The Poetic Edda Read online

  The Poetic Edda

  Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes

  The Poetic Edda

  Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes

  Translated and Edited, with Introduction, by

  JACKSON CRAWFORD

  Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  Indianapolis/Cambridge

  Copyright © 2015 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

  For further information, please address

  Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  P.O. Box 44937

  Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

  www.hackettpublishing.com

  Cover design by Brian Rak

  Interior design by Elizabeth L. Wilson

  Composition by William Hartman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edda Sæmundar.

  The Poetic Edda : stories of the Norse gods and heroes / translated and edited, with introduction, by Jackson Crawford.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-62466-356-7 (pbk.) —

  ISBN 978-1-62466-357-4 (cloth)

  1. Eddas—Translations into English. 2. Old Norse poetry. 3. Mythology, Norse—Poetry. I. Crawford, Jackson, translator, editor. II. Title.

  PT7233.C73 2015

  839’.61—dc23 2014032991

  PRC ISBN: 978-1-62466-415-1

  Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

  Beowulf. Translated, with an Introduction, by Dick Ringler

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated, with notes, by Joseph Glaser, Introduction by Christine Chism

  Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur. Translated, with an Introduction, by Joseph Glaser

  Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseut. Translated, with an Introduction, by Edward J. Gallagher

  To two fire-hearted heroes, gone far away,

  whose spirits breathe life in me still:

  To Papa, my biggest inspiration,

  and Wyatt, my smallest.

  Og til deg, du nøkkel, lås og dør,

  mitt hjartas stad—

  mi grue, kveike, ved og glør,

  eg gjev mitt kvad.

  {vi} ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge my professors at the Universities of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Texas Tech, particularly Sal Calomino, Tom Dubois, Rob Howell, Jared Klein, Brian McFadden, Joe Salmons, and my doctoral advisor Kirsten Wolf.

  I am grateful to Christy Lenzi for giving me her rich input on this book’s Introduction, and to my students at UCLA, especially Justine Bateman, Colin Bogan, Jenna Bremer, Jessica Brodsky, Courtney Cook, Casey James Holmberg, Cameron Kemper, Chanda Lenee, Masha Lepire, Tinho Mang, Jules Robins, Charlotte Rose, and Rafael Semedo, for their comments on my translations in the courses where they were first “field-tested.” I thank Katherine Crawford, who suggested some of the measures I took to render the Old Norse names more readable in English, and who shared the birds with me. I thank also the anonymous reviewer for Hackett, as well as editorial director Brian Rak, production director Liz Wilson, and copyeditor Harbour Fraser Hodder, who all made many important suggestions that improved this book.

  Thanks also to Johanna and Kelley, who let me spend so many hours writing at their restaurant.

  The mistakes and infelicities in this book are, naturally, attributable to me alone.

  Jackson Crawford

  Riverton, Wyoming

  December 29, 2014

  {vii} CONTENTS

  The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

  Introduction

  Poems about Gods and Elves

  Voluspa (The Prophecy of Ragnarok)

  Havamal (The Counsel of Odin the One-Eyed)

  Vafthruthnismal (Odin’s Contest with Riddle-Weaver)

  Grimnismal (The Words of Odin in Disguise)

  For Skirnis (The Journey of Skirnir on Behalf of Frey)

  Harbarthsljoth (The Taunting of Thor by Odin)

  Hymiskvitha (The Fetching of the Cauldron)

  Lokasenna (Loki’s Taunts)

  Thrymskvitha (The Theft of Mjollnir)

  Volundarkvitha (The Escape of Volund the Smith)

  Alvissmal (The Words of All-Wise)

  Baldrs draumar (Balder’s Dreams)

  Rigsthula (The Tale of Rig)

  Voluspa en skamma (The Short Prophecy of Ragnarok)

  Grottasongr (The Song of Grotti)

  Poems about Heroes

  Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar (The Poem of Helgi, Son of Hjorvarth)

  Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I (The First Poem of Helgi, Killer of Hunding)

  {viii} Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II (The Second Poem of Helgi, Killer of Hunding)

  Fra dautha Sinfjotla (The Death of Sinfjotli)

  Gripisspa (Gripir’s Prophecies to Sigurth)

  Reginsmal (The Tale of Regin)

  Fafnismal (The Tale of Fafnir)

  Sigrdrifumal (The Meeting with Brynhild)

  Brot af Sigurtharkvithu (Fragment of a Poem about Sigurth)

  Guthrunarkvitha I (The First Poem of Guthrun)

  Sigurtharkvitha en skamma (A Short Poem of Sigurth)

  Helreith Brynhildar (Brynhild’s Ride to Hel)

  Drap Niflunga (The Death of the Niflungs)

  Atlakvitha (The Fall of the House of Attila)

  Guthrunarkvitha II (The Second Poem of Guthrun)

  Guthrunarkvitha III (The Third Poem of Guthrun)

  Oddrunargratr (The Weeping of Oddrun)

  Guthrunarhvot (The Inciting of Guthrun’s Sons)

  Hamthismal (The Tale of Hamthir)

  Appendix: The Cowboy Havamal

  Glossary of Names

  Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

  Note: The English “titles” are not necessarily translations of the Old Norse titles, but are meant to assist in remembering the content of each poem.

  {ix} INTRODUCTION

  In a Nutshell

  The Poetic Edda is a collection of poems in the Old Norse language. These poems are the source of almost all the myths of the Norse gods—famous characters in popular culture such as Odin, Thor, and Loki—and also of the thrilling and tragic adventures of legendary Viking heroes, especially Sigurth, his wife Guthrun, and her brothers Gunnar and Hogni.

  The World of the Poetic Edda

  The poems of the Poetic Edda have their roots in the cold, brutal world of medieval Scandinavia. During the so-called Viking Age (roughly AD 800–1100), the fierce Scandinavian pirates and adventurers known as Vikings robbed and raided in nearly every country of Europe, and explored as far afield as Baghdad and the eastern coast of present-day Canada. Meanwhile, they developed an extensive poetic literature about their gods and heroes, which their Christian descendants would commit to writing many centuries later.

  Readers must understand a few facts about the culture that produced these poems, since the characters in them often act in a way that is incompatible with twenty-first-century social norms. Norse society prized a warlike, aggressive stance in men, and in the gods they worshipped. Fighting over limited resources, and even naked aggression against neighbors, was not necessarily considered wrong if it advanced one’s wealth and honor and that of one’s family. With the availability of natural resources sharply limited in medieval Scandinavia by its harsh climate and (in many regions) by sparse farmland, violent competition between families was a fact of life, and the raiding of overseas territories blessed with more food and gold must have seemed no more ethically problematic than the killing of an animal for its flesh and
hide.

  Not that Norse society recognized no code of ethics. But unlike modern moral standards, which tend to be utilitarian and altruistic (Does a given action benefit someone without harming someone else?), the Norse moral code was based on gaining and maintaining {x} honor, and avoiding shame. Honor was gained principally through displays of one’s courage in confrontations with enemies, initiative and hard work at the farm and aboard ship, and a readiness to use violence in return for the violence done to one’s friends and relatives. Those who show these qualities most abundantly, such as the god Thor and the hero Sigurth, are praised, in spite of actions that modern society would consider crude or evil (Thor owns slaves, for instance, and in the poem Harbarthsljoth he tells his father Odin that he would have gladly helped him hold down a woman he was trying to have his way with).

  In a society in which the main social unit was not the individual but the family, it was imperative for members of the family to maintain their honor by avenging any harm done to another member of their family. If a man’s brother had been killed, he would have to take revenge on the killer, but he might exact vengeance by killing a member of the killer’s family rather than by killing the perpetrator directly. This promise of mutual revenge bound a family together in a feuding world, and thus there was a special horror for the notion of accidentally or knowingly doing damage to one’s own family.

  Nonetheless, the heroes of the Poetic Edda are sometimes forced to take action against their own families, usually because of the ironclad force of their sworn words and boasts. The Eddic poems depict a world in which a person’s words are absolutely binding, no matter the consequences—which are often tragic. For instance, in Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, Hethin boasts (while drunk) that he will take his brother Helgi’s lover, the Valkyrie named Svava. Though Hethin regrets this foolish and dangerous oath almost immediately, Helgi casually accepts that it is his brother’s duty to carry it through:

  [33] “Don’t concern yourself,

  Hethin; the oaths

  men make while drinking

  will always prove true.

  A king has challenged me

  to a duel, and before three nights

  have passed, I must meet him

  at the appointed place.

  I doubt that I

  will survive;

  and then it would be good,

  if you took Svava.”

  {xi} But of course, the problems created by such oaths are not always resolved so conveniently. The greatest tragedy of the heroic poems is the murder of Sigurth, which is brought about because Brynhild has been tricked into breaking her vow that she will marry only a man who knows no fear (she marries Gunnar, believing him to be the fearless man who braved her test of courage, but in fact it was Sigurth in disguise). Since not Brynhild but her sister-in-law Guthrun married the fearless Sigurth, Brynhild insists that her husband Gunnar must kill him. But even here, Gunnar and his brother Hogni will not break their oaths of blood-brotherhood with Sigurth, and Gunnar instead must get his brother Gotthorm, who was too young to swear oaths with Sigurth, to commit the murder.

  One gets a sense from scenes like this that faithfully keeping promises ought to be the glue that holds society together, but instead tears it apart. It is instructive to remember that the evil god Loki, whose actions cause the gods constant heartbreak and loss, is tolerated in the gods’ homes because of Odin’s oath that he will never drink unless Loki is served too (see Lokasenna, st. 9–10).

  Norse society also had a fairly rigid class structure, one reflected in nearly every poem in the Poetic Edda. It is most obvious in Rigsthula, which tells the story of how the god Heimdall fathered the ancestors of the three human classes (slaves and peasants, free men, and the nobility), and which makes clear the different standards of dress, activity, and diet that were expected of people at different social levels. But the rigidity of the class structure is also reflected in an abundance of offhand comments; in fact, the very first lines of the first poem, Voluspa, casually assert the existence of higher- and lower-born people: “Heed my words, / all classes of men, / you greater and lesser / children of Heimdall.” Just as casual is Oddrun’s reminder in Oddrunargratr that she made an oath to provide her medical expertise not just to anyone, but to anyone of sufficiently high class:

  [10] Oddrun said,

  “I did not come here

  because I thought

  you were worth my help.

  I have sworn that I

  will always give help

  when it is needed

  to those who share

  my noble rank,

  and I honor my oath.”

  {xii} Another component of Norse society that surfaces in many poems is the belief that each person has an inevitable, fixed date of death, decided by the shadowy goddesses of fate called the Norns. This is what the hero Sigurth alludes to, for instance, when he shrugs off the dragon’s threats in Fafnismal:

  [10] “Every man will

  manage his own wealth

  till his fated death-day,

  but there is a time

  when each one of us

  leaves here for Hel.”

  Or, to quote Sorli in Hamthismal:

  [30] “But we fought well,

  we stand over sword-torn

  Gothic corpses and

  set a table for the eagles.

  We earned honor here,

  though we are fated to die today—

  a man will not live one day longer

  than the Norns have decided.”

  But beyond even this belief in an inevitable death-date, many of the poems of the Poetic Edda convey a sense that every detail of a life and death can be foreseen, and that this inevitable course of events cannot be changed. The witch in Voluspa foresees the death of all the gods, and offers no way for it to be avoided. On a more individual level, Sigurth’s entire life is foretold to him in Gripisspa—including most of the terrible mistakes he will soon make—but this does nothing to prevent him from doing exactly what he was predicted to do. The characters in these myths are marching toward their doom, unable to change course or to step off their predetermined path even if they fight it the entire way. Only the god Odin seems to believe seriously that he can reverse fate, but the reward for his efforts will be a final defeat just as total as if he had never tried.

  Thus, a profound sense of hopelessness pervades the myths of the Poetic Edda. The gods know that they will inevitably die in the fiery final battle of Ragnarok, and not a single one of the main human characters in the heroic poems dies happy. But surprisingly, the despair of a bad end is not accompanied by a sense of hopeless despair in any of the poems—instead, the gods and heroes alike {xiii} are actively engaged in courageously combating the inevitable. This code of boldness and the defiance of fate must have stirred something in the Norse audience in their barren farmsteads and bloodstained seaside camps, just as it may stir a modern audience faced with the seemingly hopeless circumstances of life in the crowded, postindustrial world of today.

  The Gods, the Realms, and the Heroes: A Basic Orientation

  Leading the gods is Odin, often called the “Allfather.” Odin is a profoundly anxious and, in some senses, selfish character, which is rarely suggested by his depictions in popular media. Odin knows (thanks to the prophecy in the poem Voluspa) that his fate and the fate of all the gods with him is to die at Ragnarok, and so he desperately gathers wisdom and knowledge in an effort to learn some way to postpone this catastrophe. In particular, he has sacrificed his own eye in the well of Mimir for a drink of its wisdom-granting waters (Voluspa, st. 28), and he has even sacrificed himself to himself on the supernatural ash tree Yggdrasil in order to learn the runes (see Havamal, st. 138–41).

  In order to raise an army to fight by his side at Ragnarok, Odin travels in Midgard (the realm of humans) in disguise, stirring up battles and often granting favors to powerful warriors. He sends his Valkyries (human women with the power of flight) to bring the m
en who die in battle to his hall, Valhalla (literally “the hall of men killed in battle”), in Asgard (the realm of the gods). In Valhalla, these men fight and kill one another all day, and in the evening they are resurrected for a feast. Because death in battle was the only way to join Odin’s heroes in Valhalla, the religion of the Viking Age reinforced and encouraged the reckless disregard for life that is a hallmark of so many of the heroes of the Poetic Edda and the Norse sagas. But by the same token, Odin’s role as an inciter of war and a killer of men led to some unease about his role, as we see in some of the insults Thor and Loki level at him in the poems Harbarthsljoth and Lokasenna, respectively, and by many of his own names that Odin lists at the end of Grimnismal (such as “Evil doer,” “Battle-Merry,” and even simply “Killer”).

  Regarded as a family, Odin and his children are referred to as the Aesir. Odin’s wife is Frigg, and with her Odin has two sons, Balder and Hoth. The accidental murder of Balder by his blind {xiv} brother Hoth is one of the great tragedies of Norse mythology, and it is instigated by Loki, a fickle, enigmatic figure who sometimes aids and sometimes harms the gods. Loki’s children include the wolf Fenrir, who bit off the hand of the god Tyr and who will eventually kill Odin, as well as Hel, the half-corpse queen of the dead, and the Midgard-serpent, a dragon who encircles Midgard and who will eventually kill, and be killed by, Thor.

  The god Thor is the son of the Earth (personified as a goddess) and Odin, and by far the most popular of the Norse gods. Where Odin is unpredictable, snobbish, and even treacherous, Thor is a hero of the common man, usually hard at work killing giants with his hammer, Mjollnir. In the pages of the Poetic Edda, his popularity can be seen both in the ways he is depicted respectfully and seriously (as at the end of Lokasenna, when it is only Thor’s threats that scare Loki) and with tongue in cheek (as in the humiliation he suffers when he has to dress like a bride in Thrymskvitha).