you could.”

The Lay of ReginThis lay begins with the history of Fafnir and

his hoard. Regin takes Sigurd as his foster son,forges him a mighty sword, and urges him to kill thedragon Fafnir. Sigurd insists on avenging his fa-ther first.

The Lay of FafnirSigurd, returning after avenging his father, kills

Fafnir. The dying dragon warns Sigurd that histreasure is cursed and that Regin means to kill him.Sigurd roasts and eats the dragon’s heart and findshe understands the birds talking about Regin’s plansto kill him. Sigurd kills Regin.

The Lay of SigdrifaSigurd has learned from the birds about a

Valkyrie lying in an enchanted sleep. He wakes her,and she shares her wisdom with him.

Fragmentary Lay of SigurdA dramatic fragment dealing with the murder

of Sigurd.

The Lay of GudrunGudrun grieves for Sigurd while various

noblewomen attempt to comfort her. Brynhild com-mits suicide to be with Sigurd in death.

The Short Lay of SigurdThis is Sigurd’s story from Brynhild’s point of

view. After the tale of her betrayal and revenge istold, she makes plans for her funeral and warnsGunnar what the future holds for him and for Gudrun.

Brynhild’s Journey to HelBrynhild, on her way to meet Sigurd in the land

of the dead, encounters a giantess who accuses herof murder and fickleness. Brynhild justifies herbehavior to her.

The Second Lay of GudrunGudrun tells of Sigurd’s murder, of her broth-

er’s duplicity, and her marriage to Atli.

The Third Lay of GudrunGudrun is suspected of being unfaithful to Atli.

She proves her innocence by putting her hand intoboiling water and withdrawing it unhurt.

Oddrun’s LayAtli’s sister, Oddrun, tells of her grief for

Gunnar. After Brynhild’s death, Gunnar wanted tomarry her, but Atli forbade it. Oddrun and Gunnarmet secretly. Atli learned of this and murderedGunnar and Hogni.

The Lay of AtliGunnar and Hogni, despite forebodings, visit

their brother-in-law, Atli, where they are murderedin Atli’s attempt to extort Andvari’s treasure fromthem. Gundrun avenges her brothers, murdering hersons by Atli, and feeding them to their father. Shethen burns Atli and his men in their hall.

The Greenland Lay of AtliAnother version of Gundrun’s revenge for her

brothers’s murders.

Gudrun’s Chain of WoesGudrun urges her sons by her third husband,

Jonacr, to avenge their half sister, murdered by herhusband Jormunrek.

The Lay of HamdirHamdir and Sorli, the sons of Jonacr and

Gundrun, set out to avenge their half-sister, Swanhild.On the way, they meet and murder their half-brother, Erp. When they reach Jormunrek’s court,they fail to avenge their sister for the lack ofhis help.

Balder’s DreamsOdin consults a prophetess to learn the fate of

his beloved son Balder.

The Mill SongKing Frodi had two captive giant girls. He put

them to work grinding out gold and peace at a magichand mill. They prophesy his downfall.

The Waking of AngantyrHervor, Angantyr’s daughter, goes to his grave

to demand his sword, Tyrfing, so she can avengehim. Angantyr’s ghost, who knows Tyrfing is cursedto kill every one who uses it, tries to dissuade her,but she will not be persuaded. He allows her to take it.

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CHARACTERS

AesirAesir are the Norse gods, more particularly, the

race of sky gods who first fought and then joined theVanir gods of fertility and the earth. They lived inAsgard, home of the gods, reached by a rainbowbridge. The Aesir include Odin (ruler of the gods),Balder, Frigg, Tyr, and Thor.

Agnar1. The son of King Hunding and the brother of

King Geirrod. Patronized by the goddess Frigg, hestill lost his place to his younger brother and lived asan outcast. 2. The son of King Geirrod who broughtOdin a horn of wine when his father was torturingthe disguised god between two fires. Odin rewardedAgnar with a successful reign.

All-FatherSee Odin

AlvisIn the poem The Lay of Alvis, Alvis the dwarf

attempts to steal the god Thor’s daughter away tomarry her as the price of Thor’s great hammer,Mjollnir. Thor, however, catches him and insiststhat only if Alvis answers correctly a series ofquestions can he marry his daughter. Alvis answersthe questions correctly, but Thor has kept him aboveground until sunrise and he turns to stone. The seriesof questions and answers amounts to a catalogue ofliterary synonyms.

AndvariAndvari is a dwarf who was fated to take the

shape of a pike. Andvari’s treasure plays a pivotalrole in a series of lays. In The Lay of Regin, his goldis stolen by Loki to pay compensation for theunwitting murder of a man called Otter, killed whilein the shape of an otter. Andvari curses the treasure.The gods pay Otter’s father, Hreidmar, and broth-ers, Fafnir and Regin, compensation with the stolengold. Fafnir murders his father for the treasure,beginning the series of disasters that follow thetreasure from owner to owner.

AngantyrAngantyr’s father, Arngrim, won in battle a

sword called Tyrfing that had the quality that woundsmade by it never healed. The sword, however, hadbeen stolen from the dwarves. The dwarves laid a

curse on the blade so that it would always bringdeath to whomever carried it. Angantyr and hiseleven brothers were killed together and buried inthe same mound. When Agantyr’s daughter foundout the identity of her father, she was determined toavenge him and took Tyrfing from her father’sgrave despite his ghost’s attempt to dissuade her.

AtliAtli is the ruler of the Huns, the son of Budli,

and brother of Brynhild. The character has its originin the historical Atli, but the poets have made himand his people a Germanic tribe. Atli is not always anegative figure in northern legends, but in the ElderEdda he is a vicious, greedy ruler who murders hisbrothers-in-law for the sake of Andvari’s treasure.

BalderBalder is the favorite son of Odin and Frigg,

and a favorite among all the gods. Frigg asked everyliving thing and all objects of metal, wood, or stoneto swear never to harm him. The gods amusedthemselves by hurling weapons at him certain hecould not be harmed. Loki, however, learned thatFrigg had forgotten to ask the mistletoe. He made itinto a dart and urged Balder’s brother, the blind godHod, to join in the game. The dart killed Balder.Balder’s brother Hermod rode to the land of thedead and begged Hel, goddess of the dead to releasehim. She agreed if every person and thing in theworld would weep for him. All did, except onegiantess, believed to be Loki in disguise.

BodvildBodvild is the daughter of King Nidudd. She

was raped by Volund in revenge for his imprison-ment and maiming by King Nidudd.

BorghildBorghild is Sigmund’s wife and Helgi Hunding’s

Bane’s mother.

BragiBragi is the god of poetry.

BrynhildMany scholars believe Brynhild (also known as

Sigdrifa) is based on a historical character, a sixth-century Visigothic princess, married to a Frankishking. Brynhild is Atli’s sister and a Valkyrie. Shewas betrothed to Sigurd. In the The Lay of Sigdrifa,Odin has decreed she will no longer be a Valkyrie

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but must marry because she had disobeyed him andfought for a hero he had doomed. She swears shewill only marry a man who does not know fear.Odin pricked her with a sleep thorn and she sleptuntil wakened by Sigurd. They pledge themselvesto marry each other, but Sigurd is given a magicaldrink at the court of Gunnar, forgets her, andmarries Gunnar’s sister, Gudrun. In return forGudrun, Sigurd promises to win Brynhild for Gunnarand unwittingly breaks his oath and betrays her.Brynhild loves Sigurd deeply, but believes that hehas cold-bloodedly wronged her. She sets in motionSigurd’s death. When he is dead, she kills herself tojoin the man she considers her real husband in theland of the dead.

DagDag is the son of Hogni and Sigrun’s sister. He

kills Helgi in revenge for his father.

DvalinDvalin is a dwarf. Angantyr’s cursed sword,

Tyrfing, is described as Dvalin’s weapon.

ErmanrikSee Jormunrek.

ErpErp is the son of Atli and Gudrun. He was

murdered by his half brothers Hamdir and Sorli onthe way to Jormunrek’s court to avenge their sister.His death doomed their plans since his blow wouldhave silenced the old king.

EylimiIn The Lay of Helgi Hjorvards’s Son Eylimi is

the father of the Valkyrie Svava, wife of HelgiHjorvard’s son. In the Prophecy of Gripir, he isGripir’s father, Sigurd’s maternal grandfather.

FafnirFafnir is the son of Hreidmar and brother of

Otter and Regan. He murders his own father forAndvari’s treasure. Fafnir turns into a dragon tobetter guard the treasures. As a dragon, he is killedby Sigurd. In both Roman and Germanic tradition,the dragon was a symbol of greed.

Father of the SlainSee Odin.

MEDIAADAPTATIONS

• The Elder Edda was a primary source for Rich-ard Wagner’s cycle of musical dramas The Ringof the Nibelungen, four interconnected operas,Rhinegold, The Valkyries, Siegfried, and TheTwilight of the Gods. Wagner adapted the mythi-cal and legendary world of the Elder Edda toexpress his own disquiet with the industrial revo-lution and political movements and develop-ments in nineteenth-century Germany.

• Two of the most important German movies ofthe silent era are Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924)and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924).

• The Swedish poet Victor Rydberg in Den nyaGrottasongen (1891) transformed the lay ofFrodi’s mill into a picture of the excesses ofindustrialism and capitalism, and its cynical ex-ploitation for human beings.

FenrirFenrir is the great wolf, the son of Loki and a

giantess. He is bound by the gods until Ragnarokwhen he will break his chain and devour Odin.

FreyFrey is a Vanir and a fertility god.

FreyjaFreyja is a Vanir and the goddess of love.

FriggFrigg is the Aesir goddess of love, Odin’s wife,

and the mother of Balder.

FrodiFrodi is the king of a golden age of peace and

prosperity. He owned a magic stone quern or handmill that, when turned by two captive giantesses,ground out gold and peace. Unfortunately, he drivesthe the giantesses too hard and they rebel, breakingthe quern.

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GagnradSee Odin

GangleriSee Odin

GarmGarm is the hound of the goddess Hel, ruler of

the land of the dead.

GeirodGeirod is the son of king Hunding. He sup-

plants his older brother Agnar and rules until Friggtricks him into mistreating the disguised Odin againstall rules of hospitality. He trips and dies on his ownsword as he runs to release Odin when he realizeshis mistake. His son Agnar had comforted andbrought Odin a horn of wine against his father’swishes and was rewarded by the god.

GerdGerd is a giantess, daughter of Gymir, and

loved by Frey. Frey sends his servant Skirnir to wooher. Skirnir has to threaten to curse her with degra-dation and disgrace before she will meet Frey.

GjukiGjuki is the king of the Burgundians, husband

of Grimhild, and father of Gunnar, Hogni, andGudrun. He is apparently dead by the time Sigurdreaches the Burgundian court.

GlaumvorGlaumvor becomes Gunnar’s wife after Bryn-

hild’s death.

GramGram is Sigurd’s sword. Naming swords, at

least in heroic tales, was not uncommon.

GraniGrani is Sigurd’s horse.

GrimhildGrimhild is the queen of the Burgundians, wife

of Gjuki, and mother of Gudrun, Gunnar, and Hogni.There seems to be a hint of the witch or sorceressabout her. She is the mastermind of the plot to drugSigurd into forgetting his vow to Brynhild, marry-ing Gudrun, and helping Gunnar win Brynhild.

GrimodinSee Odin

GripirGripir is the brother of Hjordis and Sigurd’s

maternal uncle. In northern heroic literature, the sonof a man’s sister was his closest male relative. In theGripisspé (The Prophecy of Gripir), he has the giftof prophecy and tells his young nephew all that liesbefore him. He ends his prophecy with the promisethat Sigurd will be ‘fortunate in his fame’ that noman will surpass. Sigurd is the greatest hero of thenorth. His exploits color the images and metaphorsof the traditional skaldic poetry and Icelandic sagaliterature.

GudrunGudrun is the daughter of Grimhild and Gjuki.

Sigurd, under the influence of Grimhild’s potion,marries Gudrun. Gudrun knows both of Sigurd’srelationship to Brynhild and the plot to use a potionon Sigurd. It is she who provokes Brynhild intorevenge. After Sigurd’s death, Gudrun is persuadedto marry Atli, king of the Huns. She eventuallymurders him and his men to avenge his murder ofher brothers. Her third husband is Jonacr by whomshe has twin sons, Hamdir and Sorli.

GungnirGungnir is Odin’s spear. It is mentioned in

many of the lays and sagas but is named only in theLay of Sigdrifa.

GunnarKing of the Burgundians after Gjuki and the

son of Grimhild and Gjuki. His character changesbetween the lays involving Sigurd and Brynhild andthose involving Atli. In the former, he is a deceiver,a breaker of oaths, and a murderer, led first by hismother and then by his wife, but always by hisgreed. In the later, he is a king who knows himself tobe doomed but who will use the most unlikely toolfor a hero, his and his brothers’ deaths, to deny AtliAndvari’s treasure.

GunnlodGunnlod is the giantess who guards the mead

of poetry.

GuthormGuthorm is the son of King Gjuki and a step-

brother of Gunnar.

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HagalHagal is the foster father of Helgi Hund-

ing’s Bane.

HamdirHamdir is Gudrun’s son. He dies avenging his

sister Swanhild’s death on Jormunrek, King ofthe Goths.

HeimdalHeimdal is the ‘radiant’ god and the gods’

watchman. His horn is called Gjallarhorn.

HelHel is the land of the dead and also the name of

its goddess. She is the daughter of Loki.

Helgi Hjorvard’s SonSee Helgi Hjorvard’s Bane.

Helgi Hunding’s BaneHelgi Hunding’s Bane is the son of Sigmund

Volsung and Borghild and the hero of The First Layof Helgi Hunding’s Bane and The Second Lay ofHelgi Hunding’s Bane. His wife was Sigrun, theValkyrie who had watched over him in battle.Sigrun chose Helgi, but her family had engaged herto King Hodbrodd. In the battle that followed, herfather and all her brothers, but one, Dag, werekilled. Sigrun and Helgi lived happily and deeply inlove, despite her grief for her kinsmen, but eventu-ally Dag killed Helgi in revenge for his father. Helgiand Sigrun loved each other so much that they wereallowed to have one last night together in Helgi’sburial mound. A note at the end of the lay says thatshe died young of grief for her husband. In theCodex Regius at the end of The Lay of HelgiHjorvard’s Son and at the end of The Second Layof Helgi Hunding’s Bane are references to a tra-dition that Helgi and Sigrun were reborn threetimes: once as Helgi Hjorvard’s Son and Svava theValkyrie, then as Helgi Hunding’s Bane and Sigrun,and finally as Helgi Hadding’s Bane and Karathe Valkyrie.

HervardHervard is a brother of Angantyr. He was killed

and buried with him.

Hervor1. The daughter of Angantyr who retrieves her

father’s sword from his grave, much against his

wishes, to avenge his death. 2. The Wise, KingHlodver’s daughter, a Valkyrie and Volund’s wife.

HjalmarHjalmar is the slayer of Angantyr.

HjalperkHjalperk is Sigurd’s foster father.

HjordisHjordis is Sigmund’s second wife and the mother

of Sigurd.

HjorvardHjorvard is another brother of Angantyr who

was also killed and buried with him.

HoddmimirSee Mimir

Hogni1.The father of Sigrun. Helgi kills him in a

battle fought to prevent Sigrun’s marriage to an-other man. Hogni is avenged by his son Dag whouses Odin’s spear. 2. A Burgundian prince, brotherof Gunnar and Gudrun. He dies rather than revealthe whereabouts of Andvari’s treasure.

HraniHrani is also a brother of Angantyr who was

killed and buried with him.

HreidnarHreidnar is the father of Regin, Fafnir, and

Otter. He is given Andvari’s treasure by Loki andOdin as compensation for their killing of his sonOtter when he was in the shape of an otter.

Hunding1. The father of Agnar and Geirrod. 2. A king

killed by Helgi Hunding’s Bane.

JonacrJonacr is Gudrun’s third husband and the father

of Hamdir and Sorli.

JormunrekJormunrek was the historical fourth-century

king of the Goths who entered legend as the mur-derer of his young second wife Swanhild and his sonwho were falsely accused of adultery together.

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KostberaIn the Greenland Lay of Atli, Kostbera is Hogni’s

wife, a wise and learned woman who tries to makesense of Gudrun’s runic warning and has a pro-phetic dream of disaster.

LoddfafnirLoddfafnir is the recipient of Odin’s wisdom in

the Sayings of the High One.

LokiLoki is an Aesir, but of doubtful allegiance. He

is the trickster who is the preferred companion ofthe gods in tight corners, but whose advice usuallyinvolves morally questionable choices that createfurther problems for those who take it. His mischiefbecomes a pure destructive maliciousness over thecourse of the history of the gods.

MimirMimir, also known as Hoddmimir, is the guard-

ian of the well under the root of Yggdrasil, the Ashtree at the center of the universe.

NiflungsNiflungs are essentially synonymous with

Gjuking, the family and followers of King Gjuki.

NjordNjord is the god of the sea.

NornsNorns, also known as Urd, are the Scandina-

vian version of the Fates, who determined thedestiny of the world and of individuals. They wereof the race of giants.

OddrunOddrun is the sister of Brynhild and Atli. She

was originally promised to Gunnar. When Atliwould not allow them to wed after Brynhild’s death,they had a secret affair. Oddrun gave this as one ofthe reasons that Atli killed Gunnar.

OdinFor an almost-full list of Odin’s names see The

Lay of Grimnir, stanzas 12 and 13, which end “I’venever been known by one name only/since I have

wandered the world.” (A brief listing of Odin’smany names include: All-Father, Warfather, Fatherof the Slain, Gagnrad—‘Counsel for Victory,’Gangleri, Grim and Ygg.) The king of the gods,known among the pagan English as Woden, the godof Wednesday, he was the god of battle, magic,poetic inspiration, and all those who die in battle. Hewas a shapeshifter and could appear as an old one-eyed man, dressed in a hooded cloak and broad hat,or as a wolf. He was usually accompanied by the so-called beasts of battle: two ravens, ‘Thought’ and‘Memory’, and wolves. He sacrificed his eye andhung nine days and nine nights on Yggdrasil, thetree that supports the world, to gain wisdom. He isthe Lord of runes and secret wisdom. Odin pro-tected kings and encouraged heroes, largely to buildup a fighting force in Valhalla the hall of the slain,for the great battle with the forces of darkness at theend of the world. When he thought the time wasright, he would disarm even a protected favorite tobring about his death in battle. It has been suggestedthat Odin became important only during the periodwhen the Germanic peoples were entering the for-mer provinces of the Roman empire when, as a godof war bands, he attracted worshipers. Normal so-cial and tribal bonds were under stress and wereoften replaced by new groups coalescing aroundsuccessful warriors.

OtterOtter is Regin and Fafnir’s brother and

Hreidnar’s son. Andvari’s treasure was handed overto his brothers and father as compensation for hismurder while in the shape of an otter.

RanRan is the goddess of the sea. Her husband and

the god of the sea is Aeggir.

ReginRegin is Hreidmar’s son and the brother of

Otter and Fafnir. He was twice cheated out of hispart of Andvari’s treasure. A dwarfish smith warpedby thwarted greed, he takes Sigurd under his wing totrain him to kill Fafnir, now in the shape of a dragon.Sigurd is warned of his treachery by both the dyingFafnir and the birds, and kills him.

SifSif is Thor’s wife.

SigdrifaSee Brynhild

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SigmundSigmund is the son of Volsung and father, by

different women, of Helgi, Sinfjotli, and Sigurd.

SignySiggeir, Signy’s husband, murdered Sigmund

and Signy’s father and brothers. Signy sends heryoung sons to Sigmund hoping they will be able tohelp Sigmund avenge their family. When the boysprove to be less than the stuff of heroes, Signy,determined to have vengeance, changes shape witha sorceress, seduces her brother, and bears him a sonSinfjotli. Sinfjotli helps Sigmund in the vengeance.Sigmund only learns that he is his son and not hisnephew when Signy tells him after they have set fireto Siggeir’s hall. Signy then enters the burning hallbecause, as she says to her brother and their son inthe Volsung Saga, “I have worked so hard to bringabout vengeance I am by no means fit to live.Willingly I shall die with King Siggeir, although Imarried him reluctantly.”

SigrlinnSigrlinn is the daughter of King Svafnir and

mother of Helgi in his first incarnation.

SigrunThe three Helgi lays suggest that Sigrun, also

known as Svava and Kara, was, like her belovedHelgi, reincarnated three times. In each incarnation,she was a Valkyrie who chose to protect and loveHelgi, and eventually marry him.

SigurdSigurd is the Siegfried of Richard Wagner’s

operas. In the Elder Edda, he is the son of Sigmundand Hjordis. He is the greatest warrior of his time.He kills the man-turned-dragon, Fafnir, and winsAndvari’s treasure from him. Following this, hewakes the Valkyrie Sigdrifa/Brynhild, learns herwisdom and promises to marry her before he goesoff to his fate at the hands of the wife and children ofGjuki. Sigurd is the type of honorable and coura-geous hero, who despite all his qualities, is manipu-lated into acting completely against his ideals.

SinfjotliSinfjotli is the son of Sigmund and Signy his

sister and the half-brother of Sigurd and Helgi. Thestory of his birth is not recorded in the Elder Eddawhere he is presented as helping his young half-brother Helgi.

SorliSorli is the brother of Hamdir and son of

Gudrun and Jonacr. He is killed on the expedition toavenge their half-sister, Swanhild.

SurtSurt is the lord of the fire giants. He has given

his name to a volcanic island off Iceland.

SvavaSee Sigrun

SwanhildSwanhild is the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun.

She is married to King Jormunrek of the Goths whoexecutes her when she is falsely accused of adulterywith her stepson.

ThorThor, also known as Ving-Thor and Veor, is the

god of thunder. He is the son of the Earth (Fjorgyn),and with his great hammer, Mjollnir, he defendedgods and men against the giants. He was the mostpopular of Norse gods. People wore little hammersmuch as Christians do crosses. Even after Christian-ity became common, some people would take nochances and keep up a quiet personal devotion toThor as well as to Christ.

ThrymA king of the giants, Thrym stole Thor’s ham-

mer, Mjollnir, in an attempt to force the gods to givehim Freya as his wife. He and many of his familyand wedding guests were killed when Thor got hishands back on his hammer.

TyrThe god of war, he was apparently once a more

important god, but lost most of his functions andpopularity to Odin and Thor by the time the ElderEddas were composed.

UrdSee Norns

VanirVanirs were the gods of fertility who were at

one time at war with the Aesir. They are oftenrepresented as having knowledge of the future.

Veor ‘Holy, Defender of the Home’See Thor

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Ving-ThorSee Thor

VolsungsVolsungs is the family name of Sigmund,

Sinfjotli, and Sigurd.

VolundVolund is the Weyland Smith of many English

place names and the hero of the Volundarqvitha(The Lay of Volund). He was the son of a Finnishking famous for his ability to work iron, gold, andsilver. He was captured and lamed by King Nidudwho wanted to monopolize his skills. Volund madehimself wings, and after killing Nidud’s sons andraping his daughter, flew away from his captivity.

War FatherSee Odin

YggSee Odin

YmirYmir is a giant from whose body the earth, sea,

and sky were made.

THEMES

The Elder Edda begins with the Völuspa or ‘Sibyl’sProphecy,’ a history of the world in the form of aprophecy. The poems following it give instructionsfor life, the fights and stratagems of the gods, and,finally, a series of heroic narrative poems anddialogues.

Divided LoyaltiesNorse society was violent, as reflected in the

Sayings of the High One “Don’t leave your weaponslying about / behind your back in a field, / you neverknow when you may need / of a sudden your spear.”In this society personal loyalties were everything,the only real basis of order and security. Nothingstood between order and chaos except the certaintythat vengeance would be exacted for a wrong. Theduty to defend family and lord was at the core too ofpersonal honor and self-esteem. The man who didnot take vengeance could expect neither mercy fromhis enemies nor sympathy from his friends. Neitherlove nor friendship nor practical expedience could

stand in its way for long. Women would sweepaside all the commonplaces of love and gender rolesto have it. The clash between competing loyaltiesand duties is perhaps the most important spring-board of action in Old Norse literature.

Hospitality and GenerosityThe “Sayings of the High One’’ paint a world

where hospitality to the stranger as well as to thefriend was a sacred duty. This idea was founded onthe realities of Viking society. Populations wereoften small and scattered. In winter, it would bemurder to deny a traveler a place at the fire. The manwho welcomed a traveler to his home might soon beglad of a welcome himself. This idea was important.Odin himself was represented as checking an accu-sation of inhospitality. Even a child realized thatmistreatment of a stranger is wrong and defied hisfather and king in The Lay of Grimnir to bring a hornof wine and a kind word to the disguised Odin. Thatsmall act was enough to win the little boy the life-long favor of the god.

Generosity was the sign of nobility of spirit, ofthe regard of the giver for the person to whom thegift was given. It was one of the things that boundsociety together. If hospitality was born of a recog-nition of common humanity, gift giving was thespecific recognition of the importance of one humanbeing for another, whether between friends, lovers,or a king and his warrior.

Pessimism and FatalismOften, characters in the lays know exactly what

lies before them and yet appear powerless to stopand make a conscious decision to snap the chain ofevents. This is a reflection of the belief that people’slives were laid out before them, just as Ragnarok(the end of time) lay before men and gods. The layssurrounding Sigurd and the royal house of theBurgundians are a reflection of this theory. He andthey are swept up in a process started long ago,which centered on the cursed treasure that Sigurdwon by killing the dragon Fafnir. The ultimatecause of the curse, the capricious slaying of Otterthe dwarf by Loki, sets in motion a chain reaction ofacts of vengeance and greed in which gods, giants,dwarves, and people suffer.

Ragnarok and HeroismThe opening poem of the Elder Edda describes

the history of the world from creation to its destruc-tion. The destruction of the world will take place atRagnarok with the last, great battle between the

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gods and heroes on one side and the forces of evil onthe other. It is in preparation for this battle that Odinsends his Valkyries to bring the spirits of men slainin battle to Valhalla, the hall of the slain. His needfor heroes is so great that he will allow a warrior hehas favored to be killed in battle rather than lose hishelp in the end time. Nevertheless, no matter whatOdin and the gods may do, no matter how manyheroes join their fight against the forces of darkness,the battle will end in defeat, or more specifically, themutual destruction of the gods and their enemies.Ragnarok seems to be a symbol of the Vikings’view of their world. They knew that all things end.The world, flawed as it obviously was, could be nodifferent. The important thing was to meet whatcame, good or bad, head on and unflinching. Man orwoman, they must master events. Rather than al-lowing events to make them less than they were,events were the stage on which they could win theonly immortality that mattered: fame. The certaintyof defeat and death did not affect the will to fight.Defeat was not important; to endure, to live accord-ing to certain standards of loyalty and courage wasimportant. To meet life courageously, however grimlife might be, was to rob it of its fears.

WisdomOdin gave his eye for wisdom; Sigurd spent

most of his courtship of Brynhild learning hersupernaturally acquired wisdom. Heroes are ex-pected to have discernment. They must be able tojudge a situation and the character of the men andthe women around them. The Norse poets gavewisdom, its acquisition, and transmission. The pre-occupation with prophecy in the Elder Edda is areflex of this pursuit of wisdom, even though it is amixed blessing in a world overshadowed by pessi-mism and fate. To modern readers, this preoccupa-tion may seem irrelevant and lacking in an aestheticsense, but in Norse society it was an essential,defining poetic function. Elegance of diction, deli-cate metrical effects, creation of atmosphere, andemotional power were tools, not ends, for the Norsepoet. In gnomic verse, poets distilled wisdom intomemorable turns of phrase. In the narrative lays,poets provided embodiments of wisdom and fool-ishness in action. Experience is the source of wisdom.

Still there are limits to wisdom. The Sayings ofthe High One suggest that it is better not to know toomuch or to be too wise; perhaps the true nature oflife would be too hard to carry. Most poignantly,however, it warns against knowing the future: “Ifyou can’t see far into the future, you can live free

TOPICS FORFURTHER

STUDY

• The Vikings opened trade routes down the riversof Russia to Constantinople. Investigate the im-portance of Viking trade and trading posts to thedevelopment of the modern states of Russia andthe Ukraine.

• Icelanders often boast of having the oldest par-liament, the Althing, in existence. Investigate theorigin and functions of the Althing and compareit to early attempts at self-government on theAmerican frontier, beginning, perhaps, with thePlymouth Colony.

• Many of the heroes of the lays in the Elder Eddaare not Scandinavian, but came from tribes as farapart as Burgundy and what is now the southwest Russia and the Ukraine. Investigate thetheories of how these heroes and their storiescame to have such a wide and devoted audience.

• Norse raiding, trading and colonization couldnot have happened without the developmentsmade by Scandinavian shipbuilding. InvestigateViking ships and their construction and the engi-neering and design principles behind their success.

from care.” Discernment too could be thwarted bypull of other ideals and by magic. The betrayal thatlies at the heart of Sigurd’s tragedy is one inducedby sorcery. Gudrun too knows disaster awaits inmarriage with Atli, but she too succumbs to hermother’s potions.

STYLE

Epic CharacteristicsLeaving aside the Sayings of the High One,

which has more in common with works like thebiblical Proverbs, it appears that the Elder Edda isnot an epic but materials for one. Here, for once,modern readers have the relatively short poeticnarratives, or lays, which supposedly lie behind the

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epic. While the collection provides in the Sibyl’sProphecy a narrative from earth’s creation throughdestruction and renewal, the majority of the poemsfit only loosely into that scheme. There is no singlehero, but rather a number of heroes ranging from thedim-but-effective god Thor to Gunnar, the treacher-ous brother-in-law of Sigurd, who, nevertheless,dies a hero while fighting the great tyrant of the age,Atli. Unlike the generic epic, the Edda has theobscenities of Loki in The Insolence of Loki and thebroad humor of the Thor episodes—particularly theLay of Thrym, an early example of that situationbeloved of slapstick humor: the brawny man forcedto pass himself off as the blushing girl.

Point of ViewEach poem in the Elder Edda must be consid-

ered individually as to its narrator and point of view.The composite Sayings of the High One gives theimpression of more than one narrator. The simplenarratives use a third person point of view: exceptfor the occasional lines like: “Hlorridi’s heart leapedwith laughter/ Then grew hard when he saw hishammer.’’ Characters’ thoughts and emotions arerevealed entirely through their own words and ac-tions. For example, Freyja’s rage is clear from heractions in the Lay of Thrym: “Freyja snorted in sucha fury / she made the hall of the Aesir shake.” Twoof the lays, the Sibyl’s Prophecy and the Prophecyof Gripir by virtue of being prophecies, have anomniscient narrator. In some of the question andanswer dialogues, for example, the The Lay ofVafthrudnir, the purpose is to provide specific in-formation, but the dramatic and ironic interest thatkeeps the exchange from descending into a glossaryis that while one character only appears to beomniscient the other truly is omniscient.

SettingThe characters’s conduct in the Elder Edda is

not greatly different from what we know of societyin the Viking age. The physical setting of the laysstretches on the modern map from Scandinavia tosouthwestern Russia, home of the Goths before theyentered the Roman empire in the late fourth century.The important Sigurd lays are centered on the Rhinevalley in western Germany. The true setting of theElder Edda, however, is a universe of nine worlds:Asgard, home of the gods in the center; Midgard,the home of men around it; and Utgard, containingJötunheim, (giants), Alfheim (elves) Svartalfheim(dark elves) and possibly, the sources are not clear,Vanaheim, home of the Vanir gods. Under these

three is Niflhel, the realm of Hel, the goddess of thedead. The ninth world is possibly that of the dwarves,but its name and exact location are not certain.Asgard and Midgard are protected from Utgard by abody of water in which lives the Midgard serpent, sobig that it encircles the whole of Midgard with histale in its mouth. A rainbow bridge, Bifröst, con-nects Asgard and Midgard. The great world ash tree,Yggdrasil, has one root in Asgard, one in Utgard,and the third in Niflhel. Under the first root is thespring of Urd or Fate, under the second, the well ofMimir, the source of Odin’s wisdom, and under thethird is Hvergelmir, the source of all rivers. Adragon gnaws continually at its deepest root.

AllusionsThe Elder Edda constantly alludes to a whole

body of myth and legend that it only imperfectlypreserves and that controls the imagery and symbol-ism of not only of the Elder Edda, but of Norseliterature in general and Skaldic verse in particu-lar. Even within the Elder Edda, there are poemsthat are essentially dramatic glossaries of allusionsand metaphors: The Lay of Alvis and The Layof Vafthrudnir.

Heiti and KenningsThe two most prominent poetic devices are

heiti and kennings. Heiti are simply cultivated andunusual words for common things or concepts.They can be archaisms, lost from everyday speech,or common words used in a way peculiar to poetry,or poetic coinages. Kenning comes from the verbkenna to characterize or define. They consist of anoun plus a modifier in the possessive case, as ‘theraven’s feeder’ for a warrior. Some rely on naturalor everyday connections ‘the bane of tinder’ for fireor ‘the giver of linen’ for a lady. The most complexrely on allusions to legend or myth.

ProsodyThe Elder Edda are typically in four line stanzas.

Each line is divided by a caesura (pause). Each half-line contains two stressed syllables; the half linesare connected across the caesura by alliterationconnecting a stressed initial sound in the first half ofthe line to a stressed initial sound in the second.Individual consonant sounds only alliterate with thesame sound. All vowels alliterate with each other.There is no restriction on the position of the stressedsyllables. Fornyrdislag (ancient verse) allows gen-erally only two unstressed syllables per half-line:

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Betty Bouncer bought a candle. Málaháttr (speechverse) allows three unstressed syllables per half-line: Sad little Susan, sought for a candle. In a thirdstanza form ljódaháttr (song measure) the first andfourth lines are in Málaháttr, the second and fourthhave only three stresses.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The VikingsThe Vikings have entered popular imagination

as bloodthirsty and immensely daring pirates, butthey were first and foremost farmers and traders,raiding for treasure and slaves to accumulate capitalto acquire status at home, or looking for landsabroad to colonize. Their raids, trading expeditions,and colonizing took them from Constantinople,modern Istanbul, to the coast of North America.They laid the basis of the Russian state with theirtrading posts along the Volga and Dneiper. Theyfounded nearly all the cities of modern Ireland. Thethreat of their great raiding parties was crucial to thedevelopment of England as a unified state.

The society the Vikings came from was one ofmixed farming, fishing and hunting, supplementedby trading. They would turn their hand to anything.The development of greatly improved ship designstowards the end of the eighth century gave theScandinavians the finest ships in Europe. Theirknorrs were the most effective cargo ships yet built.Their longships could cross the Atlantic or sail upthe Seine to lay siege to Paris.

Beside their trading and manufacturing settle-ments in Ireland and settlements in England, theVikings colonized the Isle of Man, the Orkneys,Iceland and Greenland. Many of the original settlersof Iceland were from Norway where the consolida-tion of the country under a central kingship wasopposed by many noblemen and free farmers, usedto handling their own affairs without outside inter-ference. Others came from the Viking settlements inIreland, always under pressure from the nativeIrish princes.

Viking SocietyScandinavia and her people were dominated by

the sea. The landscapes of the three Nordic coun-tries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, are eachdistinct, but in all of them the terrain tended to

separate communities, while the sea connected them.The people looked to the sea as naturally as to theland for opportunities.

The Scandinavians were farmers wherever theland was good enough. Rye, wheat, oats and barleywere grown depending on local conditions. Cows,sheep, pigs, geese and chickens were kept. Theysupplemented agricultural production with hunting,fishing and gathering wild foods: honey, birds eggsand wild plants. Farms were family enterprises, anddepending on the richness of the land, often at somedistance from one another. Towns only began toemerge from trading posts and ritual centers to-wards A.D. 1000.

Control of land was the basis of wealth. Sons ina land-owning family increased its power since theirwives’ dowries would increase and consolidatetheir landholdings. The family itself in a legal senseand in terms of the various social obligations ofNorse society was defined to the degree of third orfourth cousins recognizing a common great-great-great-grandfather. Obligations of one kind or an-other would also bind a man to the protection of amore powerful neighbor, whom he in turn wouldsupport at need. In a hard and violent age thesemutual bonds were essential to the maintenance oforder and to ensure access to justice.

Men worked their farms with the help of theirfamily which might include two or three genera-tions. Slaves were used for heavier labor by thosewho could afford them. Free laborers might workfor their keep and a small wage. A rich landownercould afford to employ more help, giving him theleisure to go raiding and trading and with luckacquire the wealth necessary to maintain or enhancehis status.

Viking Ships and ShipbuildingThe development of ship construction towards

the end of the eighth century gave the Scandinavi-ans the finest ships in Europe. They perfectedsailing ships that had no need of deep water, safeanchorages or quaysides, but could cross the NorthSea or the North Atlantic under sail, as well as berowed up most of the major rivers of westernEurope. These ships were slender and flexible. Theyhad symmetrical ends and a true keel, the length-wise structure along the base of a ship to which itsribs are connected. They were clinker-built, that isof overlapping planks riveted together. At timesthese planks would also have been lashed to the ribsof the ship with spruce roots to ensure the ship’s

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COMPARE&

CONTRAST

• Setting during The Elder Edda: During theViking era, raw material and slaves are the mainresources of northern and western Europe. Tensof thousands of European men, women, andchildren are sold into slavery not only withinEurope, but into Muslim Spain, North Africa,and the Middle East. Today, the tide of cheaplabor has turned and thousands of North Africansare forced to seek a living in Spain and France.

Medieval Iceland: Iceland is poor, with a smallpopulation, but it produces a vibrant and exten-sive literature in prose and poetry. Reading to thefamily group or to assembled neighbors is a

common winter’s entertainment into the nine-teenth century in farming districts. Iceland stillhas one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Tenth and Twelfth Century: Norse coloniesflourish in Greenland, which they found to beuninhabited and to have a climate good enoughfor stock-raising and their traditional way of life.Climactic change meant a return to the weatherwe see today and the Eskimo who had retreatednorth before the Vikings arrived. The colonyfinds it culturally impossible to adapt to the newconditions and disappears by the end of thefifteenth century.

flexibility in rough seas. They were steered with aside rudder fitted to the starboard side. One shipexcavated in 1880 from a mound at Gokstad on thewest side of the Oslo Fjord was 76 and 1/2 feet long.At its widest it was 17and 1/2 feet. When fully ladenit would have drawn only three feet of water: itcould have been sailed deep into the heart of theIrish countryside or up to the gates of Paris. A copywas sailed across the Atlantic.

TreasureHowever it was acquired, treasure, particularly

silver, was important in Viking society. One func-tion was display. Fine jewelry and ornamentedweapons were an obvious indication of status andsuccess. It was considered part of family wealth likeland, and, despite legend, no more than one or twopieces of jewelry were buried with the dead. It wasused to reward one’s retainers and to provide lavishhospitality. Both of increased a man’s standing inhis society. Spent on land it raised a freeman’sstatus. For a slave it could mean liberty.

On a practical level, because they did not have acoinage, silver had to be weighed and tested beforetransactions could take place. It was not necessary,therefore, to keep all one’s silver in coins or eveningots. If, mid-deal, a man found himself a little

short of cash, he need only throw in his cloak pin ora piece of a bracelet, properly weighed.

Iceland and its Professional PoetsAlmost from the beginning of its settlement,

Icelanders kept in constant touch with Ireland, Eng-land and their Scandinavian homelands. Icelanderswith poetic skills found their services appreciatedand well rewarded by Norse rulers or by rulers withNorse subjects. Indeed poetry became something ofan Icelandic monopoly. For 350 years, from EgillSkalla-Grímson to Jón murti Egilsonn who com-posed for King Eiríkur Magnússon in 1299 there arerecords of 110 Icelandic court poets. Snorri wasprobably trying to keep alive a tradition which hadproved useful not only to individual Icelanders, butto Iceland as a whole. A successful court poet wouldgive his fellow countrymen access to the king’scourt, and keep distant Iceland’s concerns frombeing completely forgotten.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The first indication of the Elder Edda’s criticalreception is the simple fact of its preservation in aquietly elegant manuscript, the Codex Regius with

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the explanatory prose passages interspersed amongthe lays. It is often assumed that, as Christianityreached the peoples of northern Europe, devoutChristians, as well as the institutional church, auto-matically attempted to destroy the memory of theold gods and the human heroes whose activities,judged by Judeo-Christian standards, were oftenless than edifying. Nevertheless, the poems in ElderEdda were preserved, collected, and copied. Thisprocess can perhaps be most easily understood withreference to the work of the Icelandic scholar andpolitician, Snorri Sturlson (1179–1241), author ofthe treatise the Prose Edda, which laid the founda-tion for the analysis of Norse poetry. The storiespreserved in the Elder Edda were part of the essen-tial tools of the skalds, Norse poets who workedwithin complex metrical forms, using allusions andmetaphors drawn from native heroic and mytho-logical lays, much as Greek and Roman poetsenriched their poetry with allusions to their god andheroes or Christian poets to the bible. A giftedskaldic poet could hope for patronage and advance-ment in the northern courts. Iceland in particular,poor in other resources, produced more than a fewof these poets.

In the twelfth century, the ability to understandthe older skaldic poetry and to compose in itsmanner was under threat from Church disapprovalon one hand and new French-influenced popularpoetry on the other. Christianity was probably thelesser threat. Once conversion was reasonably com-plete and real, references to Thor and Volund weregenerally considered as innocuous as references inLatin poetry to Hercules. The growing loss of thetraditional material may indeed be reflected in theElder Edda itself since the Lay of Varthrudnir andthe Lay of Alvis, which function as dramatic glossa-ries of poetic terms and allusions. Snori attemptedto reverse this loss with his Prose Edda, proseversions of the old stories together with a treatise onthe complex metrical rules governing the composi-tion of the various types of skaldic verse, and whichprovided an explanation of the ancient gods thatturned them into clever Trojans, taking advantageof the gullible northerners. In a renaissance of theolder literature, reflected in the work of Snorri, thelays of the Elder Edda were collected and copied.

There is no record of the Elder Edda before theCodex Regius came into the possession of BishopBrynjólf Seinsson in 1643. The manuscript had losta number of leaves by that time, and no copy existsthat was made before the leaves were lost. In 1662,the bishop sent it to the ruler of Iceland, King

Frederick III of Denmark. The Renaissance hadbegun with a renewed interest in Greek and Romanliterature and art. Before long, however, people innorthern and western Europe, in emulation andpartial reaction to this absorption, began to searchfor information about their own ancestors and theircultural life. This interest, fed by the political use-fulness of national identities, lead to speculationabout ancient monuments and the careful combingof Greek and Latin texts for information. It alsomeant that early vernacular writings now interestedall those who felt it was their duty or in their interestto encourage scholarship and a sense of a sharednational past. In 1665, the “Sibyl’s Prophecy” andthe “Sayings of the High One” from the Elder Eddawere published together with Snorri Sturlson’s ProseEdda. The full collection, however, was publishedonly between 1787 and 1828. By this time, theromantic movement and the new study of philology,the study of the development and interconnection oflanguages, were ready to make full use of the texts.Scholars pored over them for linguistic clues to thedevelopment and interconnections of the Germanicbranch of the Indo-European languages and ancientnorthern society. In England and Germany as thecentury progressed, the Elder Edda, along with theIcelandic Sagas (prose tales of fictionalized histori-cal events and characters) were moving into theconsciousness of the reading public at large. InNordic countries, this assimilation was strikinglyresisted on some fronts; in the nineteenth century,the traditional evening saga reading was discour-aged in favor of the Bible in Iceland. The Danishscholar Grundtvig attempted to re-introduce theimages, characters, and narratives of the ElderEdda, but with little success.

The Elder Edda, like many other early medie-val epics, for example Beowulf and the Táin BóCuáilgne, were approached almost purely as philo-logical lucky dips or archaeological artifacts wellinto the twentieth century. It can be no coincidencethat Auden’s translations, which helped bring theElder Edda to the attention of late twentieth centuryreaders, were dedicated to his former teacher Tolkien,whose own 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monstersand the Critics” radically shifted the perception ofthe epic towards it first and essential existence asliterature. Stylistic discussions of the poetry havebegun to be discussed more, in the critical literature,even though Nordal’s edition of the “Sibyl’s Prophe-cy,” revised in 1952 and printed in English transla-tion as late as 1978, has nothing to say about theattributes of the poetry, which contains this mythol-

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ogy like insects and leaves in amber. Ursula Dronke’scommentaries, particularly on the Atli lays, demon-strate both the richness of construction and theimaginative play of author with historical material.

CRITICISM

Helen Conrad-O’BriainIn the following essay, Conrad-O’Briain looks

at the great romance of the Elder Edda in an effort tounderstand its neglect by writers and critics.

Seventeen of the lays in the Elder Edda concern thehouse of the Volsungs. Fifteen directly or indirectlypoint towards the Icelandic Volsung Saga, the Mid-dle High German Nibelungenleid, and finally toWagner’s series of operas, Ring of the Nibelungs.They are part of one of the best case histories for thedevelopment of the epic from short lays or talesavailable. The other two “The First Lay of HelgiHunding’s Bane” and “The Second Lay of HelgiHunding’s Bane” could also be approached as pointson a continuum of development, but a developmentthat was somehow interrupted. The second lay hasalready begun the expansion. It adds incidents andtreats them with greater complexity, even if it stillrelies, in true lay style, on the dramatic use of thecharacters’ voices to create atmosphere and setting,direct the audience’s sympathies, and propel thenarrative. In that process of development, however,Helgi and his beloved Sigrun proved a dead end,while Sigurd and Brynhild became the star-crossedlovers of northern legend, the Viking answer toLancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde.

Sigurd was not the only son of Sigmund toinspire the love a Valkyrie, but his elder brotherHelgi and his Valkyrie, Sigrun/Svava/Kara andtheir love stretching across three lifetimes has nevercaught the popular fancy; even the extant lays in theElder Edda are fragmentary. Their story must oncehave been popular. What happened?

In the second lay, as mentioned above, the storyalready incorporates events after Helgi’s defeat andkilling of Sigrun’s father, brothers, and unwantedsuitor. The audience now had both the beginningand end of their love, expanding Helgi’s death intowhat might otherwise have been detached as aseparate lay. Helgi’s death by Dag, the brother-in-

law he had spared, is of far less importance orinterest to the poet than the love of Helgi andSigurn. To express this love to the audience, thepoet devoted slightly over a third of his lay toSigrun’s lament for Helgi and their meeting in hisgrave mound. He incorporated both the theme of theunquiet grave and an audacious reversal of thedemon-lover motif.

Instead of being carried off unwillingly to thehorrors of the grave as in the demon lover balladsand tales, Sigrun goes to the burial mound, arrangesa bed, and insists “Here in the barrow we’ll go tobed, released from sorrow, I will sleep, Helgi, safein your arms the way I used to when you werealive.” This material might serve to flesh out anepic, but placed on center stage, they seem morenaturally the stuff of romance. This and the substitu-tion in the second lay of the first’s generalizedhero’s boyhood with Helgi’s daring secret missionto spy on his family’s enemies suggests a poet with agift for narrative innovation. What then cuts off thedevelopment? Possibly the lack of a theme to sup-port an extended narrative. The winning of Sigrunprovided the center of a narrative lay, but theprocess was never given the emotional complexityto sustain a long narrative.

The core of the story, the unshakable lovebetween Helgi and Sigrun, could not accommodatean emotional struggle between them to take theplace of war. Such a change would rob the story ofits essential character. In the second version, thescene in which, going over the battlefield, she firstfinds the despised Hodbrodd dying and then Helgisafe, might easily have become an extended epi-sode. But when Helgi who says “‘Sigrun I willgrieve you by what I say . . . there fell this morningat Freka Stone, Bragi and Hogni; I was their bane.’”Her reaction does not give the society, which pro-duced the Volsung Saga or Njal’s Saga, much towork with to extend the conflict and therefore thenarrative: “Then Sigrun wept. She said: ‘Now Iwould wish those warriors alive, and still have yourarms around me.’” Then, as the story says, theymarried and had sons, but “Helgi didn’t live to growold” and “grief and sorrow caused Sigrun to dieyoung.” Helgi had spared Sigrun’s brother, Dag,who repays the oaths he has sworn with Odin’sspear in vengeance for his father. When he con-fesses the slaying to his sister and offers compensa-tion to her and her sons, she curses him, but she doesnot pursue vengeance. Her focus and the story’s

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WHATDO I READ

NEXT?

• Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda: Tales fromNorse Mythology, trans. by Jean I. Young (1971),provides a lively translation of the most accessi-ble parts of an encyclopedic thirteenth centuryprose collection of the myths and legends at theheart of the Norse poetic vocabulary.

• Magnus Magnusson, Viking Expansion West-wards (1973) is a lavishly illustrated history ofthe expansion of the Vikings from England toNorth America. Magnusson focuses on individu-als like Aude the Deep-Minded and the realitiesof daily life, bringing the reader face to face withthe people who wrote and listened to the ElderEdda.

• Lee Hollander, The Skalds: A Selection of TheirPoems presents the poets of the Viking Age and aselection of their poetry whose incredibly elabo-rate lyric poetic language and imagery dependsupon the myths and legends preserved in part inthe Elder Edda.

• Magnus Magnusson and H. Pálsson, The Vinland

Sagas. The vikings in North America in theirown words, this might well be read in conjunc-tion with Viking Expansion Westwards.

• Magnus Magnusson and H. Pálsson, Njal’s Sa-ga. This is perhaps the greatest of the Icelandicfamily sagas, set in the period when Icelandicsociety was slowly adopting Christianity and thecultural changes conversion required.

• Jesse L. Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs: TheNorse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (1990 )is a prose retelling of the Sigurd story, writtendown between 1200 and 1270. It is closelyrelated to the lays in the Elder Eddas, but pre-sents all the Volsung stories as part of an inte-grated whole.

• A new collection of essays on Elder Edda, editedby Paul L. Acker, is promised for November,2000. It is promised to apply new critical ap-proaches to the mythological poetry in the ElderEdda.

focus remains love of Helgi rather than vengeance.She dares the terrors of the grave for him and dies ofher grief; he comes back to her from the dead, fromthe halls of Odin.

Perhaps the most compelling scene, the one thatmight have offered the possibility of an extendednarrative is Helgi’s return from the dead to his wifefor one night. It operates within the context of theirinability to meet in the Norse afterlife. Since Sigrunis fated to die of grief, not in battle, she cannot joinher husband in Valhalla. It is often overlooked bymodern readers that Brynhild does not want Sigurddead merely to punish him. She wants to ensure thatshe will have him in the afterlife. She does not killherself out of guilt or remorse, but to join him in thekingdom of Hel. Sigurd must be killed treacher-ously, not merely because of his prowess, but be-cause if he dies in battle he is lost to her forever. The

composers of the lays were very much alive to this.Their sensitivity to it is reflected in “Brynhild’sHel-ride.”

The tale of Sigurd and Brynhild was a tale ofthwarted love, but there is no adultery, no stolenmeetings, none of the twists and turns of lovers’sintrigue, only the cold frustrated fury of a womanwho has been tricked into marrying a man shedespises, having been betrothed to the one man shecould respect and therefore love. Besides, the Frenchromance as a genre was not invariably or evenusually about adulterous love but a love that foundits harbor in marriage.

The women of Elder Edda and of the sagaliterature in general are praised for the same quali-ties as the men. Modern readers tend to judge themedieval taste in heroines by Chaucer’s, but GeoffreyChaucer had a highly personal taste for the plaintive

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It is the nature of their

love, their own natures, that

they should find each other

and nothing shall come

between them, not even death

itself, which is the meaning of

the story . . . The center of

their story is their love that

propels them across death.’’

and helpless woman (usually married). Brynhild’scharacter did not change substantially between theNorse and courtly version of her story. The balladtradition is full of women who follow their lovers towar in disguise, often saving them.

The problem of the Helgi legends’ dead endmay lie exactly in the cleft stick of the Eddictraditions of the afterlife and the in the reincarnationmotif. The great engine of the traditional develop-ment of the Helgi story, the narrative tool by whichthe story could be extended was that the lovers werereincarnated at least three times. The story neverfound a replacement. However much reincarnationmay appeal to modern sensibilities, if only as anarrative tool, it was a bar to wider development ofthe story between the Vikings’ conversion to Chris-tianity and the end of the nineteenth century. It hasbeen suggested that the statement at the end of “TheLay of Helgi Horvard’s Son” may be a belatedscribal attempt to link the old Helgi tradition to theVolsung-Helgi tradition.” But, it seems unlikelythat such an idea would have occurred to a Christianscribe out of nowhere, least of all to attract anaudience. Keeping the interest in the story alivewould have suggested suppressing or ridiculingsuch a heathen concept as reincarnation, as theprose passage at the end of “The Second Lay ofHelgi Hunding’s Bane”: “In olden times it wasbelieved that people could be born again, althoughthat is now considered an old woman’s tale.” Morelikely to represent a scribal attempt to make thesequence more acceptable would be the prose intro-duction to “The Second Lay of Helgi Hunding’s

Bane”: “King Sigmund, the son of Volsung, mar-ried Borghild from Balund. They called their sonHelgi, for Helgi Hjorvard’s son.” This at mostsuggests a subconscious recognition of their similarfate. The lines in “The Second Lay of HelgiHunding’s Bane’’—“before she had ever seenSigmund’s son / she had loved him with all herheart”—is also suggestive of a love reincarnated.

Perhaps the problem is more fundamental. Theresimply wasn’t enough material. Despite the greatpotential offered and already exploited by certainincidents, there were not enough of them. Evenwhen fleshed out, there certainly were not enoughtensions to make a convincing saga like that whichformed around Sigurd. The tradition of their loveoffers only one possible tension between them:there is no meeting again for them after death. Nowriter after the conversion would be able to exploitthe literary possibilities of either this endless loss orthe alternative, the rebirth and repetition of the cycleof their love. There is no great object to be pursued.It is the nature of their love, their own natures, thatthey should find each other and nothing shall comebetween them, not even death itself, which is themeaning of the story. That is what differentiatesthem from the characters in the Sigurd material. Thecenter of their story is their love that propels themacross death. Their great sorrow, the thing that theymust conquer, is their separation by death. That is asubject worthy of an epic, but not an epic thatcould have been written in the prevailing culturalatmosphere.

Source: Helen Conrad-O’Briain, for Epics for Students,Gale, 2001.

Lotte MotzLotte Motz argues that the pattern between

Eskimo and Norse tradition is similar, which leadsto understanding the “similarity of linguisticdynamics.”

In his treatise on poetry, the so-called Edda Snorra,Snorri (1949:244) states that the human mind isperiphrased in skaldic speech as ‘the wind of troll-women’ without offering an explanation for theunexpected image. We do find such kennings as . . .‘the storm of Járnsaxa (a giantess) in the meaning of‘courage’, or Herkju stormr—‘Herkja’s (a giant-ess’) storm’ in the meaning ‘mind’.

Snorri’s puzzling statement has given rise tosome scholarly interpretations. In his book on magicpractices Dag Strömbäck assumed that the noun

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The Norse god Odin is considered the mythological godfather of poets. The ElderEdda includes a story about how Odin learned the runes, the alphabet of the ancientnorth Germanic tribes.

hugr of Snorri’s sentence (Huginn skal svá kenna atkalla vind troll-kvenna) relates to the force namedhugr, which lives in men, and which may, accordingto Norse belief, detach itself and wander forth,corporeally, to attack and harm an enemy. Strömbäck(1935:175 ff) points out that witches or troll-womenare often visualized as traveling in the wind. The‘trolls’ wind’ thus would be equated with the pow-erful and noxious force, named hugr.

Basing herself on folkbelief, Lily Weiser-Aall(1936:76–78) offered a somewhat different expla-

nation. The word hugr is, according to her, to beunderstood in its meaning of ‘bodily affliction’, thekind of sickness which may be brought on by atroll’s breath or ‘wind’, as shown by the modernNorwegian nouns trollgust, alvgust—‘trolls’ wind’,‘elves’ wind’, as names of a disease.

Concerning both interpretations we must notethat the kenning ‘trolls’ wind’ does not, in theinstances which have been gathered, periphrase‘sickness’ or ‘attack’. The examples, cited by Ru-dolf Meissner, circumscribe the notions of ‘cour-

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. . .the equation ’mind—

trolls’ wind’ of skaldic poetry

had originated in its turn, as

in the scenario of the Eskimos,

in a belief, forgotten in its

articulated form at the time

of our texts, that to receive

insight, strength, or vision, a

man must attain close contact

with the elemental powers.’’

age’, ‘mind’, ‘emotion’, ‘thoughts’, which coincidewith the standard meanings of the noun hugr —‘mind’ ‘feeling’, ‘desire’, ‘courage’. Snorri musthave based his statement on his knowledge ofskaldic diction. It is therefore not likely that he usedhugr in the meaning ‘sickness’ or ‘attack’ if themetaphors consistently relate to the workings of thehuman mind. Strömbáck and Weiser-Aall appar-ently did not consider the material from whichSnorri’s conclusion was derived.

I shall, in my turn, seek to find the reason forlinking witches’ weather to human thoughts andemotions, and interpret Snorri’s sentence, under-standing hugr in its standard meaning of ‘mind,emotion, consciousness’, with the help of a non-Germanic parallel.

The parallel is found among the Eskimos. Theirhighest god, named Sila, Hila, or Tla, by the variousgroups, is a being of the outer air, of winds andstorms, the great majestic, cosmic power beforewhich men must bow in humbleness and awe. He is,as stated by an Eskimo, “A great spirit so mightythat his utterance to mankind is not through com-mon words, but by storm and snow and rain and thefury of the sea; all the forces that men fear …”

Surprisingly the name of this great force servesalso as a designation of the human mind or humanintelligence. In Greenlandic speech it may be said:Siälihliuppa—“Sila rained on him”, and it may bestated about someone: “He has Sila,” i.e. “He hasintelligence.” In Alaska the name Sla means ‘weath-er’ and the verb slaugohaqtoa means “I am thinking”.

We may find an explanation for this duality ofmeaning by considering that among some of theEskimo nations, for instance among the CaribouEskimos, it is indeed from Hila that the shaman-magician, the central figure of religious life, re-ceives his visionary powers. He has prepared him-self for this profound experience by leaving thesettlements of men and by the endurance of muchsuffering. Then in his loneliness he may hear thegod’s voice, be filled with god’s presence, and thushimself become part of the secret workings of theuniverse. “All true wisdom,” an Eskimo explainedto the explorer Rasmussen, “is only to be learned farfrom the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes”.

In a recurrent tale from Greenland a poor or-phan boy transforms himself into a mighty herothrough his strength of will, and he too obtains hisgifts through his experience of meeting Sila in thewilderness. If a man wishes to become an angakoq(shaman), we are told by an eighteenth centuryobserver of Eskimo life, he must go a long way fromhis home to a field where there are no men; he mustlook for a huge stone, sit down on it, and call forTorngarsuk (the shaman’s helping spirit with thisgroup of Eskimos). The shock of the terrifyingencounter will cause the man to fall into a stupor,and to lie like dead; but he will reawaken and returnto his community as a shaman.

The examples given testify to a belief that toacquire knowledge of the secrets of the world onemust meet and merge with the forces which aremanifest in storm and winds.

Eskimo culture, as we know, remained forclimatic reasons at a very early stage of economicdevelopment, i.e. that of hunters and of fishermen,until the most recent time, and preserved someextremely archaic forms of belief. It is reasonable toassume that these forms had at one time had a widerdistribution and that some had stayed, vestigially, inmore sophisticated environments.

I wish to show in this paper that the equation‘mind—trolls’ wind’ of skaldic poetry had origi-nated in its turn, as in the scenario of the Eskimos, ina belief, forgotten in its articulated form at the timeof our texts, that to receive insight, strength, orvision, a man must attain close contact with theelemental powers. If enough fragments of such afaith are still discernible, though in various alteredforms, in our texts we may be able to assume the

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The goddess Frigg (also known as Friia or Freya), Odin’s wife and a promoter ofmarriage and fertility.

existence of such a pattern in Germanic lands. Toarrive at this assumption we would have to be ableto point to the following:

1. that in north-Germanic tradition inspirationmay be gained by contact with the forces of un-tamed nature,

2. that trolls and giants (the names are inter-changeable) represent such forces,

3. that trolls and giants are capable of dispens-ing knowledge and inspiration,

4. that humans have indeed gained inspirationthrough a meeting with the trolls in distant places.

The examples from the arctic environment,here cited, describe an initiatory experience fromwhich the human arises with a new identity, a newdimension to his person, possibly a new conscioussoul. We shall examine whether in the Germaniccontext the inspiration granted would be of anindividual nature, pertaining to a certain task, theworking of a poem, or the divining of the future, orto the more profound event of acquiring a new stateof consciousness.

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Inspiration through contact with the forces ofuntamed nature

The Icelandic noun útiseta—‘sitting outside’,designates the wizard’s practice of staying outdoorsfor the night in the course of his profession. The actis performed to gather knowledge of the future—eflaútiseta ok leita spádóms—and is considered afelony or crime. And we may understand that thewizard of Germanic society reached in his lonelyvigil contact with the superhuman as does theangakoq of the Eskimos, visited by Torngarsukwhile ‘sitting on a stone’.

Inspiration may also be gained by sitting on amound—sitja á haugi. After a night of sleeping on amound an Icelandic shepherd gained the gift ofpoetic creativity.

While the instances above depict techniques ofseeking specific visions or knowledge the episodeof an Eddic poem shows how a whole new form ofbeing is granted to a man through forces that havecome to him through wind and air. The lad was, inhis early youth, mute and without a name. One day,while sitting on a mound, he noticed that a train ofshining maidens was riding through the clouds; oneof them came to him to bestow these gifts: a name,the power of speech, and a sword. That practicesmeant to gain manhood, i.e. a new state of con-sciousness, were associated in Norse tradition witha stay in uncultivated places may be surmised froma sentence of Landnámabók; here a man was ledinto a certain cave of Iceland before attaining the‘rank of man’.

2. Trolls and giants as representatives of nature

This point hardly needs belaboring. Trolls andgiants are the powers of úlgarthar, for they dwelloutside of the settlements of men in the stones andcrags, the caves and glaziers of the mountainside.Theirs is an especially close alliance with the weather,with storms and snow, and frost and winds. In Norsemyth the wind arises because a giant in the shape ofan eagle flaps his wings. A saga giant will fre-quently manipulate the weather to gain his end; hethus may send a storm to wreck the boat of sail-ors near his shore. The troll-woman ThorgerthrHölgabrúthr created a hailstorm so that her friendmight win his battle (The Saga of the Jomsvikings).The giant Gusir was observed as he was moving in awhirl of snow (Ketils saga hœngs), and Thorri, agiant and a king in a legendary saga, sends snow for‘good skiing’ if he is favorably inclined (HversuNoregr byggthist).

Winds may rise and darkness fall, just before ahuman meets a giant. The young Icelandic lad Oddrthus found himself in darkness, frost, and drifts ofsnow as he was about to meet the giant Bárthr(Bárthar saga Snœfellsáss). Rain and hail descendedjust before the heroes Hjálmthér and Ölvir encoun-tered the giantess Skinnhúfa (Hjálmthés saga okÖlvis). The Icelander Thorsteinn experienced anagony of cold before he faced the giant Grámann(Ármanns saga inn fyrri). The modern Germannoun Windsbraul for ‘whirlwind’ shows that in folkbelief storm and wind may be visualized in the formof a witch.

We may be quite sure that the giants speak tomen, like Sila of the Eskimos, ‘by storm and snowand rain and the fury of the sea’.

3. Trolls and giants as source of knowledge andinspiration

Óthinn learned nine important magic songsfrom the giant Bolborn, his maternal uncle(Hávamál). The goddess Freyja approached Hyndla,a troll-woman living in a cave, to learn from her thegenealogy of her human friend Óttar. And shereceived the information (Hyndlulióth). Though theEddic poem Vafthrúthnismál ostensibly presents acontest between Óthinn and a giant, much informa-tion, concerning matters of the cosmos, is dispensedby Vafthrúthnir in the course of the event.

Young Oddr acquired so much legal knowl-edge from the giant Bárthr that he became thegreatest lawyer of his generation (Bárthar sagaSnœfellsáss). The warrior Thorsteinn learned manyskills from his giant mistress (Thorsteins sagaGeirnefjufóstra), while another man, namedThorsteinn, was taught so well by a giant womanand her daughters in the arts of courtly accomplish-ment that none could rival him in these matters(Ármanns saga inn fyrri); and the giant Ármannoffered valuable advice in the lawsuit of an Ice-landic farmer (Ármanns saga inn fyrri). Bárthr, whohimself was a giant, was introduced to magic skills,knowledge of genealogy, sorcerers’ chants, and theold magic lore by the giant Dofri (Bárthar sagaSnœfellsáss). This giant was also said to be theteacher of the historical king Harald Finehair and hein structed him in learning—frœthi—and accom-plishments—íthróttir. The giantess Menglöth ap-peared to Ormr in a dream and advised him on hisfuture battle (Orms tháttr Stórólfssonar), while thegiantess Brana came to Hálfdan in a dream toremind him of a pledge he had forgotten (Hálfdanarsaga Brönufóstra). The hero Hadingus was sent for

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his education to the giant Vagnhofthus and heincreased much in strength and skill, as reported bySaxo Grammaticus.

Trolls and giants, who are themselves, as wehave seen, wise and versed in magic crafts, thusappear in teaching and counseling, and, in dreams,in helping and admonishment.

4. The inspirational meeting between troll andhuman in the wilderness

The útiseta, the magician’s stay outside ofhuman dwellings, is performed, as it is overtlystated, so that the trolls may be aroused—útisetur atvekja troll upp. The trolls thus are, in this practice,the superhuman forces of the natural environmentwhom the Norse magician wishes to approach, asthe angakoq wishes to approach the mighty Sila.

In most instances, cited under 3, knowledgeis imparted and instruction conducted in theuncultivated space of the giant’s realm. Oddr spenta winter in his teacher’s cave. Thorsteinn lived withGeirnefja as her lover while she taught him, and theother Thorsteinn resided with three giant women. Ina mountain cave young Bárthr became acquaintedwith the many magic powers and the wisdom of thegiant Dofri. And young Harald, later king of Nor-way, spent five years in this giant’s cave.

Frequently the hero gains, through his meetingwith the troll, usually a troll-woman, a superhumanfriend who will help him in time of need in his lateradventures. The giantess Mána came to Sörli’srescue when he was threatened by the anger of aqueen (Sörla saga slerka), and the giantess Fálarushed to fight at Gunnar’s side against an entirehorde of trolls (Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls). Thegiantess Skinnhúfa killed a monstrous whale whichhad threatened her human friend (Hjálmthés sagaok Ölvis), and the giant woman Brana arrived tosave Hálfdan from the fires of a blazing hall(Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra). A troll-woman, rid-ing on a wolf, offered to become the fylgja, thelifelong and loyal guardian force, of the war-rior Heth inn.

After the encounter with the troll some heroesof the legendary sagas are given a new by-name asthe fosterson of the respective spirit. In this wayHálfdan became the Fosterling of Brana, Illugi theFosterling of Gríthr, and Thorsteinn the Fosterlingof Geirnefja. King Harald Finehair was also knownas the Fosterling of Dofri. It is clear that receiving anew name, which he will bear throughout his future

life, marks a decisive change in the being of aperson, the reaching of a new stage, the acquisitionof an altered identity. And this event is occasioned,in the cases cited, by the man’s stay with the troll inthe troll’s environment.

Let us summarize our argument: we cannotdoubt that in north-Germanic tradition men arebelieved to gain temporary or lasting wisdom orinspiration by meeting with forces of the wilderness(1); it is also clear that trolls and giants representsuch forces, especially those of wind and weather(2); trolls and giants, themselves deeply versed inmagic wisdom, may generously give of their knowl-edge (3); an encounter of a human hero with a troll,in the troll’s environment, and its impact is alsofrequently noted in the Old Icelandic texts (4).

We may, however, raise some questions con-cerning the latest category and wonder if the Norsehero’s friendship with the troll is indeed of the samekind as the Eskimo shaman’s contact with his god.Let us consider these events more closely.

The Eskimo’s experience in the solitude of thearctic waste initiates him into his craft. He leavesthe place of contact as a profoundly altered being, aman with a new identity. The Norse hero’s experi-ence in a giant’s cave also leaves him as an alteredbeing. The possession of a helping spirit has added anew dimension to his person; he may, furthermore,be protected in his future adventures by a magic giftreceived from his superhuman friend, as is Hálfdanby the corselet Brönunautr. Sometimes, as in thecase of Illugi Grítharfóstri, he goes forth as onewhose mettle has been tested, for Illugi’s couragedid not falter even at the moment of the greatestperil. At times a new by-name marks him as a mantested or instructed by a superhuman creature in thewilderness.

The initiatory nature of the Norse episodes isalso underlined by the events preceding the adven-ture. The Eskimo shaman cannot attain his vision-ary powers without enduring suffering so great thatit may endanger his physical existence. The sagahero in his turn is subjected to hardship and to pain.His ship may have drifted aimlessly, for weeks ormonths, in fog and darkness, before it was shatteredon the rocks; he may be the sole survivor on thecliffs (Ásmundar saga Atlasonar). He may havebeen wounded and lie close to death on the battleground. He may be on the point of drowning, as wasThorsteinn of Thorsteins saga Víkingssonar, orworn to exhaustion by the cold as was Thorsteinn ofÁrmanns saga inn fyrri.

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The initiatory pattern of the saga hero’s adven-ture would allow us to place it generically with theinitiatory encounter of the angakoq. We must admit,however, that the experience in the arctic ice is partof the tradition of a living faith while the útiseta ofthe sorcerer belongs with forbidden practices, andthe episode concerning the Norse hero and the trollis embedded in fictional or semi-fictional tales. Wemay wonder in what way information from suchsources may be related to religious beliefs. Clearlythe magician’s practices, though forbidden in Chris-tian time, had been part of pre-Christian faith and itsmanifestations persisted, as we may note, after theconversion.

We do not know, however, to what extent thesagas mirror a believed reality. They clearly havepreserved a tale of a man’s meeting with an elemen-tal power in the wasteland and its impact on hispersonality. To the extent to which there was beliefin the actual existence of the hero there also musthave been belief, at least at one time, in the reality ofhis adventures. That such a faith was likely and thatit had, actually, not completely vanished, is sup-ported by the fact that the medieval king HaraldFinehair bore, among others, the title Fosterson of(the giant) Dofri. The assumption might have beenthat to be a real king or a real hero one must have hadthe tutelage of an elemental force of nature.

If the arguments brought forth allow us tounderstand that the thought pattern here discussedis, in essence, the same in Eskimo and in Norsetradition then we may also understand the similarityof linguistic dynamics, the equation of Sila withintelligence and the equation of the ‘troll’s wind’with the human mind, for in meeting with the trollthe hero acquired his hugr, his aware and conscioussoul. That the meaning ‘courage’ recurs among thekennings is in keeping with the destiny and roleawaiting the young warrior of the northern lands.

Source: Lotte Motz, “The Storm of Troll-Women,” in Maalog Minne, Vol. 1–2, 1988, pp. 31–41.

Lee M. HollanderLee M. Hollander, in this article from The

Poetic Edda, attributes the preservation of the Teu-tonic race’s literary heritage to the early Christianmissionaries, and specifically, to Iceland, whoseinhabitants contributed greatly to capturing thewonders of the Viking Age, its sagas and Eddic lays.

What the Vedas are for India, and the Homericpoems for the Greek world, that the Edda signifies

for the Teutonic race: it is a repository, in poeticform, of their mythology and much of their heroiclore, bodying forth both the ethical views and thecultural life of the North during late heathen andearly Christian times.

Due to their geographical position, it was thefate of the Scandinavian tribes to succumb later thantheir southern and western neighbors to the revolu-tionary influence of the new world religion, Christi-anity. Before its establishment, they were able tobring to a highly characteristic fruition a civilizationstimulated occasionally, during the centuries pre-ceding, but not overborne by impulses from themore Romanized countries of Europe. Owing to theprevailing use of wood for structural purposes andornamentation, little that is notable was accom-plished and still less has come down to us from thatperiod, though a definite style had been evolved inwood-carving, shipbuilding and bronze work, andadmirable examples of these have indeed beenunearthed. But the surging life of the Viking Age—restless, intrepid, masculine as few have been in theworld’s history—found magnificent expression in aliterature which may take its place honorably besideother national literatures.

For the preservation of these treasures in writ-ten form we are, to be sure, indebted to Christianity;it was the missionary who brought with him toScandinavia the art of writing on parchment withconnected letters. The Runic alphabet was unsuitedfor that task.

But just as fire and sword wrought more con-versions in the Merovingian kingdom, in Germany,and in England, than did peaceful, missionary activ-ity so too in the North; and little would have beenheard of sagas, Eddic lays, and skaldic poetry had itnot been for the fortunate existence of the politicalrefuge of remote Iceland.

Founded toward the end of the heathen period(ca. 870) by Norwegian nobles and yeomen whofled their native land when King Harald Fairhairsought to impose on them his sovereignty and tolevy tribute, this colony long preserved and fosteredthe cultural traditions which connected it with theScandinavian soil. Indeed, for several centuries itremained an oligarchy of families intensely proudof their ancestry and jealous of their cultural heri-tage. Even when Christianity was finally introducedand adopted as the state religion by legislativedecision (1000 A.D.), there was no sudden break, aswas more generally the case elsewhere. This waspartly because of the absence of religious fanati-

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cism, partly because of the isolation of the country,which rendered impracticable for a long time anystricter enforcement of Church discipline in mattersof faith and of living.

The art of writing, which came in with the newreligion, was enthusiastically cultivated for the com-mitting to parchment of the lays, the laws, and thelore of olden times, especially of the heroic andromantic past immediately preceding and followingthe settlement of the island. Even after Christianitygot to be firmly established, by and by, wealthyfreeholders and clerics of leisure devoted them-selves to accumulating and combining into “sagas,”the traditions of heathen times which had beencurrent orally, and to collecting the lays about thegods and heroes which were still remembered —indeed, they would compose new ones in imitationof them. Thus, gradually came into being hugecodices which were reckoned among the most cher-ished possessions of Icelandic families. By about1200 the Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, al-ready speaks in praise of the unflagging zeal of theIcelanders in this matter.

The greatest name in this early Icelandic Ren-aissance (as it has been called) is that of SnorriSturluson (1178–1241), the powerful chieftain andgreat scholar, to whom we owe the Heimskringla, orThe History of the Norwegian Kings, and the SnorraEdda—about which more later—but he stands byno means alone. And thanks also to the fact that thelanguage had undergone hardly a change during theMiddle Ages, this antiquarian activity was contin-ued uninterruptedly down into the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries, when it was met and reinforcedby the Nordic Renaissance with its romantic interestin the past.

In the meantime the erstwhile independent is-land had passed into the sovereignty of Norway and,with that country, into that of Denmark, then at thezenith of its power. In the search for the origins ofDanish greatness it was soon understood that aknowledge of the earlier history of Scandinaviadepended altogether on the information containedin the Icelandic manuscripts. In the preface toSaxo’s Historia Danica, edited by the Danish hu-manist Christiern Pedersen in the beginning of thesixteenth century, antiquarians found stated in somany words that to a large extent his work is basedon Icelandic sources, at least for the earliest times.To make these sources more accessible, toward theend of the sixteenth century, the learned Norwegian,Peder Claussön, translated the Heimskringla, which,

The whole is in one firm,

legible hand which

paleologists agree in assigning

to an Icelander of the last

half of the thirteenth century.

He must have copied it from,

it seems, at least two

manuscripts for the nature of

a number of scribal errors

shows that he did not write

from memory or from

dictation.’’

with the kings of Norway in the foreground, tells ofScandinavian history from the earliest times downto the end of the twelfth century.

Since it was well known that many valuablemanuscripts still existed in Iceland, collectors has-tened to gather them although the Icelandic free-holders “brooded over them like the dragon on hisgold,” as one contemporary remarked. As extremegood fortune would have it, the Danish kings thenruling, especially Fredric III, were liberal and intel-ligent monarchs who did much to further literatureand science. The latter king expressly enjoined hisbishop in Iceland, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, a notedantiquarian, to gather for the Royal Library, thenfounded, all manuscripts he could lay hold of. As aresult, this collection now houses the greatest manu-script treasures of Northern antiquity. And the foun-dations of other great manuscript collections, suchas those of the Royal Library of Sweden and thelibraries of the Universities of Copenhagen andUppsala, were laid at about the same time.

This collecting zeal of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries may almost be called providen-tial. It preserved from destruction the treasures,which the Age of Enlightenment and Utilitarianismfollowing was to look upon as relics of barbar-ian antecedents best forgotten, until Romanticismagain invested the dim past of Germanic antiquitywith glamor.

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The god Thor, whose name meansthunder, is probably the most well-known figure in all of Germanicmythology.

At the height of this generous interest in thepast a learned Icelander, Arngrímur Jónsson, sentthe manuscript of what is now known as SnorraEdda or The Prose Edda (now called CodexWormianus), to his Danish friend Ole Worm. Knowl-edge of this famous work of Snorri’s had, it seemed,virtually disappeared in Iceland. Its author was atfirst supposed to be that fabled father of Icelandichistoriography, Sæmundr Sigfússon (1056–1133),of whose learning the most exaggerated notionswere then current. A closer study of sources gradu-ally undermined this view in favor of Snorri; and hisauthorship became a certainty with the finding ofthe Codex Upsaliensis of the Snorra Edda, which isprefaced by the remark that it was compiled by Snorri.

To all intents and purposes this Edda of Snorri’sis a textbook—one of the most original and enter-taining ever written. In it is set forth in dialogueform the substance and technique (as we should say)of skaldship, brought conveniently together for thebenefit of those aspiring to the practice of theart. The first part, called “Gylfaginning” or “TheDuping of Gylfi,” furnishes a survey of Northernmythology and cosmogony; the second, called

“Skaldskaparmál” or “The Language of Skaldship,”deals with the subject of “kennings,” whose originis explained by quotations from skaldic poems andother lore; the third, called “Háttatal” or “TheEnumeration of hættir (metres),” contains Snorri’sencomiastic poem, in 102 stanzas, on King Hákonand Duke Skúli, exemplifying as many metres em-ployed in skaldship and giving explanations of thetechnical aspects of the skaldic art.

Among the scholars eagerly scanning this pre-cious find the conviction soon made itself felt thatthe material in it was not original with Snorri: theysaw that much of the first two books was on the faceof it a group of synopses from older poetic sourceswhich, in their turn, investigators ascribed toSæmundr. Hence when that lucky manuscript hunter,Bishop Brynjólfur, discovered (about 1643) theunique and priceless codex containing what we nowcall The Poetic Edda, it was but natural that heshould conclude this to be “The Edda of Sæmundr,”whose existence had already been inferred theoreti-cally. And this conclusion was unhesitatingly sub-scribed to by all, down to modern times. The fact is,though, that the connection of Sæmundr with ThePoetic Edda has no documentary evidence what-ever. Moreover, it is inherently improbable.

But, since the great bulk of poems which wehave come to regard as “Eddic” is handed downprecisely in this manuscript, and since we lack anyother collective title, the name of Edda, whichproperly belongs to Snorri’s work, has been re-tained for all similar works. We know with a fairdegree of certainty that Snorri himself named hishandbook of poetics “Edda”; but as to the meaningof this word we are dependent on conjecture.

Quite early, the name was taken to be identicalwith that of Edda, who was progenitress of the raceof thralls according to “The Lay of Ríg,” and whosename means “great-grandmother.” This identifica-tion was adopted by the great Jakob Grimm who,with his brother Wilhelm, was one of the first toundertake a scientific edition of part of the collec-tion. In the taste of Romanticism he poeticallyinterpreted the title as the ancestral mother of man-kind sitting in the circle of her children, instructingthem in the lore and learning of the hoary past.However, as it happens, Snorri did not, in all likeli-hood, know “The Lay of Ríg”; nor does this fancifulinterpretation agree at all with the prosy manner inwhich the Icelanders were accustomed to name theirmanuscripts, or—for that matter—with the purposeand nature of Snorri’s work. It is altogether untenable.

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Another explanation was propounded early inthe eighteenth century by the Icelandic scholar,Árni Magnússon, and has been accepted by many.According to him, Edda means “poetics”—a titlewhich (from a modern point of view) would seememinently fitting for Snorri’s work. Later scholars,who have provided a more solid philological under-pinning for this theory than Arni was able to, alsopoint out that the simplex óðr, from which Eddamay be derived, signifies “reason,” “soul” and hence“soulful utterance,” “poem,” agrees excellently,etymologically and semantically, with the relatedLatin vates and the Old Irish faith, “seer,” “poet.”Nevertheless, this explanation does not quite sat-isfy, for the word “Edda” in the meaning “poetics”is nowhere attested before the middle of the four-teenth century.

The simplest theory, agreeing best with thematter-of-fact Icelandic style of naming their writ-ings, is the proposal of the Icelandic-English scholar,Eirík Magnússon. He reminded us that Edda maymean “the Book of Oddi.” This was the name of therenowned and historic parsonage in southwest Ice-land which under that remarkable mind, SæmundrSigfússon, had become a center of learning whitherflocked gifted youths eager for historical or clericalinstruction. After his death, in 1133, the estate,continuing to prosper, kept up its tradition forlearning under his two sons, and especially underhis grandson, the wise and powerful chieftain, JónLoptsson. It was he who fostered and tutored thethree-year-old Snorri and under whose roof the boylived until his nineteenth year. What is more likelythan that Oddi with its traditions and associationsplayed a profound role in Snorri’s entire develop-ment? To be sure, whether Snorri wrote his workthere in later years, whether he gave it the title ingrateful recognition of the inspiration there re-ceived, or whether he wished thus to indicate anindebtedness to manuscript collections of poemsowned at Oddi—these are mere surmises.

Magnússon, indeed, believed that Snorri, whilein Oddi, had used a manuscript containing about allthe lays comprised in the codex found by BishopBrynjólfur, and from them made the synopses foundin the “Gylfaginning.” In this he was mistakenhowever; for it seems well-established now thatSnorri could have had before him only “Voluspá,”“Vafthrúonismál,” and “Grímnismál.”

Subsequent finds added a few lays of Eddicquality to those preserved in Brynjólf’s codex,which thus remains our chief source for them. This

famous manuscript, now known as Codex RegiusNo. 2365 of the Royal Library of Denmark, is asmall quarto volume consisting of forty-five sheetsclosely covered with writing. No distinction is madebetween prose and poetry, except that the beginningof every lay is marked off by a large colored initial,and every stanza, by a smaller one. The whole is inone firm, legible hand which paleologists agree inassigning to an Icelander of the last half of thethirteenth century. He must have copied it from, itseems, at least two manuscripts for the nature of anumber of scribal errors shows that he did not writefrom memory or from dictation. Paleographic evi-dence furthermore shows that these postulated manu-scripts themselves cannot have been older than thebeginning of the thirteenth century; also, that theymust have been written by different scribes, forthere is a distinct paleographic and orthographicboundary between “Alvíssmál,” the last of the mytho-logical lays in Regius, and the heroic lays. We knownothing concerning the provenience of this pricelesscollection, not even where it was preserved whenBishop Brynjólfur found it. As to the date when thelays were first collected, various considerationsmake it probable that this occurred not earlier thanthe middle of the thirteenth century.

Next in importance to the Regius comes themanuscript Fragment 748 of the ArnamagnæanCollection of the Copenhagen University Library,dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century.Among other matters it contains, in a slightly differ-ent form and in a divergent order, part of “The Layof Hárbarth,” “Baldr’s Dreams” (for which it is thesole source), part of “The Lay of Skírnir,” “The Layof Grímnir,” “The Lay of Hymir,” and part of “TheLay of Volund .” For all the differences between themanuscripts, scholars are unanimous in holding thatit derives, ultimately, from the same source asRegius. The different ordering of the two collec-tions may be due to the various lays having beenhanded down on single parchment leaves, which thescribe of Regius arranged as he saw fit. He no doubtwas the author of the connecting prose links.

The large Manuscript Codex No. 544 of theArnamagnæan Collection, called Hauksbók fromthe fact that most of it was written by the Icelandicjudge, Haukr Erlendsson, about the beginning of thefourteenth century, is important for Eddic study inthat it supplies us with another redaction of “TheProphecy of the Seeress.”

For “The Lay of Ríg” we are entirely dependenton the Codex Wormianus of the Snorra Edda (re-

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ferred to above) written in the second half of thefourteenth century, where it is found on the last page.

The huge Codex No. 1005 folio of the RoyalLibrary, known as the Flateyjarbók because Brynjól-fur Sveinsson obtained it from a farmer on thesmall island of Flatey, is the source for “The Layof Hyndla.”

“The Lay of Grotti” occurs only in the CodexRegius manuscript No. 2367 of the Snorra Edda,dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century,where the poem is cited in illustration of a kenningbased on the Grotti myth.

There exists also a considerable number ofpaper manuscripts of the collection; but aside fromthe fact that some of them contain the undoubtedlygenuine “Lay of Svipdag,” not found in earliermanuscripts, they are of no importance since theyall date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries and are essentially derived from the samesource as Regius, if not from that collection itself.To be sure, they bear eloquent testimony to thecontinued interest of Icelanders in these poems.

The Eddic lays which are found in these manu-scripts, utterly diverse though they be in manyrespects, still have in common three important char-acteristics which mark them off from the great bodyof skaldic poetry: their matter is the mythology, theethical conceptions, and the heroic lore of the an-cient North; they are all composed in a compara-tively simple style, and in the simplest measures;and, like the later folk songs and ballads, they areanonymous and objective, never betraying the feel-ings or attitudes of their authors. This unity inapparent diversity was no doubt felt by the unknowncollector who gathered together all the lays andpoetical fragments which lived in his memory orwere already committed to writing.

A well thought-out plan is evident in the order-ing of the whole. In the first place, the mythic anddidactic lays are held apart from the heroic, andthose of each group disposed in a sensible order.

The opening chord is struck by the majestic“Prophecy of the Seeress,” as the most completebodying forth of the Old Norse conceptions of theworld, its origin and its future. There follow threepoems, in the main didactic, dealing chiefly with thewisdom of the supreme god, Óthin (the lays of Hár,of Vafthrúthnir, of Grímnir); then one about theancient fertility god, Frey (“The Lay of Skírnir”);five in which Thór plays the predominant, or at leasta prominent, part (the lays of Hárbarth, of Hymir, of

Loki, of Thrym, of Alvís). The poems following inthe present translation (“Baldr’s Dreams,” the laysof Ríg, of Hyndla, of Svipdag, of Grotti) are, it willbe remembered, not contained in Regius.

The Heroic lays are found arranged in chrono-logical order, as far as feasible, and joined by ProseLinks so that the several smaller cycles form onelarge interconnected cycle. The procedure is espe-cially clear in the case of the Niflung Cycle. Notonly has the Collector been at pains to join thefrequently parallel lays, but he tries hard to rec-oncile contradictory statements. Connection withthe Helgi Cycle is effected by making HelgiHundingsbani a son of the Volsung, Sigmund. Thetragic figure of Queen Guthrún then links the NiflungCycle with the Ermanarich lays (“Guthrún’s La-ment,” “The Lay of Hamthir”).

There has been a great deal of discussion as tothe authenticity and age of the Prose of the Collec-tion, but it is clear now that (excepting the pieceabout “Sinfjotli’s Death,” which no doubt is a proserendering of a lay now lost) the Prose Links for themost part add nothing, or very little, of independentvalue—nothing, indeed, which could not have beeninferred from the poems themselves. We shall hardlyerr in attributing these links to the intelligent, butnot very gifted, compiler of the Collection.

The case is somewhat different, perhaps, withthe narrative which binds together the fragments of“The Lay of Helgi Hjorvarthsson” and those of“The Second Lay of Helgi,” and with the ProseLinks of the Sigurth Cycle from “The Lay of Regin”to “Brynhild’s Ride to Hel.” Especially the lattergroup notably resembles in manner the genre of theFornaldarsaga —prose with interspersed stanzas—a form exceedingly common in Old Norse literatureand one which, for aught we know, may have beenthe original form in this instance. Still, even here thesuspicion lurks that the Prose is but the apology forstanzas, or whole lays, imperfectly remembered:there is such discrepancy between the clear andnoble stanzas and the frequently muddled and ineptprose as to preclude, it would seem, the thought oftheir being by the same author.

Even greater diversity of opinion obtains con-cerning the age and home of the lays themselves. Aswas stated above, in sharp contradiction to ourknowledge of skaldic poetry, we know nothingabout the author of any Eddic poem. Nay, in only avery few, such as “The Lay of Grípir,” or “TheThird Lay of Guthrún,” can one discern so much asthe literary individuality of the authors. In conso-

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nance with medieval views, they were probably feltto be merely continuators, or elaborators, of legend-ary tradition. Thus, to illustrate by a very clear case:A Gothic lay about the death of Hamthir and Sorli isknown to have existed already in the sixth century.So the person who indited or, perhaps, translated, orpossibly, added to such a song could not well layclaim to be an “inventor” and hence worthy of beingremembered. Skaldic art, on the other hand, mayalso deal with myth and legendary lore or allude toit; but—note well—skaldic poems do not narratedirectly, though some do describe in detail pictorialrepresentations of scenes from mythology or leg-endary history. Hence, there the author is faithfullyrecorded if we owe him but a single stanza; just aswas the troubadour and the minnesinger, in contrastwith the anonymity of the chansons de geste and theGerman folk epics.

Thus it is that we are entirely dependent oninternal evidence for the determination of the ageand the origin of the Eddic poems, individually andcollectively. And here experience has taught that wemust sharply differentiate between the subject mat-ter of the poems and the form in which they havebeen handed down to us. Failure to do so wasresponsible for some fantastic theories, such as theuncritical notions of the Renaissance, that the po-ems harked back to the Old Germanic songs inpraise of the gods of Tuisco and Mannus, or else tothe barditus, as Tacitus calls the terrifying warsongs of the ancient Teutons, and the speculationsof the Age of Romanticism which claimed the Eddicpoems as the earliest emanations of the Spirit of theGermanic North, if not of all German tribes, andwould date them variously from the fifth to theeighth century.

It was not until the latter third of the nineteenthcentury, when the necessary advances in linguisticknowledge and philological method had been made,that it was established beyond contradiction that theEddic poems have West Norse speech forms; that is,that they are composed in the language that wasspoken only during and after the Viking Age (ca.800–1050 A.D.), in Norway, Iceland, and the otherNorwegian colonies in the Atlantic, and hence, intheir present shape, could have originated onlythere. In the second place, they can under no cir-cumstance be older than about 700 A.D.—most ofthem are much later—because it has been shownexperimentally that the introduction of older (Runic)forms of the Old Norse language would largelydestroy the metric structure. This date a quo isadmirably corroborated by comparison with the

Loki the trickster, another commonlyknown Norse figure, is shown herehelping Höd aim the arrow that causedthe death of Balder.

language of the oldest skaldic poems, whose age isdefinitely known.

More general considerations make it plausiblethat even the oldest of the lays could hardly haveoriginated before the ninth century. Of the Heroiclays precisely those which also appear in other waysto be the oldest breathe the enterprising, warlikespirit of the Viking Age, with its stern fatalism;while the later ones as unmistakably betray thesoftening which one would expect from the Chris-tian influences increasingly permeating the latertimes. And the Mythical lays, by and large, bespeaka period when belief in the gods was disintegrating,thanks to contact with the same influences. Inparticular, “The Seeress’ Prophecy” reads like thetroubled vision of one rooted in the ancient tradi-tions who is sorrowfully contemplating the demor-alization of his times (which we know a change offaith always entails) and who looks doubtfully to abetter future.

There is also the testimony of legendary devel-opment. To touch on only one phase of the matter:we do not know when the Volsung and Nibelunglegends were first carried to Norway, but sparing

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allusions in the oldest skaldic verses from the earlyninth century would point to the seventh or eighthcentury, thus allowing several generations for thecomplete assimilation and characteristic Northerntransformation of the material. Some lays, however,show traits of a legendary development which hadnot taken place in Germany before the ninth centu-ry—in other words, they presuppose another, later,stratum of importation.

Contrary to views formerly held, we now un-derstand that the lays about the gods are, on thewhole, younger than some of the heroic lays, whichin substance (except the Helgi lays) deal with per-sons and events, real or fictive, of the Germanictribes from the Black Sea to the Rhine during theAge of Migrations. In general we may say that,although there is little unanimity among scholars asto the dating of individual lays, the composition ofthe corpus of Eddic poetry can safely be ascribed,not to a single generation, not even to a singlecentury, but to three or four centuries at the very least.

Intimately connected with the question of thedate is that of the home of Eddic poetry. There is fairagreement about only two poems. “Atlamál,” whichis generally allowed to be of Greenlandish origin,and “ The Prophecy of Grípir,” which no doubt wascomposed by an Icelander of the twelfth century orlater who had before him a collection of the laysdealing with the Sigurth legends. But a strongdiversity of opinion exists concerning the place oforigin of the bulk of the lays.

For one thing, no evidence can be derived fromthe language because the Old West Norse of theEdda was spoken with scarcely a dialectal variationthroughout the far-flung lands of the North Atlanticlittorals and archipelagoes. Again, all attempts toseek definite and convincing clues in climatic ortopographic references, or in the fauna and floramentioned in the poems, have proved vain. Did theyoriginate in the motherland, Norway, or in Iceland,or in the British or North Atlantic islands?

Those who claim the bulk of the Eddic po-ems for Norway have contended that the relatedSkaldic poetry flourished there especially through-out the tenth century, favored by a period of com-parative calm following the organization of therealm by Harald Fairhair; whereas Iceland, from itsfirst settlement down to the beginning of the elev-enth century, was in a condition of constant tur-moil which could not have favored the rise of abody of literature like that of The Edda. Undeni-ably, Norway furnishes the cultural background for

the Weltanschauung of nearly all of the poems,mythologic, gnomic, and heroic. In every respecttheir milieu is that of a cold, mountainous land bythe sea. One, “The Lay of Hyndla,” may refer to aNorwegian princely race; another, “The Lay ofRíig,” glorifies the institution of monarchy based onan aristocracy; both poems but poorly agree withIcelandic, republican conditions.

The theory of origin in the British Islandssettled by Norwegians—the Orkneys, the ShetlandIslands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, and thelittoral of Ireland, Scotland, and Northern England,is based on several considerations. These regionsfurnish precisely the stage where the rude Vikingsfirst came in contact with the cultural conditions of amore advanced kind already deeply infused withRoman and Christian elements. Indeed some Celticinfluences are seen in the apparel, the architecture,and the wood carving of ancient Scandinavia. Inliterature the saga, and possibly also skaldic verse,were thought to owe their inception to Irish im-pulses. Also a small number of both mythical andheroic motifs occurring in the Edda may havecongeners in the British Islands. Now, most of theseclaims are discounted by modern scholarship.

Those who argue Icelandic origin admit thatAnglo-Celtic influences are evident, but insist thatthis can be amply accounted for by the fact that avery large proportion of Icelandic settlers had comefrom Norway by way of the North British Islandsand littoral where they had sojourned for shorter orlonger periods, frequently even wintering, andwhence they had brought with them a goodly num-ber of Celtic slaves and freedmen. Also, on theirreturn journeys to the motherland they frequentlytouched at North British, and especially at Irish,trading towns, interchanging goods and ideas. As tothe milieu being that of a cold, mountainous land,this holds of course also for Iceland. There, thegeneral state of unrest attending the first timeswas by no means unfavorable to the intense culti-vation of the skaldic art—witness such poets asEgil Skallagrímsson, Hallfrœth Óttarsson, SighvatThórtharson, not to mention scores of others—andhence probably was no more unfavorable to condi-tions for the inditing of Eddic lays. The first familiesof Iceland were notably proud of their origin fromthe princely races of the motherland—whence thearistocratic note of some lays. Indeed the wholepeople clung to their cultural traditions all the moretenaciously for being separated from their originalhomes. In general, the defenders of Icelandic originwould put the burden of proof on those who contend

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that the Eddic lays did not take at least their final,distinctive shape in the land where arose, and wasperptuated, virtually all of Old Norse literature.Certainly, the later poems definitely point to Ice-land. On the other hand this does not preclude anumber of stanzas, particularly the gnomic onesrepresenting the stored wisdom of the race, fromhaving originated in Norway.

Of late the Norwegian paleographer Seip hasendeavored to demonstrate, on the basis of a num-ber of Norwegianisms in Codex Regius, that all theEddic lays were originally composed in Norway.Other scholars would ascribe these to a pervadinginfluence from the motherland, since several manu-scripts of unquestionable Icelandic origin alsoshow Norwegianisms.

All this raises the question as to the ultimatesource, or sources, of the matter of the Eddic poems.Were they all or partly indigenous to Scandinavia?

With regard to the mythological poems weshall probably never know, though here and therewe seem to glimpse a connection with classical ororiental legends. But in all cases the matter hasundergone such a sea change that we never getbeyond the verdict “perhaps.”

With the Helgi poems we are on somewhatfirmer ground. The Vendel Period of Scandinavianhegemony (550–800) in the north of Europe, at-tested by innumerable archeological finds in thewestern Baltic lands, may well have been accompa-nied by a flourishing poetic literature of which theselays (and Bēowulf) may be remnants.

The matter of the Niflung cycle undoubtedly isof German (Burgundian) provenience; and muchhas been made by German scholars of faint Southand West Germanic traces in the style and languageof the lays dealing with the Gjúkungs, Sigurth, andAtli. But whether these stories were transmitted tothe North in poetic form or only there received theircharacteristic aspects, that is another question. Thefact that only on Scandinavian soil did a rich litera-ture actually arise as early as the ninth century,although its origins date even further back, wouldseem to speak for the latter assumption. But in thecase of the retrospective and elegiac monologuepoems it has been convincingly demonstrated thatthey share many motifs, phrases, even vocables,with what must have been the forerunners of theDanish ballads.

One of the distinguishing features of Eddic, asagainst skaldic, poetry is its comparative simplicity

of style and diction. This is true notwithstanding thefact that we have to deal with poems different insubject matter and structure and composed by dif-ferent poets working centuries apart. Essentially,the style is akin to that of the alliterative poetry ofthe other Old Germanic tribes, especially in the useof kennings and the retarding devices of variationand parenthetical phrases. It is to the employment,rather more extensive than usual, of these stylisticfeatures that Old Norse poetic style owes its pecul-iar physiognomy which, in skaldic art, becomesmost pronounced.

The figure of speech called a “kenning” is akind of condensed metaphorical expression. It mostoften contains a real, or implied, comparison, or elsedefines a concept with reference to something else.Thus, a ship (which may be thought of as gallopingover the waves) is called a “sailsteed”; a warrior, a“helm-tree” because, helm-clad, he stands proudlyerect like a tree, braving the “shower-of-arrows” (asthe battle is designated for obvious reasons). Orinstead of naming a person or object directly, thereis a reference to somebody, or something, else.Thór, for example, is called, simply, “Sif’s hus-band,” or “Hrungnir’s bane,” or in allusion to histypical activity, “Breaker-of-thurs-heads.” Similarly,blood is termed “dew-of-wounds” or “dew-of-sor-row”; gold, “the burthen-of-Grani” (Sigurth’s steedwhich bears away the Niflung hoard); a prince, mostoften “breaker-of-rings,” “reddener-of-swords,” orsimilar names, referring to the two qualities mosthighly admired in rulers—generosity and bravery.

Figures like these are common to the poeticspeech of all races and all times. The importantdifference is that whereas elsewhere they are coinedad hoc, as the situation demands, and struck in theheat of poetic fervor, in Old Germanic, and particu-larly Old Norse, poetry they have become stereo-typed; that is, entirely independent of the situationin hand, and hence are apt, at first, to appear to usfarfetched and frigid, until by longer acquaintancewe arrive at the deeper insight that they are part andparcel of a style, like the ever-recurring “dragonmotif” of Scandinavian carvings.

In skaldic poetry the systematic and unlimiteduse of kennings marks that type of composition offfrom anything known elsewhere in world literature.Only two Eddic lays, “The Lay of Hymir” and “ TheFirst Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani,” show a fre-quency of kennings approaching skaldic usage fromafar. In “The Lay of Alvís” the express didacticpurpose is to cultivate copiousness of diction by

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enumerating the “unknown names” (heiti) and ken-nings by which common objects may be designated.

Although somewhat less prominent, variationor parallelism is a stylistic device characteristic ofall Old Germanic poetry—as it is, indeed, of thepoetry of many nations. Only the more importantfeatures will be enumerated here, especially such ascome out clearly in a somewhat faithful translation.There is variation of words, of conceptions, ofverses; and there is refrain.

The variation of words (synonymic variation),more particularly found in gnomic poetry, is on thewhole not frequent in The Edda. The followingstanza will furnish an example:

With his friend a man should be friends ever,and pay back gift for gift;laughter for laughter he learn to give,and eke lesing for lies.

More frequent, and also more characteristic, isthe repetition of related, or contrasting, concep-tions. These are usually joined by alliteration, andoccasionally by rime, so as to form together a half-line. Thus: “bark nor bast,” “he gives and grants,”“shalt drivel and dote,” “in wine and in wort,” “whetme or let me.”

Peculiar to Eddic poetry is the repetition, withor without variations, of entire half-lines. One ex-ample for many will suffice:

I issue bore as heirs twain sons,as heirs twain sons to the atheling.

With variation:

I saw but naught said, I saw and thought.

Repetition (with variation) of a full-line occursin the so-called galdralag or “magic measure” ofthe ljthaháttr stanza:

No other drink shalt ever get,wench, at thy will,wench, at my will.

Refrain—for example, the “know ye further, orhow” of “The Seeress’ Prophecy ”—and incremen-tal repetition—especially in the gnomic poetry—are occasionally used with telling effect.

Only less characteristic of skaldic art than theunlimited use of kennings is the employment ofparenthetical phrases—usually containing an ac-companying circumstance. In The Edda the deviceoccurs infrequently, and most often in “The FirstLay of Helgi the Hunding-Slayer,” which also ap-proaches skaldic art in the use of kennings; forexample (Stanza 17):

But high on horseback Hogni’s daughter—was the shield-din lulled—to the lord spoke thus.

In contrast with Old West Germanic poetry,which is stichic, and quite generally uses run-onlines, Old Norse poetry is strophic, the stanzas as arule being of four lines each. Each stanza is mostcommonly divided into two vísuhelmings or “halfstanzas,” by a syntactic cæsura.

This is the rule; but imperfect stanzas occur toofrequently to be explained away in all cases bydefective tradition. It is certainly worth pondering,however, that unexceptional regularity is found, onthe one hand, in poems whose question-answerform offered a mnemotechnic help to preservation,and on the other, in those that belong to the youngeststrata; whereas lays which, for a number of reasons,seem among the oldest—for example, “The Lay ofVolund” and “The Lay of Hamthir”—are quiteirregular in this respect. The inference seems plausi-ble that stanzaic structure was a later and specifi-cally Scandinavian development, the bulk of OldNorse monuments being younger, both chronologi-cally and developmentally, than most West Ger-manic monuments.

Like the mass of Old Germanic poetic monu-ments, the Eddic lays are composed in alliterativeverse; in verse, that is, whose essential principlesare stress and concomitant alliteration.

The rhythmic unit of alliterative verse is the so-called “half-line,” represented in metrics by con-vention as dipodic. These two feet, as will be seen,may be of very different lengths. In the normal half-line there are four or five syllables (very rarelythree) two of which are stressed, the position ofstress depending on the natural sentence accent. Therhythmical stress (and concomitant alliteration) gen-erally requires a long syllable and is conventionallyrepresented thus: ⊥ . However, it may also be borneby two short syllables (“resolved stress”). . .“a salarsteina,” where salar constitutes two short syllables;this may be paralleled by “that etin’s beerhall,” withetin reckoned as two shorts); or else by one shortsyllable immediately following a stressed long syl-lable. . . (see the discussion of rhythmic patternsbelow). In the unstressed syllable, quantity is indif-ferent, marked thus: x.

The juxtaposition of two stresses without inter-vening unstressed syllable, so rarely used in modernpoetry, is not only permitted but is a distinctivefeature in Old Germanic poetry. It gives rise to therhythmic types C and D (see below), where a strong

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primary, or secondary, stress may fall on importantsuffixal or compositional syllables, and on stemsyllables of the second member of compounds: forexample, “es hann vaknathi” (C), “hatimbruthu”(D). The following may serve as English exam-ples: “The sun knew not,” “a hall standeth,” “tilltrustingly.”

Always, two half-lines, each an independentrhythmic unit, are joined together by alliteration toform the “long-line.” Alliteration, or initial rime,consists in an initial consonant alliterating, or rim-ing, with the same consonant (except that sk, sp, andst alliterate only with themselves), and a vowelalliterating with any other vowel; but—note well—alliteration occurs only at the beginning of stressedsyllables. Because the verse is addressed to hearers,not to readers, “eye-rimes” are not permitted. Also,alliteration may be borne only by words of syntacticimportance.

In Old Norse verse, alliterating initial soundsare called stafir, “staves,” the one of the secondhalf-line, hofuthstafr, “main-stave,” governing thewhole line. Somewhat greater latitude is allowed inEddic poetry than in Old English poetry in thematter of the “main-stave” falling only on the firststress of the second half-line. In the first half-line,either stress, or both—they are called stuthlar,“props”—may receive the alliteration.

Beyond stating that alliteration is the bearingprinciple in their verse the ancients made no state-ment about how this verse is to be read. Simpleobservation shows that the alliteration is borne onlyby stressed syllables concomitant with the syntacticimportance of the word, and also that the stress isborne predominantly by nominal elements—nouns,adjectives, and pronouns. As stated earlier, there isagreement among scholars that the half-line isdipodic. But there is divergence of opinion aboutthe disposition and relative stress of the variouselements of the half-line, that is, about its rhythm.

In view of the utter difference between OldGermanic verse and any modern or classic schemeof versification, an adequate comprehension of theprinciples of Old Germanic verse technique is es-sential for the correct reading and understanding—nay, for entering at all into the spirit—of OldGermanic poetry. It is hoped that the reader willacquaint himself with the facts set forth abovebefore attempting to recite Eddic lays—and indeedhe should recite them, for they are meant for the ear,not the eye.

In reciting the Eddic lays it should ever be keptin mind that the strongly expiratory nature of Ger-manic verse demands very strongly stressed sylla-bles, and correspondingly weak or slurred unstressedsyllables. Juxtaposed stresses must by no means beavoided; in fact, type C is of extremely commonoccurrence. We must ever be on the alert, guided bythe alliteration, to ascertain which words or sylla-bles bear the main stress and are, hence, syn-tactically predominant. Thus we must be carefulto read not “who made Mithgarth,” but “whomade Mithgarth.”

The translator has endeavored to follow faith-fully the rules of Eddic metrics above explained—atleast in spirit. Naturally, in an analytic tongue likeEnglish many more particles, pronouns, and prepo-sitions must be used than in the highly inflected OldNorse. A liberal use of anacrusis (upbeats), todispose of them, cannot well be avoided, and thisuse swells the number of syllables countenanced bythe original. This should not, however, interferewith reading half-lines of the same metre in aboutthe same time. Thus, “much that is hoarded andhidden” should not occupy more time than the line“save one only.”

I have followed Sophus Bugge’s text in themain, but by no means always, because, for thepurpose in hand, a somewhat constructive text iscalled for—one not fatuously sceptical of the resultswon by a century of devoted study. I can see noharm in adopting the brilliant emendations of greatscholars, some of them guided by the poet’s insightin solving desperate textual problems, always pro-viding the emendations be shown as such. I haveconsidered it unavoidable to transpose stanzas andlines for the sake of intelligible connection. In fact,this course must be chosen to accomplish anæsthetically satisfying translation of poems which,at best, are strange and difficult for the modernreader, both as to matter and manner. Naturally, notall, or even most, changes could be so indicated.Nor is that called for in a work intended, not as acritical text, but as an interpretation for the studentof literature, of folklore and folkways. Still I havethought it wise to give warning whenever the termsof the translation might give rise to misconceptions.

I hope I shall not be criticized for confiningmyself to the body of poems generally considered ascomprising The Poetic Edda. I am, of course, awareof the existence of other lays fully deserving to beadmitted to the corpus; but neither in this respect nor

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in the ordering of the material was it my intention torival Genzmer-Heusler’s rifacimento.

As to the principles which I have endeavored tofollow, I may be permitted to quote from my pro-gram, “Concerning a Proposed Translation ofThe Edda”:

“… while scouting any rigorously puristic ideas, Iyet hold emphatically that, to give a fair equivalent,Germanic material must be drawn upon to theutmost extent, and later elements used most sparinglyand only whenever indispensable or unavoidable,and even then only after anxiously consideringwhether consonant with the effect of the whole. Thestylistic feeling of the translator must here be thecourt of last instance; … At the same time I do notmean to be squeamish and avoid a given word justbecause it is not found in Anglo-Saxon before thebattle of Hastings, or because I have preconceivednotions about the relative merit of Teutonic andFrench-Latin elements. Any one who has given thematter thought knows that no amount of linguisticcontortions will furnish Germanic equivalents inEnglish for such oft-recurring words as: battle, hero,glory, revenge, defeat, victory, peace, honor, andthe like. Still, wherever possible, Germanic wordsought to be chosen … because of the tang and flavorstill residing in the homelier indigenous speechmaterial…

“Another difficulty: the old Germanic poetry,however scant in content, and in however narrow acircle it moves, is phenomenally rich in vocabulary,and shines with a dazzling array of synonyms forone and the same conception. Scherer has shownhow this state of affairs was brought about bythe very principle of alliteration. … The Eddashows almost all stages in this development shortof the final consummation, from the austere artof the ‘Volundarkvitha’ to the ornate art of the‘Hymiskvitha.’ It stands to reason that to approachthis wealth of synonymic expressions even fromafar, and to avoid the overhanging danger of monot-ony, all the resources of the English vocabularyought to be at one’s disposal. I have, therefore,unhesitatingly had recourse, whenever necessary, toterms fairly common in English balladry; without, Ihope, overloading the page with archaisms.

“The proper rendition of Old Norse propernames presents a knotty problem to the would-betranslator. Shall he translate them all, to the best ofhis knowledge—and that is a difficult task—orsome only, and if so which? Or shall he leave alluntranslated—much the easiest course. Or shall he

try to render only those parts of proper nouns whichare of more general significance? E.g., shall he callthe dwarf, Alvís or Allwise; Thór, Sithgrani’s son orLongbeard’s son; the seeress, Hyndla or Houndling;the localities Gnipalund and Hátun, Cliffholt andHightown? Shall we say Alfheim, Elfham, or Alf-home? Are we to render Skjoldungar, Ylfingar byShieldings and Wolfings? I do not hesitate to saythat on the translator’s tact and skill in meeting thisproblem—for dodge it he cannot—will depend inlarge measure the artistic merit of his work and itsmodicum of palatableness to the modern reader.”

For this reason, absolute consistency in thisrespect was not striven for or even thought desirable.

Source: Lee M. Hollander, “General Introduction,” in ThePoetic Edda, University of Texas Press, 1962, pp. iv–xxix.

SOURCES

Dronke, Ursula, “Art and tradition in Skirnismal,” in Englishand Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkein, edited byN. Davis and C. L. Wrenn, Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1962, pp.250–268, repr. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, “Classical Influence on Early Norse Literature,” inClassical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 500–1500.edited by R. R. Bolgar, Cambridge University Press, 1971,pp. 143–149, repr. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, “Eddic Poetry as a source for the history of Ger-manic religion,” in Germanische Religiosgeschichte. Quellenund Quellemprobleme, edited by H. Beck, D. Elmers, and K.Schier, Walter de Gruyter, 1992, pp. 656–684, repr. Myth andFiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands, VariorumCollected Studies Series CS524, 1996.

———, “Pagan beliefs and Christian impact: The Contribu-tion of Eddic Studies,” in Viking Revaluations. Viking Soci-ety Centenary Symposium, edited by A. Faulkes andR. Perkins, Viking Society for Northern Research, 1993, pp.121–127, repr. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, The Poetic Edda: Volume I Heroic Poems, ClarendonPress, 1969.

———, “The Scope of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale” in ÚrDölum til Dala. Guthbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays,edited by R. McTurk and A. Wawn, Leeds Texts and Mono-graphs New Series 11, Leeds Studies in English, 1989, pp.93–111, repr. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, “Völuspa and satiric tradition,” in Aion XXII, 1979:Studi per Mario Gabrieli Napoli, Istituto UniversitarioOrientale, 1979, pp. 57–86, repr. Myth and Fiction in EarlyNorse Lands.

———, “Völuspa and Sibylline traditions” in Latin Cultureand Medieval Germanic Europe, ed. R. North and T. Hofsta,

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Germania Latina 1, Egbert Forsten, 1971, pp. 3–23, repr.Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

———, “The war of the Aesir and Vanir” in Völuspá Idee,Gestalt, Geschichte. Festschrift Klaus von See, edited byG. W. Weber, Odense University Press, 1988, pp. 223–238,repr. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands.

Nordal, Sigurthur, ed., Völuspa, translated by B. S. Benedikzand John McKinnell, Durham and St. Andrews MedievalTexts 1, 1978.

Sturluson, Snorri, The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse My-thology, translated by Jean I. Young, University of CaliforniaPress, 1966.

FURTHER READING

Byock, Jesse L., The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic ofSigurd the Dragon Slayer, University of California Press, 1990.

A thirteenth century prose version of the Volsungsdrawing upon the Edda lays. It will help the readerplace the dramatic and allusive lays in a coherentnarrative.

Dronke, Ursula, The Poetic Edda: Volume I Heroic Poems,Clarendon Press, 1969.

This book is the most modern edition. The analysis ofthe poetry is designed for the advanced student but isthe finest available.

Grahm-Campbell, James and Dafydd Kidd, The Vikings,British Museum Publications Limited, 1980.

A magnificently illustrated book with a good but non-technical discussion of the Vikings at home and abroad.

Ker, W. P., Epic and Romance, Dover Press, 1957.A very old, but very engaging book. It has introducedgenerations to the excitement and beauty of Norseliterature.

Magnusson, Magnus, Viking Expansion Westwards, TheBodley Head, 1973.

This history of the Vikings from England to NorthAmerica reads like a novel. It is full of lively portraitsand the small happenings of everyday life as well asheroism and violence.

Sturluson, Snorri, The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse My-thology, translated by Jean I. Young, University of Califor-nia Press.

This text provides a lively translation of the mostaccessible parts of an encyclopedic thirteenth–cen-tury prose collection of the myths and legends at theheart of the Norse poetic vocabulary.

Taylor, Paul B., and W. H. Auden, tran., The Elder Edda: ASelection translated from the Icelandic, introduction by PeterH. Salus and Paul B. Taylor, Faber and Faber, 1969.

Auden was a major twentieth century avant-gardepoet who nevertheless maintained a lively interest inearly medieval poetry. The introduction is particu-larly useful for the beginner.

Terry, Patricia, Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda,Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969.

A nearly complete and very careful translation of theElder Edda. The introduction is clear and to the point.

Turville-Petr, E. O. G., Myth and Religion of the North, Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

This book is still considered the best and most read-able on the subject.

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