September 15, 2026
Last week the series left Thor’s hall by the green roads and found, on the last sheet of a copy of Snorri, a god who was never quoted and a poem that ended one stanza before the king’s name. That poem’s annotator said the god was Heimdall, and Bellows, disagreeing, allowed him “a few rather vague passages in the other poems” for support. We have looked at the first of them — the opening line of the whole Edda — and found Bellows calling it “uncertain.” The second, in the Grimnismol, he calls “a very doubtful line,” and his note on that stanza says its second line “in the manuscripts is apparently in bad shape, and in the editions is more or less conjectural.” That leaves the third witness. It is a line in a poem that Bellows introduces like this:
Neither poem is of any great value, either as mythology or as poetry. The author of “the short Voluspo” seems, indeed, to have been more or less confused as to his facts; and both poets were too late to feel anything of the enthusiasm of the earlier school. — Henry Adams Bellows, introductory note to the Hyndluljoth (1923)
Neither poem — because there are two of them in one, and we will come to that. The series has now told poems Bellows loved (“the finest ballad in the world,” №29) and poems he despised (№30, “a distinctly inferior piece of work”); this is the first he has written off whole. It is also, for the second week running, a poem from neither of the great codices — it survives in the Flateyjarbok, the Book of the Flat Island, “an enormous compilation made” about 1400, and Bellows says the lateness of the manuscript “would of itself be enough to cast a doubt upon the condition in which the poem has been preserved, and there can be no question that what we have of it is in very poor shape. It is, in fact, two separate poems, or parts of them, clumsily put together.”
And in this unvalued, late, two-headed thing are two things this series has been waiting for since its early weeks: the names of the nine mothers of Heimdall, and the entire Völsung tragedy — six of these tellings — folded into one man’s family tree, with a refrain that calls him a fool for not knowing it.
Teasers are claims. Last week’s said the giantess is woken “at nightfall” (stanza 1: “Already comes darkness”) and asked to ride to Valhalla (“To Valhall to seek | the sacred hall”) — yes. Freyja is riding a boar — yes, and it is her lover in disguise — no, or not quite, and that is the first thing to tell in the open. It is the giantess who says so. Freyja says “Wild dreams, methinks, | are thine when thou sayest / My lover is with me,” and Bellows’ note says that “there is no other reference to this love affair” anywhere. The teaser took the giantess’s side. The poem leaves it a quarrel between a goddess and a giantess, and the giantess has the last word on the subject, some forty stanzas later, and it is rude.
The teaser also said “only a giantess can recite the line back far enough.” The poem does not say that; it is a reason the reader supplies for why Freyja is in a cave at nightfall rather than at home. Bellows says only that Ottar “by rich offerings” — and here his parenthesis: “(Hyndla hints at less commendable methods)” — “has induced Freyja to assist him in establishing his genealogy.” Why Hyndla in particular, the poem never explains. She “does not appear elsewhere in the poems,” and her name, Bellows says, means “She-Dog.”
And the teaser said the nine mothers of Heimdall are here “given their names.” The names are here. Whose mothers they are, the stanza never says — and that is the find of this run, and it gets its own section.
One more small honesty, because the series counts things. Bellows says the other poem is “a fragment of fifty-one lines.” Count the lines he prints for it and you get fifty; put back the two lines of stanza 28 that the manuscript keeps inside the fragment and Bellows has moved out of it, and you get fifty-two. The number is his and I do not doubt it meant something exact to him; but the edges of this fragment are soft enough that counting it is an editorial act, and the reader should know that before we go in.
"Maiden, awake! | wake thee, my friend, My sister Hyndla, | in thy hollow cave! Already comes darkness, | and ride must we To Valhall to seek | the sacred hall. — Hyndluljoth 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
The speaker is Freyja — though, as usual, “the names of the speakers do not appear in the manuscripts,” and the editors have supplied them. A goddess calls a giantess my sister and my friend; two weeks ago a dwarf talked in a god’s hall until the sun caught him (№36), and here the ride begins the other way round, at the coming of the dark. She wants to go to Valhall, and she says why: the favor of Heerfather — Odin — who “To his followers gold | he gladly gives,” who gave Hermoth a helm and mail-coat and gave Sigmund “a sword as gift.” (Bellows cannot resist a footnote here: the sword is the one in the tree that only Sigmund could draw — and “Wagner eliminates all the intervening generations by the simple expedient of using Volsung’s name as one of Othin’s many appellations.” The old books were being tidied for the stage long before this series came to them.) Then Freyja promises to honor Thor, and asks Hyndla to be in his favor too — and cannot resist a joke at a giantess’s expense: “Though little the brides | of the giants he loves.” Thor’s feelings about giant-women are a matter of record in a flyting this series has told (№32); Freyja is saying it to one of them, in her own cave, while asking her for a ride.
The ride:
“From the stall now | one of thy wolves lead forth, And along with my boar | shalt thou let him run; For slow my boar goes | on the road of the gods, And I would not weary | my worthy steed.” — Hyndluljoth 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
The giantess keeps wolves in a stall as a farmer keeps horses. The goddess rides a boar, and the boar is slow. And here the apparatus intervenes before the giantess can: Bellows’ note says some editors, “following Simrock, assign this whole stanza to Hyndla,” and that giving it to Freyja “makes better sense than any other arrangement, but is dependent on changing the manuscript’s ‘thy’ in line 3 to ‘my’, as suggested by Bugge.” The my of the third line is an editor’s pronoun. In the manuscript that line reads thy boar, and whose boar it is depends on which scholar you follow. Then the note says what the poem is about to say: “The boar on which Freyja rides (‘my worthy steed’) is, of course, Ottar.”
“Falsely thou askest me, | Freyja, to go, For so in the glance | of thine eyes I see; On the way of the slain | thy lover goes with thee. Ottar the young, | the son of Instein.” — Hyndluljoth 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
This series has kept a ledger of eyes since Thor’s burned through a bridal veil (№29) and a giant read a hawk’s eyes at a window and knew it was a man (№35). Here the giantess reads the goddess’s. She does not look at the boar; she looks at Freyja, and in “the glance | of thine eyes” sees the lie, and names the boar — Ottar the young, the son of Instein — before Freyja has said a word about him. And she calls him thy lover. Freyja’s answer is the one the accounting flagged:
"Wild dreams, methinks, | are thine when thou sayest My lover is with me | on the way of the slain; There shines the boar | with bristles of gold, Hildisvini, | he who was made By Dain and Nabbi, | the cunning dwarfs. — Hyndluljoth 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
She denies the lover and explains the boar: it is Hildisvini, “Battle-Swine,” golden-bristled, dwarf-made. Bellows’ note wonders whether she “refers to the boar with golden bristles given, according to Snorri, to her brother Freyr by the dwarfs” — the one this series watched come out of the forge in №28, its own lantern. If so, Freyja is claiming her brother’s treasure as her mount to cover for a man. Nabbi, the second dwarf, is “nowhere else mentioned.” Neither denial nor explanation settles anything; the poem simply moves on, and Bellows’ note on the giantess’s accusation says, with a scholar’s shrug, that unless Ottar is somehow the same as Oth — Freyja’s husband — “which seems most unlikely, there is no other reference to this love affair.” Hold on to Oth. He is coming back in the giantess’s mouth at the end.
Between stanzas 7 and 8, without a word, they arrive. “The general assumption,” Bellows says, “is that in the interval between stanzas 7 and 8 Freyja and Hyndla have arrived at Valhall. No lacuna is indicated in the manuscript.” So they leap down from their saddles at the sacred hall — Freyja from her lover, if the giantess is right — and the goddess states the business:
"A wager have made | in the foreign metal Ottar the young | and Angantyr; We must guard, for the hero | young to have, His father’s wealth, | the fruits of his race. — Hyndluljoth 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
The foreign metal is gold, and the note on it is the kind of thing this series stops for. The word, Bellows says, is valr, “meaning ‘foreign,’ and akin to ‘Welsh,’” and “some editors interpret it frankly as ‘Celtic,’ i.e., Irish.” Last week the god’s name was an Irish word for king; this week the gold the bet is made in is, in one reading, Irish gold. The Celtic accent Bellows kept hearing in the Rigsthula does not stop at its border.
The bet itself is in the note rather than the verse: Ottar “has made a wager of his entire inheritance with Angantyr regarding the relative loftiness of their ancestry.” Everything he has, on the claim that his blood is better than another man’s — and he cannot prove it himself, because he does not know it. That is the poem’s whole premise, and its refrain will not let him forget it. What he did to earn a goddess’s help, Freyja tells the giantess herself:
"For me a shrine | of stones he made,– And now to glass | the rock has grown;– Oft with the blood | of beasts was it red; In the goddesses ever | did Ottar trust. — Hyndluljoth 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
An altar of stone, fired so constantly that “the rock has grown” to glass — Bellows: “the constant fires on the altar have fused the stone into glass” — and reddened with beasts’ blood over and over. In the goddesses ever did Ottar trust. Whatever else he is, he is a devout man, and Freyja is saying so to a giantess who has already implied what else he is. And then she asks the question the whole poem exists to answer:
“Tell to me now | the ancient names, And the races of all | that were born of old: Who are of the Skjoldungs, | who of the Skilfings, Who of the Othlings, | who of the Ylfings, Who are the free-born, | who are the high-born, The noblest of men | that in Mithgarth dwell?” — Hyndluljoth 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
The four great houses of the North — Skjold’s line, the Danish kings; Skelfir’s; Authi’s; the Ylfings, who may be the family of Helgi Hundingsbane — and then a ladder like the one last week’s poem climbed: the free-born, the high-born, the noblest of men. Bellows’ note admits the manuscript “omits the first half of line 4, here filled out from stanza 16” — the question has been mended from its own answer.
The answer runs eighteen stanzas, 12 through 29, and Bellows, in his introduction, promised to keep his notes on them “a mere record of who the persons mentioned were.” So will this series. The giantess starts at Ottar’s father and goes up: Instein, Alf the Old, Ulf, Sæfari, Svan the Red; then his mother, “the priestess Hledis,” and her parents, and hers. And within four stanzas the genealogy has genealogy problems: Bellows’ note says stanzas 14–16 “are clearly interpolated,” because Friaut, named in stanza 13, is the daughter of Hildigun, named in stanza 17 — a later hand has stuffed Halfdan the Old, “foremost of Skjoldungs,” and his eighteen sons (nine at one birth, all nine slain, the other nine “the ancestors of the most famous families in Northern hero lore”) into the middle of Ottar’s mother’s line, where the generations do not add up. Then, at stanza 18, “Another interpolation.” A pedigree with pedigrees grafted into it, in a poem that is two poems. And the refrain arrives:
"Hence come the Skjoldungs, | hence the Skilfings, Hence the Othlings, | hence the Ynglings, Hence come the free-born, | hence the high-born, The noblest of men | that in Mithgarth dwell: And all are thy kinsmen, | Ottar, thou fool! — Hyndluljoth 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
And all are thy kinsmen, Ottar, thou fool! Nine times in eighteen stanzas — and the series has a ledger for what the vellum does with a refrain. In the Thrymskvitha the copyist cut repeated stanzas to their initial letters (№29); in the Lokasenna the hammer-refrain was abbreviated in the manuscript (№31). Here Bellows’ note on stanza 21 says: “here, and generally hereafter when it appears in the poem, this refrain-line is abbreviated in the manuscript to the word ‘all.’” One word. The scribe of the Flateyjarbok wrote all and trusted the reader to hear are thy kinsmen, Ottar, thou fool. A giantess’s insult, so well known by 1400 that it could be filed under its first syllable.
The names go on, and the notes keep confessing. Stanza 22 is “An isolated stanza” whose last two lines “stand after stanza 24, where they fail to connect clearly with anything.” Stanza 23’s first line — the names of four berserkers — “does not appear in the manuscript, but is added from the list of names given in the sagas”: a line of the poem written by editors out of prose. (The twelve berserker sons of Arngrim, “the Haddings twain” among them, get Bellows’ whole lecture on the word — men who “howled like wild beasts, foamed at the mouth, and gnawed the iron rims of their shields,” and whose name “probably” means “bear-shirt.”) Stanza 24’s first half-line is “supplied from the Orvar-Oddssaga.” Stanza 25’s first line, in the manuscript, sits at the end of stanza 29. This is what “very poor shape” looks like in the notes: a list of ancestors in which the ancestors have been moved, mended, and in two places supplied from other books.
And then, in the middle of the list, the giantess reaches a name this series knows:
He was kinsman of Sigurth,– | hear well what I say,– The foe of hosts, | and Fafnir’s slayer. — Hyndluljoth 25 (lines 3–4), trans. Bellows (1923)
"From Volsung’s seed | was the hero sprung, And Hjordis was born | of Hrauthung’s race, And Eylimi | from the Othlings came,– And all are thy kinsmen, | Ottar, thou fool! — Hyndluljoth 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Gunnar and Hogni, | the heirs of Gjuki, And Guthrun as well, | who their sister was; But Gotthorm was not | of Gjuki’s race, Although the brother | of both he was: And all are thy kinsmen, | Ottar, thou fool! — Hyndluljoth 27, trans. Bellows (1923)
Read those three stanzas with the series’ dark run in your hand. Fafnir’s slayer, and the dragon who told the truth (№20). Volsung’s seed, and the otter’s ransom that started it (№19). Hjordis, Sigurd’s mother. Gunnar and Hogni, and Guthrun their sister, whose cup we watched (№22) and whose quarrel at the river we heard (№23). And Gotthorm — Bellows’ note: “the third brother, who killed Sigurth at Brynhild’s behest, was Grimhild’s son, and thus a step-son of Gjuki” — the boy fed the wolf-meat, whose hand the series followed to the bed (№24). But Gotthorm was not of Gjuki’s race, although the brother of both he was: even here, in a list, the poem pauses to say that the killer was only half in the family. Bellows’ note says plainly what the stanzas are doing: “Stanzas 25-27 connect Ottar’s descent with the whole Volsung-Sigurth-Jormunrek-Gjuki genealogy.”
Six tellings — the ring, the cup, the river, the whetting, the pyre, the ride to Hel — and in this poem they are a pedigree. The greatest tragedy the North told is, to a giantess in a cave, three stanzas of names that a young man needs to memorize by the third morning to win a bet, and every one of them ends the same way: thou fool. And the list does not stop at legend. Jormunrek, whose sons “To the gods in death | were as offerings given,” is, Bellows says, “the historical Ermanarich, king of the Goths, who died about 376.” Harald Battle-tooth, in the last stanza of the list, died on the Bravalla-field in the sagas; his mother Auth the Deep-minded fled to Russia. The giantess is walking a line that runs out of Valhall, through Sigurd’s bed, past a Gothic king with a date, and ends at a man standing in front of her with bristles of gold.
Eleven in number | the gods were known, When Baldr o’er the hill | of death was bowed; And this to avenge | was Vali swift, When his brother’s slayer | soon he slew. — Hyndluljoth 30, trans. Bellows (1923)
The giantess has been naming Ottar’s kinsmen for eighteen stanzas, and then, without a break, she is counting the gods at Baldr’s death (№12). Bellows’ note: “At this point begins the fragmentary and interpolated ‘short Voluspo’ identified by Snorri. The manuscript gives no indication of the break in the poem’s continuity.” Nothing on the page says here a different poem begins; the same hand simply keeps writing, and the subject changes from a fool’s ancestors to the doom of the world.
We know this other poem’s name “by a curious chance,” Bellows says: Snorri “quotes one stanza of it, calling it ‘the short Voluspo.’” Here is that stanza — the one stanza of this fragment that Snorri thought worth keeping:
The sybils arose | from Vitholf’s race, From Vilmeith all | the seers are, And the workers of charms | are Svarthofthi’s children, And from Ymir sprang | the giants all. — Hyndluljoth 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
Forest Wolf, Wish-Tree, Black Head — Bellows’ glosses — and of all three “nothing further is known.” The short Völuspá survives by name because Snorri wanted to know where the witches came from. (The series has been here before: №31 found Snorri keeping four lines of the Lokasenna, and they were about silence.) The rest of the fragment is the great Völuspá’s furniture, cheaper: Odin as “the heir of Bur”; Gerth, Gymir’s daughter, whom №27 watched cursed into a marriage, and Thjazi, “the dark-loving giant,” and his daughter Skathi (№17, №25); the refrain “Much have I told thee, | and further will tell; / There is much that I know;– | wilt thou hear yet more?” — which Bellows sends you to the Völuspá’s own refrain to compare, and which sounds, beside it, like a student’s copy. And then the fragment says something Bellows can match only in Snorri.
One there was born | in the bygone days, Of the race of the gods, | and great was his might; Nine giant women, | at the world’s edge, Once bore the man | so mighty in arms. — Hyndluljoth 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
Gjolp there bore him, | Greip there bore him, Eistla bore him, | and Eyrgjafa, Ulfrun bore him, | and Angeyja, Imth and Atla, | and Jarnsaxa. — Hyndluljoth 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
Twenty-three tellings ago, in №15, this series quoted the god himself — “I am of nine mothers the offspring” — and said of the mothers: “The sisters are never named where we can trust the naming.” Here is the naming. Bellows renders the nine as “Yelper,” “Griper,” “Foamer,” “Sand-Strewer,” “She-Wolf,” “Sorrow-Whelmer,” “Dusk,” “Fury,” and “Iron-Sword.” Nine giantesses at the edge of the world, and one man born of all of them at once.
And now the where we can trust the naming, because №15’s hedge was better than №15 knew. Look at the two stanzas again. They do not say Heimdall. “One there was born … the man | so mighty in arms” — no name, in either stanza, anywhere in the fragment. The name is in Bellows’ note: “According to Snorri (Gylfaginning, 27) Heimdall was the son of Othin and of nine sisters.” The mothers are named in the poem; the son is named by Snorri, and Bellows makes the match. The poem that names them is one he has called “a late and very inferior imitation” by an author “more or less confused as to his facts.” The wave-guess the series held loosely in №15, Bellows holds exactly as loosely: the names “are frequently said to denote attributes of the sea.” Frequently said. Not mean. So: nine names, in a poem its editor says is in “very poor shape,” attached to a man the poem does not name, by a mythographer writing a century or so later. That is where the naming can be checked, and that is what checking it finds. The series keeps the names, and keeps the hedge.
One of them deserves a second look. Jarnsaxa — Iron-Sword — was, in №34, the name of the giantess who bore Thor the three-nights-old son who lifted a giant’s leg off his father. Brodeur spells her Járnsaxa; Bellows, here, Jarnsaxa. The sources do not say she is the same giantess; they only give two sons of gods the same mother’s name, one at the world’s edge and one in Snorri’s story of the duel. The series notes it and does not join them.
Then the stanza that made me stop:
Strong was he made | with the strength of earth, With the ice-cold sea, | and the blood of swine. — Hyndluljoth 39, trans. Bellows (1923)
Readers of №22 will feel something. That post quoted Guthrun remembering the cup her mother mixed to make her forget her murdered husband: “For mingled therein was magic earth, / Ice-cold sea, and the blood of swine.” Earth, ice-cold sea, blood of swine. The same three things, in the same order. Bellows’ note here: “It has been suggested that these lines were interpolated from Guthrunarkvitha II, 22.” And his note on the Guthrun stanza, in the heroic half of his own book, sends you straight back: “Blood of swine: cf. Hyndluljoth, 39 and note.” The two lines that give the watchman of the gods his strength may be the same two lines that describe the ale of forgetting — and the editor, honestly, cannot tell you which poem they came from. He offers a reading for the swine’s blood in this one (“to Heimdall’s strength drawn from earth and sea was added that derived from sacrifice”), but the suggestion of interpolation stands beside it unretracted. If it is right, the recipe for making a widow forget and the recipe for making a god strong are one recipe, and the North kept it in two places without noticing.
One there was born, | the best of all, And strong was he made | with the strength of earth; The proudest is called | the kinsman of men Of the rulers all | throughout the world. — Hyndluljoth 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
There it is: the third vague passage. The kinsman of men. Bellows’ note on it is the hub last week’s post pointed at — “Regarding Heimdall’s kinship to the three great classes of men, cf. Rigsthula, introductory note” — and the Rigsthula note, you will remember, points back here. But read the first sentence of the same note:
In the manuscript this stanza stands after stanza 44. — Bellows, note to Hyndluljoth 40 (1923)
After stanza 44. Look where that is. Stanza 44 is the end of the world — “For the gods are doomed, | and the end is death” — and stanza 45 is the one that follows it, the one about a nameless someone “a greater than all.” In the manuscript, “the kinsman of men” stands after the doom of the gods — and, if stanza 45 follows it there as it does here, before the one whose name the poet dares not speak. Bellows has lifted it out of that place and set it down beside the nine mothers, where it reads as Heimdall. In the manuscript, “One there was born, | the best of all” sits beside the end of the world and, on that reading, next to “Then comes another, | a greater than all” — and reads as what? Bellows’ note on 45 sends you to the Völuspá’s last stanzas, “where the possible reference to Christianity is noted.”
So the third witness for the annotator is a stanza that names no one, in a fragment the editor says is of no great value, by a poet the editor calls confused, that the editor has moved from beside the end of the world to beside the nine mothers, and that reads as Heimdall only once it has been moved. Bellows did this openly — he tells you in the first line of the note — and I am not saying he was wrong; the sea-mothers are the stanza’s nearest neighbor in sense, if not on the page. I am saying that the series promised last week to look at the third vague passage, and that it is vaguer than the other two, and that the whole Heimdall-as-father-of-mankind tradition now rests, in the Edda, on one uncertain line, one conjectural line, and one stanza that has been relocated. The annotator of the Rigsthula wrote “Heimdall” on the authority of something. The series has now looked for that something in every place Bellows sent it, and in each place found the editor holding the page at arm’s length.
The short Völuspá has a little more to say, and the series will let it, quickly. Loki: the wolf “with Angrbotha,” Sleipnir borne to Svathilfari — the mare story №31 heard as an insult — and then a myth that exists nowhere else:
A heart ate Loki,– | in the embers it lay, And half-cooked found he | the woman’s heart;– With child from the woman | Lopt soon was, And thence among men | came the monsters all. — Hyndluljoth 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
Loki eats a half-cooked heart from the embers and becomes pregnant, and from that “came the monsters all.” Bellows: “Nothing further is known of the myth here referred to.” A whole origin of monsters, in four lines, in a poem nobody values, and nowhere else. Then the sea that “seeks heaven itself,” the snows and the furious winds, the gods doomed, the end that is death (№14), and:
Then comes another, | a greater than all, Though never I dare | his name to speak; Few are they now | that farther can see Than the moment when Othin | shall meet the wolf. — Hyndluljoth 45, trans. Bellows (1923)
“With this stanza the fragmentary ‘short Voluspo’ ends,” Bellows says, “and the dialogue between Freyja and Hyndla continues.” Just like that. The world ends, a nameless greater one comes, and Freyja says:
“To my boar now bring | the memory-beer, So that all thy words, | that well thou hast spoken, The third morn hence | he may hold in mind, When their races Ottar | and Angantyr tell.” — Hyndluljoth 46, trans. Bellows (1923)
To my boar. “Freyja now admits the identity of her boar as Ottar,” Bellows notes — after the giantess named him in stanza 6, after the denial in stanza 7, after a genealogy and an apocalypse, she asks for the memory-beer for my boar in the first line of the stanza and names him in the last. The Norse had a drink for forgetting (№22) and a drink for remembering — one poured to end a grief, one to win a bet. The giantess will have none of it:
"Hence shalt thou fare, | for fain would I sleep, From me thou gettest | few favors good; My noble one, out | in the night thou leapest As. Heithrun goes | the goats among. — Hyndluljoth 47, trans. Bellows (1923)
Go away; I want to sleep. (The stray period after As is the transcription’s; the series quotes what the page prints.) And then the line the teaser called “a giantess’s opinion of Freyja’s morals.” Heithrun is the she-goat who stands by Valhall — Bellows says the name is “here used simply of she-goats in general, in caustic comment on Freyja’s morals,” and adds that “Of these Loki entertained a similar view,” in the Lokasenna (№31). The giantess is not done:
“To Oth didst thou run, | who loved thee ever, And many under | thy apron have crawled; My noble one, out | in the night thou leapest, As Heithrun goes | the goats among.” — Hyndluljoth 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
Oth. Readers of №2 will know him as Óðr, the husband who went away, for whom Freyja wept tears of red gold and walked the world under borrowed names. In that telling he is the reason gold is called Freyja’s tears. In this one, in a giantess’s mouth, he is the first name on a list. The refrain-lines come back a second time, and Bellows suspects they are “very likely repeated here by mistake” — abbreviated in the manuscript like the refrain, and expanded one time too many. Freyja’s answer is not an argument:
“Around the giantess | flames shall I raise, So that forth unburned | thou mayst not fare.” — Hyndluljoth 49, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two lines only; the manuscript, Bellows says, repeats the goat-lines a third time here, and “It seems probable that two lines have been lost,” which he supplies in his note with the threat’s condition — fetch the beer, or burn. The giantess sees the flames and yields — and poisons the yielding:
“Flames I see burning, | the earth is on fire, And each for his life | the price must lose; Bring then to Ottar | the draught of beer, Of venom full | for an evil fate.” — Hyndluljoth 50, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bring then to Ottar the draught of beer, of venom full. She gives the memory-beer and curses it in the same breath. And the poem’s last stanza is Freyja’s:
“Thine evil words | shall work no ill, Though, giantess, bitter | thy baleful threats; A drink full fair | shall Ottar find, If of all the gods | the favor I get.” — Hyndluljoth 51, trans. Bellows (1923)
If. The poem ends there — not because a sheet is missing this time; Bellows marks no loss at the end — but because that is where it stops. Bellows’ note on the memory-beer says Ottar “is to recall the entire genealogy he has just heard, and thus win his wager with Angantyr.” The poem does not say he won. It ends two mornings before the wager is told, with a poisoned beer, a goddess’s counter-blessing, and a condition: if of all the gods the favor I get. Last week a praise-poem ran out one stanza before the king’s name. This week a fool’s pedigree ends before we learn whether it was worth anything.
Nine times the giantess calls him a fool, and the reader should ask, at the end, what for. Not for the bet; the bet is never judged. Not for the disguise; she saw through it in one glance. He is a fool, in the refrain’s own logic, for one reason: and all are thy kinsmen — he does not know who he is related to. He has wagered everything on his blood and cannot say whose it is, and it takes a giantess woken at nightfall to tell him that the Skjoldungs and the Skilfings, the berserkers of Bolm, a Gothic king with a date, and Sigurd who killed the dragon and Gunnar whose brother killed him and Gotthorm who was that brother — all of them are his. Every family in the North is in the fool’s family. The whole dark run this series told, cup and river and pyre, is, to Ottar, a list of relatives he had not been introduced to.
And in the middle of it, with no warning on the page, the poem stops being about him and becomes about the end of the world, and the nine mothers of a god it will not name, and a heart in the embers, and a greater one whose name the poet dares not speak — and then a goddess says to my boar now bring the memory-beer, as if none of that had been said. Bellows said neither poem was of any great value. Perhaps as poems that is so. But this series has now told the Rigsthula’s three houses and the Hyndluljoth’s eighteen stanzas of kin back to back, and they turn out to be the same claim from both ends: the god sits between the couple and the three kinds of people come; the giantess counts backward from one fool and arrives at the gods. Everyone is related to everyone, the old books say, and the only question is whether you know it. Ottar did not. That is what the refrain means.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week the series goes to the second of the vague passages, in the poem that is a map of heaven, told by a god between two fires.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Hyndluljoth and its notes; the Rigsthula’s introductory prose note; Guthrunarkvitha II (stanza 22 and note); and the Grimnismol (stanza 13 and note, and for the teaser). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: this series has stood in King Geirröth’s hall once already, in №35, and watched a god sit between two fires for eight nights until his mantle burned. What it did not tell is what he said there — because what Odin says, from between the fires, is the map. The Grimnismol is, Bellows says, “largely encyclopedic”: the last forty-seven stanzas hold two hundred and twenty-five proper names, and among them are the homes of the gods, told hall by hall and numbered as he goes — Alfheim, given to Freyr “As a tooth-gift in ancient times”; Thrymheim, where Skathi (№17) “abides” in her father’s mountain home, with Bellows’ note telling the nine-nights-and-three compromise with Njorth that failed; Folkvang, where Freyja (№2) chooses “The half of the dead”; Himinbjorg, where the second vague passage about Heimdall sits in “bad shape”; and Valhall itself, with “Five hundred doors | and forty,” eight hundred fighters to a door, a goat by the hall whose mead never fails, and a hart from whose horns every river runs. Then the names of the Valkyries (№7), the horses of the sun, the harts and serpents in Yggdrasil (№13), and, at the end, name after name of Odin, stanza after stanza of them, the last beginning “Now am I Othin” — and a king falling on his own sword. The Grimnismol: the poem that is a map of heaven, and a god reading it aloud while he burns.