September 15, 2026
Last week the strongest of the gods won his last telling by knowing what hour it was, and this series said it would leave his hall by the green roads. Here is the door we are leaving by. Bellows, introducing the Alvissmol, mentioned that one scholar was “pretty sure” that poem “shows marked traces of Celtic influence,” and sent the reader, for the argument, to the introductory note of another poem. That poem is the Rigsthula, the Song of Rig, and the first thing Bellows has to say about it is where it was found, which is: almost nowhere.
The Rigsthula is found in neither of the principal codices. The only manuscript containing it is the so-called Codex Wormanius, a manuscript of Snorri’s Prose Edda. The poem appears on the last sheet of this manuscript, which unluckily is incomplete, and thus the end of the poem is lacking. In the Codex Wormanius itself the poem has no title, but a fragmentary parchment included with it calls the poem the Rigsthula. Some late paper manuscripts give it the title of Rigsmol. — Henry Adams Bellows, introductory note to the Rigsthula (1923)
Not in Regius, which kept the Völsungs and lost eight leaves of them (№19–№24). Not in the Arnamagnæan codex. On the last sheet of a copy of Snorri’s handbook, with no title, the title supplied by a scrap of parchment tucked in beside it, and the ending gone because the sheet is the last one and what followed it is not there. Every poem of the Edda this series has quoted came out of one or the other of them. This is the first that came out of neither — and it is, Bellows says in his next paragraph, “essentially unlike anything else which editors have agreed to include in the so-called Edda.”
What it is, is a walk. A god goes down a seashore, comes to three houses one after another, and in each one does the same three things. And from the three houses come — well. That is the poem’s claim, and we will look at exactly how much of it the page delivers before it stops.
Teasers are claims, and last week’s carried a good many. The husk-loaf (in what the teaser called a hovel and the poem calls only “a dwelling”), the chest in the corner, the doors that face south, the three nights and the nine months, the three sons in order, the annotator’s Heimdall and Bellows’ Othin, the runes, the crow: all there, and the blockquotes below will show them. Two things need telling in the open.
The teaser said that from the three sons “come the three kinds of people there are.” The poem says so twice. At the end of the first house’s children: “And thence has risen | the race of thralls.” At the end of the second’s: “And thence has risen | the yeomen’s race.” And then it never says it a third time. There is no line for the jarls. The poem walks past the third son and into his sons, and the page runs out while it is still going. So the tidy sentence — three houses, three classes — is two-thirds the poem’s and one-third the reader’s, and this series labels those.
And the teaser said the parchment “runs out in the middle of its sentence.” Look at the last stanza and it does not. The crow’s last sentence ends at a full stop. What never ends is the crow’s speech: the quotation mark that opens in stanza 47 is never closed, because the page on which it would have closed is not there. Mid-speech, then, not mid-sentence. The difference is small, and the series keeps small differences.
One more correction, and it is ours. Twenty-two tellings ago, in №15, this series said that a medieval hand had noted in the margin that Rig was Heimdall, “and the Völuspá’s first stanza agrees.” Here is that stanza, the first four lines of the whole Edda:
Hearing I ask | from the holy races, From Heimdall’s sons, | both high and low; Thou wilt, Valfather, | that well I relate Old tales I remember | of men long ago. — Voluspo 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
Heimdall’s sons, both high and low. It sounds like agreement. But Bellows’ note on that stanza says: “Why mankind should be referred to as Heimdall’s sons is uncertain, and the phrase has caused much perplexity.” And it sends you here — to the Rigsthula, “wherein a certain Rig appears as the ancestor of the three great classes of men, a fourteenth century annotator identifies Rig with Heimdall, on what authority we do not know, for the Rig of the poem seems much more like Othin.” So the Völuspá does not agree with the annotator. The annotator may have been reading the Völuspá — that is a different thing — and Bellows thinks he read it wrong. №15’s sentence stood on the annotator’s authority alone, and this post says so; the series would rather correct itself in the open than let a tidy line stand.
Here is the annotator, in full — the prose that sits above the poem in the manuscript, and the whole of the Heimdall claim:
They tell in old stories that one of the gods, whose name was Heimdall, went on his way along a certain seashore, and came to a dwelling, where he called himself Rig. According to these stories is the following poem: — introductory prose to the Rigsthula, trans. Bellows (1923)
And here is Bellows on him:
The note was presumably written somewhere about 1300, or even later, and there is no reason for crediting the annotator with any considerable knowledge of mythology. There is little to favor the identification of Rig with Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, beyond a few rather vague passages in the other poems. — Bellows, note to the introductory prose of the Rigsthula (1923)
The vague passages are three: the Völuspá line above; a line in the Grimnismol that “may mean” Heimdall “o’er men holds sway, it is said” — Bellows calls it “a very doubtful line”; and one in the short Völuspá embedded in the Hyndluljoth, where someone is “the kinsman of men.” Against these, Bellows sets the poem itself: the god is “the aged and wise,” and the poem’s tail is full of runes — he counts three stanzas of them — and “everything in the Rigsthula,” he says, “fits Othin exceedingly well. It seems probable that the annotator was wrong, and that Rig is Othin, and not Heimdall.” The name itself he traces “almost certainly” to “the Old Irish word for ‘king,’ ‘ri’ or ‘rig.’” (One small pleasure of the apparatus: his note on the Völuspá sends you to the Rigsthula, his note on the Hyndluljoth sends you to the Rigsthula, and his note on the Rigsthula sends you back to both. Every road in the Heimdall question leads to this poem, and this poem says the god was somebody else.)
So: an old god, wise, walking. Bellows says Odin, and the series has no standing to argue; the annotator says Heimdall, and the poem says neither. The poem says Rig, which is a Celtic word for king, and never explains it. Let him walk.
Men say there went | by ways so green Of old the god, | the aged and wise, Mighty and strong | did Rig go striding. . . . . . . . . . . — Rigsthula 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
The fourth line is a row of dots. No gap is marked in the manuscript, Bellows says, “but editors have generally assumed one,” and the reader had better get used to those dots, because this poem is in worse shape than anything the series has yet handled. The stanzas come to us with lines out of order, lines missing, lines in the wrong stanza, and — again and again in the notes — “no line indicated in the manuscript as beginning a stanza,” which means the editors are guessing where one verse ends and the next starts. We will meet the worst of it at the second house. First:
Forward he went | on the midmost way, He came to a dwelling, | a door on its posts; In did he fare, | on the floor was a fire, Two hoary ones | by the hearth there sat, Ai and Edda, | in olden dress. — Rigsthula 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
Ai and Edda — Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother, Bellows says, and adds a small famous thing: the old woman’s name “was responsible for Jakob Grimm’s famous guess at the meaning of the word ‘Edda’ as applied to the whole collection.” It is only a guess — Bellows’ own word for it — but it is possible that every time you have said the name of the book you were saying the name of the old woman by the fire in the hovel, and I would like that to be true.
Rig knew well | wise words to speak, Soon in the midst | of the room he sat, And on either side | the others were. — Rigsthula 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
Remember those three lines. You will hear them again, and again, and the poem is built on them. He sits in the middle. The couple sit on either side. And the supper:
A loaf of bread | did Edda bring, Heavy and thick | and swollen with husks; Forth on the table | she set the fare, And broth for the meal | in a bowl there was. (Calf’s flesh boiled | was the best of the dainties.) — Rigsthula 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
The bread is husks, the meal is broth, and the fifth line — the boiled calf’s flesh, the one touch of plenty — is in parentheses because Bellows’ note says it “has generally been rejected as spurious.” Hold on to that line too; it comes back, and where it comes back is the strangest thing in the apparatus. Then he sleeps as he sat — “Soon in the bed | himself did he lay, / And on either side | the others were” — and the poem says exactly this much and no more:
Thus was he there | for three nights long, Then forward he went | on the midmost way, And so nine months | were soon passed by. — Rigsthula 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
The child of the first house is born in a stanza that, in the manuscript, barely exists:
A son bore Edda, | with water they sprinkled him, With a cloth his hair | so black they covered; Thræll they named him, | . . . . . — Rigsthula 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note: “After line 1 the manuscript has only four words: ‘cloth,’ ‘black,’ ‘named,’ and ‘Thræll.’ No gap is anywhere indicated. Editors have pieced out the passage in various ways.” Read that again. After its first line, the stanza in which the first thrall is born survives as four words, and one of them is Thræll — Thrall, Slave. The rest of the two lines above is an editor’s guess at what went around them. The sprinkling of water, in the line the manuscript does keep, is real and old — “long antedated the introduction of Christianity,” Bellows says. The black hair is the poem’s sign: “dark hair, among the blond Scandinavians, was the mark of a foreigner, hence of a slave.” That is the whole of what the manuscript preserves about the birth of the lowest of the three: a mother, a sprinkling, a cloth, a color, a naming, and the name.
What he grew into the poem gives whole, and it is not kind:
The skin was wrinkled | and rough on his hands, Knotted his knuckles, | . . . . . Thick his fingers, | and ugly his face, Twisted his back, | and big his heels. — Rigsthula 8, trans. Bellows (1923)
He binds with bast, carries burdens, bears home faggots “the whole day long.” A woman comes to the house — “crooked her legs, / Stained were her feet, | and sunburned her arms, / Flat was her nose; | her name was Thir” — Serving-Woman — and “They whispered both, | and the bed made ready, / Thræll and Thir, | till the day was through.” Note the sunburn. Of every woman in this poem, she is the only one the sun has been allowed to touch. And their children:
Children they had, | they lived and were happy, Fjosnir and Klur | they were called, methinks, Hreim and Kleggi, | Kefsir, Fulnir, Drumb, Digraldi, | Drott and Leggjaldi, Lut and Hosvir; | the house they cared for, Ground they dunged, | and swine they guarded, Goats they tended, | and turf they dug. — Rigsthula 12, trans. Bellows (1923)
They lived and were happy. And their names, in Bellows’ glosses: Cattle-Man, The Coarse, The Shouter, The Horse-Fly, Concubine-Keeper, The Stinking, The Log, The Fat, The Sluggard, The Big-Legged, The Bent, The Grey. The daughters are The Log, The Stumpy, Fat-Legged, Homely Nosed, The Noisy, The Servant, The Oaken Peg (with a question mark), Clothed in Rags, Crane-Legged. “And thence has risen | the race of thralls.” The poem is a court poem; it was written for a king, by someone who wanted to please one, and it names the people at the bottom for their bodies and their smell. The series does not soften the old words; it only notes, once, that the line they lived and were happy is not the thralls’ alone — the poem gives it, in nearly the same words, to all three houses.
Forward went Rig, | his road was straight, To a hall he came, | and a door there hung; In did he fare, | on the floor was a fire: Afi and Amma | owned the house. — Rigsthula 14, trans. Bellows (1923)
Grandfather and Grandmother, and owned — the first house was a dwelling with a door on its posts; this one is a hall with a door that hangs, and it belongs to somebody. The man hews wood for the weaver’s beam; “His beard was trimmed, | o’er his brow a curl, / His clothes fitted close; | in the corner a chest.” The chest is the whole difference. The woman works the distaff, “On her head was a band, | on her breast a smock; / On her shoulders a kerchief | with clasps there was.” And Rig sits in the middle of the room, and the others on either side.
Then the manuscript falls apart. Bellows’ note to the seventeenth stanza: “The manuscript jumps from stanza 17, line I, to stanza 19, line 2. Bugge points out that the copyist’s eye was presumably led astray by the fact that 17, I, and 19, I, were identical.” The refrain — Rig knew well wise words to speak — opens both the sitting-stanza and the sleeping-stanza, and the scribe, copying, looked up from one and down at the other, and a supper vanished. Here is the supper Bellows prints:
Then took Amma | . . . . . The vessels full | with the fare she set, Calf’s flesh boiled | was the best of the dainties. — Rigsthula 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
And here is his note on it: “I have followed Bugge’s conjectural construction of the missing stanza, taking lines 2 and 3 from stanzas 31 and 4.” Stanza 4. Go back and look. The calf’s flesh that “has generally been rejected as spurious” at the hovel’s table is the line that has been carried forward to fill the hole at the farm’s. The same line is an interpolation on one page and a reconstruction three pages on. I do not say this to mock the editors — a scribe’s eye skipped and something had to go in the gap — but the series has promised to say which is which, and here the honest answer is that the second supper in the Rigsthula is a collage of the first and the third, and the meat on the table was borrowed from a line the same editor does not believe in.
Three nights, nine months:
A son bore Amma, | with water they sprinkled him, Karl they named him; | in a cloth she wrapped him, He was ruddy of face, | and flashing his eyes. — Rigsthula 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
Karl — “Yeoman” — and Bellows’ note reports Sijmons’ guess that a whole stanza describing him has dropped out, on the pattern of the thrall’s. What survives is what he did: “Oxen he ruled, | and plows made ready, / Houses he built, | and barns he fashioned, / Carts he made, | and the plow he managed.” The carts are worth a note of their own — the word, Bellows says, “‘kartr,’ is one of the clear signs of the Celtic influence noted in the introduction.” Bellows says there are “various other Celtic words employed,” and the god’s own name is one; but the cart is the one place in the verse where his notes stop and point. And the bride:
Home did they bring | the bride for Karl, In goatskins clad, | and keys she bore; Snör was her name, | ’neath the veil she sat; A home they made ready, | and rings exchanged, The bed they decked, | and a dwelling made. — Rigsthula 23, trans. Bellows (1923)
Snör means Daughter-in-Law, and bring, Bellows says, “literally means ‘drove in a wagon’–a mark of the bride’s social status.” The thrall’s woman walked in on crooked legs; the yeoman’s is driven in, veiled, with keys at her belt (the keys of a household — readers of №29 will remember whose belt a household’s keys hung from). She is the ledger’s fourth bride, after Gerth, Freyja and Thrúdr, and the first one the poem shows arriving. The sons are Man, The Strong, The Holder of Land, Freeman, Craftsman, The Broad-Shouldered, Yeoman, With Beard Bound — “i.e., not allowed to hang unkempt” — Dwelling-Owner, Farm-Holder, With Beard Carried High, Man. The daughters are Worthy Woman, Bride, The Slender, The Proud, The Fair, Woman (with a question mark), The Proud again, Wife, The Bashful, The Graceful. “And thence has risen | the yeomen’s race.” The thralls were named for what they looked like. The yeomen are named for what they hold.
Thence went Rig, | his road was straight, A hall he saw, | the doors faced south; The portal stood wide, | on the posts was a ring, Then in he fared; | the floor was strewn. — Rigsthula 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
Doors to the south, a ring on the post, and fresh straw on the floor — “in preparation for a feast,” Bellows says, and sends you to the Thrymskvitha, where the giant orders the same thing done for his wedding (№29). The couple inside are not at their tasks:
Within two gazed | in each other’s eyes, Fathir and Mothir, | and played with their fingers; There sat the house-lord, | wound strings for the bow, Shafts he fashioned, | and bows he shaped. — Rigsthula 27, trans. Bellows (1923)
Father and Mother, gazing at each other and playing with their fingers, and he is making weapons, not tools. She is looking at her own sleeves:
The lady sat, | at her arms she looked, She smoothed the cloth, | and fitted the sleeves; Gay was her cap, | on her breast were clasps, Broad was her train, | of blue was her gown, Her brows were bright, | her breast was shining, Whiter her neck | than new-fallen snow. — Rigsthula 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
And here is the apparatus again, at the poem’s loveliest lines: Bellows’ note says Bugge “thinks lines 5-6, like 23, 4, got in here from the lost stanzas describing Kon’s bride and his marriage.” The bright brows and the snow-white neck may be a different woman’s, two generations on, filed by a copyist under the wrong mother. The poem’s one flight of beauty is possibly misplaced. The series tells you that and moves on, because the supper is the point:
Then forth she brought | the vessels full, With silver covered, | and set before them, Meat all browned, | and well-cooked birds; In the pitcher was wine, | of plate were the cups, So drank they and talked | till the day was gone. — Rigsthula 31, trans. Bellows (1923)
Husk-bread and broth; then boiled calf (borrowed); then thin white loaves on a broidered cloth, browned meat and birds, wine, and cups of plate. The whole poem is a ladder, and you can climb it by the food alone. So drank they and talked till the day was gone — talked; the poem says they talked — and Rig sat in the middle, and the others on either side, and three nights, and nine months:
A son had Mothir, | in silk they wrapped him, With water they sprinkled him, | Jarl he was; Blond was his hair, | and bright his cheeks, Grim as a snake’s | were his glowing eyes. — Rigsthula 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Cloth, cloth, silk. Black hair, ruddy face, blond hair — the poem does not hide what it is doing. And the eyes: Karl’s were flashing; Jarl’s are “grim as a snake’s,” and glowing. This series has kept a ledger of eyes since Thor’s burned through a bridal veil (№29), and it will only note that the third house’s child is born with the eyes of something dangerous, and that the poem thinks this is praise. He grows up brandishing shields, winding bowstrings, riding, swimming, handling swords. And then the god comes back.
Straight from the grove | came striding Rig, Rig came striding, | and runes he taught him; By his name he called him, | as son he claimed him, And bade him hold | his heritage wide, His heritage wide, | the ancient homes. — Rigsthula 36, trans. Bellows (1923)
This is the stanza where Bellows’ side of the Heimdall argument is strongest, and his note says why: “The whole stanza, particularly the reference to the teaching of magic (runes), fits Othin far better than Heimdall.” Three houses, three nights each, three sons — and the god comes back for one. He teaches him runes (the price of which this series told in №18). He gives him his own name. And he claims him as his son: which he did not do for Thræll, and did not do for Karl, though by the poem’s own reckoning they are as much his as Jarl is. The poem is a court poem. It knows which son it was written for.
Jarl rides out, raises wars, reddens the field, wins land, holds eighteen halls and gives rings away; his messengers go “by the ways so wet” to a lord’s hall, and bring back Erna — “The Capable” — whose hand, the poem says, “they sought,” which makes her the first bride on this series’ ledger anybody asked for. And their sons:
Bur was the eldest, | and Barn the next, Joth and Athal, | Arfi, Mog, Nith and Svein, | soon they began- Sun and Nithjung– | to play and swim; Kund was one, | and the youngest Kon. — Rigsthula 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Now read the glosses, because after the thralls and the yeomen you will expect something, and what you get is this: Son, Child, Child, Offspring, Heir, Son, Descendant, Boy, Son, Descendant, Kinsman, Son. That is the whole list. The thralls’ children were named for their bodies; the yeomen’s for their holdings; the jarl’s are named for nothing at all except that they are his. Every one of them is a word for son, or child, or heir, or kinsman — a word for descent. And Bellows adds, drily: “It is curious that there is no list of the daughters of Jarl and Erna.” The lowest house has nine named daughters, the middle house ten, and the highest none — and one editor, unable to bear the gap, simply copied the yeomen’s daughters in.
The youngest is Kon, and Bellows’ note on his name is the best joke in the apparatus:
Kon the Young: a remarkable bit of fanciful etymology; the phrase is “Konr ungr,” which could readily be contracted into “Konungr,” the regular word meaning “king.” The “kon” part is actually not far out, but the second syllable of “konungr” has nothing to do with “ungr” meaning “young.” — Bellows, note to Rigsthula 44 (1923)
Konr ungr — Kon the Young — squeezed together, is konungr, king. The poem has built a boy out of a pun, and the pun is wrong, and it does not matter, because the boy is the point. “But Kon the Young | learned runes to use, / Runes everlasting, | the runes of life” — he can shield warriors, dull a sword-blade, still the seas, learn bird-chatter, lessen flames, quiet minds, calm sorrows, and has “The might and strength | of twice four men,” and Bellows sends you to the list of charms in the Hovamol (147–163), the same list №18 walked through. Then:
With Rig-Jarl soon | the runes he shared, More crafty he was, | and greater his wisdom; The right he sought, | and soon he won it, Rig to be called, | and runes to know. — Rigsthula 46, trans. Bellows (1923)
Rig to be called. The name the god gave the father, the grandson wins from him by out-knowing him — and the name, remember, is an Irish word for king. A Norse poet, in Bellows’ reading, at a Danish court, makes his patron’s ancestor earn the royal title in Celtic. That is the accent the Alvissmol note was pointing at, and it is not an accent at all; it is the poem’s last word for what its hero is.
Young Kon rode forth | through forest and grove, Shafts let loose, | and birds he lured; There spake a crow | on a bough that sat: "Why lurest thou, Kon, | the birds to come? — Rigsthula 47, trans. Bellows (1923)
Birds “frequently play the part of mentor in Norse literature,” Bellows notes, and sends you to the nuthatches who told Sigurd the truth about Regin (№20). This one tells Kon to stop playing:
" ’Twere better forth | on thy steed to fare, . . . . . | and the host to slay. — Rigsthula 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
Half a line gone, or, Bellows thinks more likely, “two lines and a half.” And then the last stanza there is:
"The halls of Dan | and Danp are noble, Greater their wealth | than thou bast gained; Good are they | at guiding the keel, Trying of weapons, | and giving of wounds. — Rigsthula 49, trans. Bellows (1923)
(Bast is the transcription’s slip for hast; the series quotes what the page prints and tells you.) The crow is telling the boy who has won the name of king that there are halls richer than his, and naming them: Dan and Danp. Bellows’ note carries the whole of the historical argument — a Latin epitome of a lost saga in which Rig “married the daughter of a certain Danp, lord of Danpsted,” and their son was “called Dan or Danum, all of whose subjects were called Danes.” “This may or may not be conclusive,” he says, and then the sentence the series has been waiting the whole poem to quote: “it is a great pity that the manuscript breaks off abruptly at this stanza.”
That is why Bellows thinks the poem is Danish — composed, on Mogk’s showing, “in honor of either Gorm the Old or Harald Blue-Tooth,” in the first half of the tenth century, by “a wandering Norse singer, who may have had a dozen homes,” who had lived among the Celts and was visiting a Danish king. The crow was about to connect the mythical Kon to the real one. “The manuscript breaks off at a most exasperating point,” Bellows says in his introduction, “just as the connection between the mythical ‘Young Kon’ … and the monarch in question is about to be established.” A praise-poem for a king, and the page ends one stanza before the king’s name.
Now go back and count. Rig knew well | wise words to speak — stanza 3, stanza 5, stanza 17, stanza 19, stanza 29, stanza 32. Six times the poem tells you that the god knew how to say wise things. And in the whole of what survives, he does not say one. Not one word of Rig’s is quoted. He sits in the middle; he eats; he sleeps; he walks on; he comes back and teaches, and claims, and bids — all of it reported, none of it spoken. The only voice that speaks in its own words in the Rigsthula is a crow’s. And the manuscript breaks off inside the crow’s mouth.
The series has kept a ledger of silences since a hall went quiet when Loki walked in (№31). This is a different kind. It is not that the god chose not to speak; it is that the poem chose not to write him down. What it wrote down instead — three times at the table and three times in the bed, in almost the same three lines — is where he was: in the midst of the room, and on either side the others were. That is the whole of the god’s method. He does not arrive with a hammer or a curse or a question. He comes in, and sits between two people, and eats what they have, and sleeps between them, and leaves, and the poem draws a line under three nights and says nine months. Whether Odin or Heimdall, whether the poem meant it as a blessing on the hovel or only as the necessary first rung of a ladder to the king, the god of this poem is defined by the middle of the room. Everyone else is on either side.
Nine weeks of Thor, and every telling was won or lost with his body. Here is a god who does nothing with his but sit, and the three kinds of people there are — two of them, the page says; the third the reader must supply — are the result. The old books do not say what the wise words were. Perhaps the poet did not know either. Perhaps the point was only that the god was there, at the table, in every house, and that all three houses were happy, and the yeomen had a chest, and the jarl had eyes like a snake, and the king — the king was on the next page.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week the series goes to the third of Bellows’ vague passages, which turns out to have a goddess, a boar, and a bet in it.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Rigsthula and its notes, the Voluspo (stanza 1 and note), and the Hyndluljoth and its notes (for the teaser). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the third witness for the annotator was a line in “the short Voluspo” — a poem that survives, Bellows says, only as a fragment of fifty-one lines “inserted bodily” into another poem, in a manuscript from around 1400, the two “clumsily put together” by “some blundering copyist.” The poem it was stuffed into is the Hyndluljoth, and it begins with Freyja (№2) waking a giantess in her cave at nightfall and asking her to ride with her to Valhalla. Freyja is riding a boar. The boar is her lover, in disguise, and the giantess sees through it at once. What Freyja wants is a family tree — her favorite has bet his whole inheritance on having nobler blood than another man, and only a giantess can recite the line back far enough — and what she gets is eighteen stanzas of names with a refrain: “And all are thy kinsmen, | Ottar, thou fool!” Somewhere in the middle, the copyist’s other poem breaks in, and there, for the first time in these tellings where the naming can be checked, the nine mothers of Heimdall (№15) are given their names. It ends with a drink of memory, a threat of fire, and a giantess’s opinion of Freyja’s morals. The Hyndluljoth: the poem that is two poems, and the goddess who rode her lover to a wager.