September 15, 2026
Last week the series went looking for the third of Bellows’ “few rather vague passages” for Heimdall as father of men, and found a stanza that named no one and had been moved. This week it goes to the second — and the second sits in a poem this series has already stood inside once. In №35 we watched a mortal king named Geirröth set a stranger in a dark-blue mantle between two fires for eight nights, until the mantle burned; we heard the stranger give one of his names in the forty-ninth stanza and his true one in the fifty-fourth; we read the manuscript’s closing prose, in which the king’s sword slips from his hand and he falls on it. That was the frame. What №35 did not tell is what the man between the fires said for fifty-four stanzas — because what he said is not a story. Bellows:
Like the preceding poem, the Grimnismol is largely encyclopedic in nature, and consists chiefly of proper names, the last forty-seven stanzas containing no less than two hundred and twenty-five of these. It is not, however, in dialogue form. As Müllenhoff pointed out, there is underneath the catalogue of mythological names a consecutive and thoroughly dramatic story. — Henry Adams Bellows, introductory note to the Grimnismol (1923)
Two hundred and twenty-five proper names in forty-seven stanzas, and under the list, a man burning. That is the whole poem: a god pays for a horn of drink with everything he knows, and everything he knows turns out to be a map. This series has told a contest with thirteen questions (№36) and a genealogy with one (№38). The Grimnismol is the catalogue nobody asked for. A ten-year-old hands a prisoner a drink, and the prisoner, without being asked anything at all, begins to name the homes of the gods.
Bellows dates it “probably in the first half of the tenth century,” says it is in both great codices — “found complete” in the Arnamagnæan — and that “Snorri quotes over twenty of its stanzas.” And — this matters for the ending — he says that “many stanzas have undoubtedly crept in from other poems, but the beginning and end of the poem are clearly marked.” The fire and the name are original. Hold on to that.
Teasers are claims. Last week’s holds, particular by particular: “largely encyclopedic” and the two hundred and twenty-five names are Bellows’ own words; Alfheim is given to Freyr “As a tooth-gift in ancient times” (stanza 5); Skathi “abides” in her father’s home (11); Freyja chooses “The half of the dead” (14); Heimdall’s line is, in Bellows’ note, “in bad shape” (13); Valhall has “Five hundred doors | and forty” and eight hundred fighters to a door (23); the goat’s drink “Ne’er fails” (25) and from the hart’s horns “all the rivers run” (26); the Valkyries are listed (36), the sun’s horses (37), the harts and serpents (33–34), and the last stanza opens “Now am I Othin” (54). Three things to tell in the open before we go in.
First, “numbered as he goes.” He does — but the numbering starts late. The god names Thor’s Thruthheim (stanza 4), then Ydalir and Alfheim (stanza 5), and then says “A third home is there” (stanza 6). Three places, and the count begins at three. Bellows does not comment. The arithmetic that follows is mine, not his: either Ydalir and Alfheim are the first and second homes and Thor’s hall stands outside the count altogether, or Thruthheim and Ydalir are one and two and the elves’ Alfheim is not counted as a god’s home. Either way, one of the first three houses in heaven is not numbered — and the last, Vithar’s Vithi (stanza 17), has no number either. Thirteen places named; a count that runs to eleven; two places with no number.
Second, the teaser said Bellows’ note tells “the nine-nights-and-three compromise” between Skathi and Njorth — and it does: “nine nights at Thrymheim and then three at Noatun.” But readers of №17 will remember a different sum. That post followed Brodeur’s Snorri, which says: “They made a compact on these terms: they should be nine nights in Thrymheimr, but the second nine at Nóatún.” Nine and three; nine and nine. Two public-domain sources, two arithmetics — and №17 was faithful to its source. The series now holds both numbers, and will come back to them at the sixth hall.
Third, “a king falling on his own sword.” Bellows’ introduction says Geirröth “falls on his sward” — the transcription’s spelling — and the closing prose, which №35 quoted, says the sword slipped from his hand hilt-down and the king stumbled forward onto it. The teaser’s phrase is fair; but the prose is careful to make it a fall, not a choice. Whether anything arranged the fall, the poem says only this, in its fifty-third stanza: “The maids are hostile.” Bellows’ note: the three Norns (№4).
The prose that precedes the poem is long, and Bellows thinks it worth the reader’s time: the Eddic prose notes, he says, were written “in the twelfth or thirteenth century” by the compiler, and where they contain more than the poems themselves supply, they “are relics” of an oral prose tradition — the stories that lived beside the verse. This one begins with two boys in a boat. King Hrauthung’s sons, Agnar, ten winters old, and Geirröth, eight, row out to catch little fish and are blown to sea; wrecked in the dark, they find a poor peasant and his wife and winter with them. “The housewife took care of Agnar, and the peasant cared for Geirröth, and taught him wisdom.” In spring the peasant gives him a boat and “spoke secretly with Geirröth.” When they reach home, Geirröth leaps ashore first, pushes the boat back out with his brother in it, and says — the prose gives him the words — “Go thou now where evil may have thee!” Their father is dead. Geirröth is made king.
Then the scene changes to a chair this series has sat in before. In №27 it was Freyr who sat in Hlithskjolf and looked over all the worlds and saw a girl in a giant’s yard. Here it is the chair’s owner and his wife:
Othin and Frigg sat in Hlithskjolf and looked over all the worlds. Othin said: “Seest thou Agnar, thy foster ling, how he begets children with a giantess in the cave? But Geirröth, my fosterling, is a king, and now rules over his land.” Frigg said: “He is so miserly that he tortures his guests if he thinks that too many of them come to him.” Othin replied that this was the greatest of lies; and they made a wager about this matter. — prose introduction to the Grimnismol, trans. Bellows (1923)
(Foster ling, with the space, is the transcription’s; the series quotes the page.) The prose never says in so many words that the peasant and his wife were Odin and Frigg. It says the housewife took Agnar and the peasant took Geirröth and taught him wisdom; and then it has Odin call Geirröth “my fosterling” and Agnar thy fosterling. The reader joins the two halves, and Bellows’ note joins them only this far: “She and Othin nearly always disagreed in some such way as the one outlined in this story.” So, if the reader joins them: a god and a goddess each raised a boy for a winter, and one of the boys, after a secret word from his foster-father, pushed the other out to sea — and the god boasts of him. And the goddess, whom №3 called the one who knows and says nothing, says one thing here, and it is not true. The prose is blunt: “Now it was a very great slander that King Geirröth was not hospitable.” Then Frigg makes it true. She sends her maid-servant Fulla to warn the king that a magician is coming who will bewitch him, “and told this sign concerning him, that no dog was so fierce as to leap at him.” A man arrives whom the dogs will not attack. He wears a dark-blue mantle and gives the name Grimnir — “the Hooded One” — and will say nothing else. The king, hospitable, has him tortured to make him speak. Frigg said Geirröth tortures his guests; Geirröth tortures a guest because Frigg said so. The wager is won by the party who rigged it, and the prose does not say who collected.
№35 told the rest of the frame: two fires, eight nights, the mantle burning on his back. One more thing the prose gives that №35 did not: the king’s son is “ten winters old, and called Agnar after his father’s brother” — the uncle who was pushed out to sea. The boy named for the wronged brother is the one who brings the prisoner a full horn and says “that the king did ill in letting him be tormented with out cause” — with out, in two words, is the transcription’s, like sward and foster ling; the series quotes what the page prints. Grimnir drinks. And speaks:
Hot art thou, fire! | too fierce by far; Get ye now gone, ye flames! The mantle is burnt, | though I bear it aloft, And the fire scorches the fur. — Grimnismol 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
’Twixt the fires now | eight nights have I sat, And no man brought meat to me, Save Agnar alone, | and alone shall rule Geirröth’s son o’er the Goths. — Grimnismol 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note on that stanza is the first of many confessions: “In the original lines 2 and 4 are both too long for the meter, and thus the true form of the stanza is doubtful”; both manuscripts have “the land of the Goths,” and “Goths,” he says, “apparently was applied indiscriminately to any South-Germanic people” — the word “has no specific application.” The god’s first prophecy is in a stanza whose shape the editor cannot vouch for. Then the payment is named:
Hail to thee, Agnar! | for hailed thou art By the voice of Veratyr; For a single drink | shalt thou never receive A greater gift as reward. — Grimnismol 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
Veratyr is “Lord of Men,” Odin — the boy is being hailed by the god under one more name, and does not know it. And the gift? Bellows’ whole note on the gift: “The ‘gift’ which Agnar receives is Othin’s mythological lore.” Everything that follows — every hall, every door, every river and horse and serpent and name — is the reward for one horn. Nobody asked a question. The dwarf in №36 was answering Thor; the giantess in №38 was answering Freyja. Grimnir is answering a drink.
The land is holy | that lies hard by The gods and the elves together; And Thor shall ever | in Thruthheim dwell, Till the gods to destruction go. — Grimnismol 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
The first home named is Thor’s — the whole run this series just finished, №28 through №36, lived in that one hall — and the poem gives him a lease that runs exactly to the end of the world. Then:
Ydalir call they | the place where Ull A hall for himself hath set; And Alfheim the gods | to Freyr once gave As a tooth-gift in ancient times. — Grimnismol 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Ull is the archer among the gods, and Ydalir is “Yew-Dales” — Bellows: “The wood of the yew-tree was used for bows in the North just as it was long afterwards in England.” (His note prints the god’s name as Ulf; the stanza and his later note say Ull; the series takes the slip for the transcription’s.) And Alfheim, the home of the elves, was given to Freyr as a tooth-gift — the present made to a child when it cuts its first tooth, a custom which was, Bellows says, “according to Vigfusson, still in vogue in Iceland” in his day. The god who in №27 sent a servant with a carved curse to buy a bride was once a teething infant who was given a whole realm for it.
Then the count begins — at three. “A third home is there, | with silver thatched”: Valaskjolf, “the Shelf of the Slain,” Odin’s own home, with his watch-tower in it. And here is the poem’s first flagged interpolation, and it is the god’s own house: Gering, Bellows says, “identifies this with Valhall, and as that is mentioned in stanza 8, he believes stanza 6 to be an interpolation.” The fourth:
Sökkvabekk is the fourth, | where cool waves flow, And amid their murmur it stands; There daily do Othin | and Saga drink In gladness from cups of gold. — Grimnismol 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
Of Saga, Bellows says, “little is known” — but “Saga may be an hypostasis of Frigg, but Snorri calls her a distinct goddess, and the name suggests some relation to history or story-telling.” If the may is right, and Snorri wrong, the god sitting in a fire his wife lit is describing the house where he and his wife, under another name, drink daily from gold cups among the murmur of cool water. The series notes Bellows’ may and does not press it.
The fifth is Glathsheim, “the Place of Joy,” and in it “gold-bright there / Stands Valhall stretching wide,” where Odin “each day” chooses “The men who have fallen in fight.” Then two stanzas on how you would know it:
Easy is it to know | for him who to Othin Comes and beholds the hall; Its rafters are spears, | with shields is it roofed, On its benches are breastplates strewn. — Grimnismol 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
Easy is it to know | for him who to Othin Comes and beholds the hall; There hangs a wolf | by the western door, And o’er it an eagle hovers. — Grimnismol 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows thinks the wolf and the eagle “were carved figures above the door.” And the vellum ledger this series keeps gets a fourth entry: “The opening formula is abbreviated in both manuscripts.” The Thrymskvitha cut its repeated stanzas to initial letters (№29); the Lokasenna shortened its hammer-refrain (№31); the Flateyjarbok wrote all for a giantess’s whole insult (№38). Here, in both great codices, Easy is it to know for him who to Othin comes and beholds the hall was written once and, the second time, not — the copyist knew the reader knew the way in.
The sixth is Thrymheim, | where Thjazi dwelt, The giant of marvelous might; Now Skathi abides, | the god’s fair bride, In the home that her father had. — Grimnismol 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
№17 quoted this stanza as Snorri quotes it, in Brodeur’s English; this is Bellows’. And Bellows’ note tells the marriage whole, in one breath:
The god, or rather Wane, Njorth (cf. Voluspo, 21, note) married Thjazi’s daughter, Skathi. She wished to live in her father’s hall among the mountains, while Njorth loved his home, Noatun, by the sea. They agreed to compromise by spending nine nights at Thrymheim and then three at Noatun, but neither could endure the surroundings of the other’s home, so Skathi returned to Thrymheim, while Njorth stayed at Noatun. — Bellows, note to Grimnismol 11 (1923)
Nine nights and then three. Brodeur’s Snorri, which №17 followed, says nine “but the second nine.” The two verses the couple traded afterward — №17 quoted them; the series will not re-spend them — settle only one side of the sum: Njorth says he was in the hills “Nights only nine.” Neither verse counts the nights by the sea. So the two sources agree exactly on how long the god lasted on the mountain and disagree on how long the giantess was meant to last on the shore. The series does not know which Snorri manuscript Bellows had in mind, and will not guess; it reports that the oldest divorce record in the North has two settlements on file.
And then the poem does something no prose retelling can. Five halls later:
The eleventh is Noatun; | there has Njorth For himself a dwelling set; The sinless ruler | of men there sits In his temple timbered high. — Grimnismol 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
The sixth home is hers; the eleventh is his. The map of heaven keeps them exactly where they ended up — five halls apart, her mountain and his sea, with Baldr’s house and Heimdall’s and Freyja’s and Forseti’s between them — and the god reciting the map knows both addresses. Bellows on Noatun: “Ships’-Haven,” “the home of Njorth, who calms the waves.” The sinless ruler of men. Of all the gods in this catalogue, the one who gets the word sinless is the hostage (№8) whose marriage failed on geography.
Between the two: the seventh, Breithablik, “Wide-Shining,” where Baldr has set his dwelling “In the land I know | that lies so fair, / And from evil fate is free.” The one house in heaven the poem calls free of evil fate belongs to the god whose fate this series told in №12. The tenth is Glitnir, “the Shining,” pillars of gold and roof of silver, where Forseti “sets all strife at end” — a god this series has never had cause to name, because, Bellows says, we know nothing of him “beyond what Snorri tells us”: “he is the best judge among gods and men.” One stanza and three sentences of Snorri’s; that is Forseti’s whole estate. And the eighth and the ninth each get a section of their own, because each carries a footnote this series owes.
Himinbjorg is the eighth, | and Heimdall there O’er men holds sway, it is said; In his well-built house | does the warder of heaven The good mead gladly drink. — Grimnismol 13, trans. Bellows (1923)
There it is: o’er men holds sway — Heimdall as ruler of mankind, the second of the three passages Bellows allowed the annotator of the Rigsthula. №37 reported that Bellows calls it “a very doubtful line,” and №38 quoted the tail of his note on it; here is the note whole, because the first half matters as much as the second:
In this stanza the two functions of Heimdall–as father of mankind (cf. Voluspo, 1 and note, and Rigsthula, introductory prose and note) and as warder of the gods–seem both to be mentioned, but the second line in the manuscripts is apparently in bad shape, and in the editions is more or less conjectural. — Bellows, note to Grimnismol 13 (1923)
Seem both to be mentioned; the line that does the mentioning is “in bad shape” in the manuscripts and “more or less conjectural” in the editions. And this is a stanza Snorri quotes — “Snorri quotes stanzas 11-15,” says the note two stanzas up — so we can look at it in a second translation of a second text. Brodeur, rendering Snorri’s copy:
Himinbjörg ‘t is called, | where Heimdallr, they say, Aye has his housing; There the gods’ sentinel | drinks in his snug hall Gladly good mead. — Gylfaginning XXVII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
No men. In Snorri’s version of the stanza, as Brodeur gives it, Heimdall simply has his housing there. The series is not reading the Old Norse and will not pretend to; it is holding two public-domain translations of two medieval texts side by side, and saying what they show: the line that makes Heimdall lord of men in Bellows’ Grimnismol is, by Bellows’ own account, a conjecture, and the same stanza in Snorri’s mouth does not carry it. So the ledger on the three vague passages closes. №37 found the first “uncertain.” №38 found the third relocated from beside the end of the world. And the second is a line the editor calls conjectural, which the other witness to the stanza does not have. Three passages, three times the editor holding the page at arm’s length. Heimdall keeps his mead, his well-built house, and his nine mothers; the fatherhood of mankind rests where the Rigsthula’s annotator put it, and nowhere else the series can find.
The ninth is Folkvang, and the stanza is the one this series built its second telling on — “Half the Slain, and Hers First,” №2 — where Freyja “decrees / Who shall have seats in the hall” and chooses “The half of the dead” each day, “And half does Othin have.” №2 quoted it right, and the series will not quote it again. What №2 did not tell is Bellows’ note under it, and the series owes it now:
Half of the dead: Mogk has made it clear that Freyja represents a confusion between two originally distinct divinities: the wife of Othin (Frigg) and the northern goddess of love. This passage appears to have in mind her attributes as Othin’s wife. Snorri has this same confusion, but there is no reason why the Freyja who was Freyr’s sister should share the slain with Othin. — Bellows, note to Grimnismol 14 (1923)
So the stanza says Freyja, and Snorri says Freyja, and №2 said Freyja — and the editor of the stanza thinks the poet was describing Odin’s wife’s office and gave it his sister-goddess’s name. This does not unsay the poem. The poem says what it says, and the series’ second telling stands on the words as they are. But the reader is owed the footnote: the arithmetic of the slain that №2 made its title from is, on Bellows’ reading, the one place the Grimnismol may have mixed two goddesses up. And notice where we are when he says it. This is a poem in which the god sits in the fire because of Frigg; describes Sökkvabekk, where he drinks daily with Saga, who “may be” Frigg (though Snorri, Bellows adds, “calls her a distinct goddess”); and describes Folkvang, where Freyja takes half his dead in what “appears to” be Frigg’s office. If Bellows is right each time, Odin’s wife is everywhere in this poem under other names — and Bellows says may each time, and so does the series.
One more home, and then the god goes indoors:
Filled with growing trees | and high-standing grass Is Vithi, Vithar’s land; But there did the son | from his steed leap down, When his father he fain would avenge. — Grimnismol 17, trans. Bellows (1923)
Vithi is “not mentioned elsewhere.” Vithar is the son who “avenged his father, Othin, by slaying the wolf Fenrir” (№14). The god between the fires, reciting the homes of heaven, includes the field where his own death will be paid for. He puts it on the map in the past tense.
Stanzas 18 to 20, Bellows says, “appear also in Snorri’s Edda. Very possibly they are an interpolation here.” In Eldhrimnir, the great kettle, the cook Andhrimnir boils the boar Sæhrimnir, whose flesh feeds every hero, and “each evening he becomes whole again, to be cooked the next morning.” Then the host’s own table:
Freki and Geri | does Heerfather feed, The far-famed fighter of old: But on wine alone | does the weapon-decked god, Othin, forever live. — Grimnismol 19, trans. Bellows (1923)
The Greedy and the Ravenous, the two wolves at his side, “to whom he gives all the food set before him, since wine is food and drink alike for him.” A god who has just said no man brought him meat for eight nights describes a hall where he gives all his meat away. And then the stanza this post is named for:
O’er Mithgarth Hugin | and Munin both Each day set forth to fly; For Hugin I fear | lest he come not home, But for Munin my care is more. — Grimnismol 20, trans. Bellows (1923)
Hugin is Thought and Munin is Memory — “the two ravens who sit on Othin’s shoulders, and fly forth daily to bring him news of the world.” The very first telling in this series, №1, paraphrased this stanza: Odin fears each day that the ravens will not come back, and Memory is the one he fears for most. Here are the words. And look where he says them. He is in the middle of a recitation — halls, doors, a cook, a boar — that is nothing but memory performed aloud; and in the middle of it he says that of the two things his mind sends out each day, the one he is most afraid of losing is the one he is using. This series has been in the memory business for weeks: the ale that made a widow forget (№22), the beer that would make a fool remember (№38). Here is the god who runs Valhall saying, with no one having asked, what he would least like to lose.
Then the approaches. Thund roars around Valhall, and in it “Thjothvitnir’s fish” swims — the sun, Bellows thinks, as the catch of “the mighty wolf” — a kenning he calls “characteristic of all Skaldic poetry” and “rather rare in the Edda.” The gate:
There Valgrind stands, | the sacred gate, And behind are the holy doors; Old is the gate, | but few there are Who can tell how it tightly is locked. — Grimnismol 22, trans. Bellows (1923)
And then the number the teaser promised:
Five hundred doors | and forty there are, I ween, in Valhall’s walls; Eight hundred fighters | through one door fare When to war with the wolf they go. — Grimnismol 23, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows says Snorri “quotes stanza 23 as a proof of the vast size of Valhall,” and that the last two lines “refer to the final battle with Fenrir.” He does not do the multiplication; the series does, and owns it: five hundred and forty doors, eight hundred to a door, is four hundred and thirty-two thousand fighters going out at once. And then the same number again, for a different house:
Five hundred rooms | and forty there are I ween, in Bilskirnir built; Of all the homes | whose roofs I beheld, My son’s the greatest meseemed. — Grimnismol 24, trans. Bellows (1923)
My son’s — this is Odin on Thor’s hall, Bilskirnir, in Thruthheim, the first home he named. Bellows: “This stanza is almost certainly an interpolation, brought in through a confusion of the first two lines with those of stanza 23. Its description of Thor’s house, Bilskirnir… has nothing to do with that of Valhall.” And, in the note on 23: “This and the following stanza stand in reversed order in Regius.” Two houses in heaven have the same dimensions because, on this reading, a copyist’s ear caught on the same opening line and a stanza from somewhere else followed it in — and the two manuscripts cannot agree which came first. The strongest god’s house is measured by his father’s eye, and the measurement may belong to someone else’s poem.
Then the two animals the teaser named:
Heithrun is the goat | who stands by Heerfather’s hall, And the branches of Lærath she bites; The pitcher she fills | with the fair, clear mead, Ne’er fails the foaming drink. — Grimnismol 25, trans. Bellows (1923)
Eikthyrnir is the hart | who stands by Heerfather’s hall And the branches of Lærath he bites; From his horns a stream | into Hvergelmir drops, Thence all the rivers run. — Grimnismol 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
Last week a giantess used Heithrun’s name as an insult to a goddess; here she is the mead supply of heaven, eating the tree (Lærath is “presumably the ash Yggdrasil”) and filling the pitcher that never runs dry. Bellows cannot resist Snorri here: “Gangleri foolishly asks whether the heroes drink water, whereto Har replies, ‘Do you imagine that Othin invites kings and earls and other noble men, and then gives them water to drink?’” And the hart, “the Oak-Thorned,” antlered like an oak, “presumably represents the clouds” — from his horns into Hvergelmir, “the Cauldron-Roaring,” and from there every river in the world. Both first lines, Bellows says, are “too long in the original.”
What follows is the part of the map that the editor would like to fold away. Two stanzas of river-names — Sith and Vith, Sækin and Ækin, on through Gjol and Leipt, “that go among men, / And hence they fall to Hel” — and Bellows opens his note with a sigh: “The entire passage from stanza 27 through stanza 35 is confused. The whole thing may well be an interpolation.” Bugge calls four of the stanzas an interpolation; other editors “have rejected various lines”; the spelling of the rivers “varies greatly”; and — the series’ favorite sentence in the apparatus — “It is needless here to point out the many attempted emendations of this list.” One river is called Rin, and it is the same word as the Rhine, and the resemblance, Bellows says, is “doubt less purely accidental” (the split word, again, is the page’s). Another, Leipt, is the river men swore oaths by, and Gering, Bellows says, “points the parallel to the significance of the Styx among the Greeks.”
Then Thor, on foot:
Kormt and Ormt | and the Kerlaugs twain Shall Thor each day wade through, (When dooms to give | he forth shall go To the ash-tree Yggdrasil;) For heaven’s bridge | burns all in flame, And the sacred waters seethe. — Grimnismol 29, trans. Bellows (1923)
The parentheses are Bellows’: lines 3–4 “are almost certainly interpolated from stanza 30.” Why does Thor wade where the other gods ride? Bellows gives two readings, leads with the first, and rules on neither: either “Thor has to go on foot in the last days of the destruction, when the bridge is burning,” or “when Thor leaves the heavens (i.e., when a thunder-storm is over) the rainbow-bridge becomes hot in the sun.” The end of the world, or the weather clearing; the poem’s line supports both. Then the horses the gods do ride — Glath and Gyllir, Gler and Skeithbrimir, ten in all — and one omission Bellows cannot let pass: “Othin’s eight footed horse, Sleipnir, is not mentioned in this list” (eight footed, unhyphenated, as the page prints it). Fourteen stanzas later the same poem will call Sleipnir “the best of steeds.” The list of the gods’ horses leaves out the god’s horse. (Golltopp, “Gold-Topped,” is Heimdall’s, and Bellows pauses to note that gold “was one of the attributes of Heimdall’s belongings” — his teeth too; №15.)
Then the tree, which this series told in №13 out of this very passage — the three roots, the squirrel, the rotting trunk; those stanzas are №13’s and stay there. What №13 did not have room for is what the editor says around them. After the three roots, Bellows thinks a stanza has been lost, and he supplies its ghost from Snorri: “An eagle sits in the branches of the ash tree, and he is very wise; and between his eyes sits the hawk who is called Vethrfolnir.” And after the squirrel come two stanzas he calls “certainly in bad shape in the Mss.”:
Four harts there are, | that the highest twigs Nibble with necks bent back; Dain and Dvalin, | . . . . . . Duneyr and Dyrathror. — Grimnismol 33, trans. Bellows (1923)
The row of dots is Bellows’ — half a line gone, and “there is no clue as to its nature.” Highest twigs is, he admits, “a guess; the Mss. words are baffling.” And the four harts themselves may be “a late multiplication of the single hart mentioned in stanza 26.” Then:
More serpents there are | beneath the ash Than an unwise ape would think; Goin and Moin, | Grafvitnir’s sons, Grabak and Grafvolluth, Ofnir and Svafnir | shall ever, methinks, Gnaw at the twigs of the tree. — Grimnismol 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Than an unwise ape would think — the only ape this series has met in the Edda, and he is here, in a stanza about how many serpents are chewing the world-tree. The list, Bellows thinks, “seems to have been expanded out of Nithhogg, the only authentic dragon under the root of the ash.” And then the note that this post will need at the end: “Ofnir and Svafnir (‘The Bewilderer’ and ‘The Sleep-Bringer’): it is noteworthy that in stanza 54 Othin gives himself these two names.” Two of the serpents gnawing at the tree have the god’s names — or the god has theirs. Hold that.
Bellows closes the tree with a bookkeeper’s shrug: “If we assume that stanzas 27-34 are later interpolations–possibly excepting 32–this section of the poem reads clearly enough.” Possibly excepting 32. The squirrel may be the only original thing between the hart and the rot.
The Valkyries come next — thirteen names, “Shaker” to “Gods’-Kin” — and №7 quoted the stanza whole; the series adds only Bellows’ caution that “Manuscripts and editions vary greatly in the spelling of these names, and hence in their significance.” Then the sky:
Arvak and Alsvith | up shall drag Weary the weight of the sun; But an iron cool | have the kindly gods Of yore set under their yokes. — Grimnismol 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
Early Waker and All Swift, the horses of the sun, and under their yokes something to cool them. Bellows gives Snorri’s story whole: a man named Mundilfari had two children “so fair and lovely that he called his son Mani and his daughter Sol,” and the gods, angry “at this presumption,” took them and set them to driving the moon and the sun; “under their yokes the gods set two bellows to cool them, and in some songs these are called ‘the cold iron.’” Müllenhoff suspects the whole run, 37 to 41, of being interpolated; Edzardi thinks it “may have come from” the Vafthruthnismol. In front of the sun, a shield:
In front of the sun | does Svalin stand, The shield for the shining god; Mountains and sea | would be set in flames If it fell from before the sun. — Grimnismol 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
Svalin, “the Cooling” — and this is one of two places in the whole Edda it is mentioned. And behind the sun, the reason the map matters:
Skoll is the wolf | that to Ironwood Follows the glittering god, And the son of Hrothvitnir, | Hati, awaits The burning bride of heaven. — Grimnismol 39, trans. Bellows (1923)
Skoll for the sun, Hati for the moon — “the burning bride of heaven” — and Hati is “the son of Hrothvitnir (‘The Mighty Wolf,’ i. e. Fenrir),” the wolf this series bound in №5. Ironwood is “a conjectural emendation of an obscure phrase.” Then two stanzas on Ymir, the giant whose flesh became the earth and whose blood the ocean, “Of his bones the hills, | of his hair the trees, / Of his skull the heavens high” — which Bellows thinks “seem to have come from a different source from the others of this poem,” an older Vafthruthnismol perhaps; Snorri adds that the stones were made from Ymir’s teeth and that Mithgarth, the wall around the world, was built from his eyebrows “because of the enmity of the giants.”
And then, for one stanza, the god remembers where he is:
His the favor of Ull | and of all the gods Who first in the flames will reach; For the house can be seen | by the sons of the gods If the kettle aside were cast. — Grimnismol 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows: “With this stanza Othin gets back to his immediate situation, bound as he is between two fires. He calls down a blessing on the man who will reach into the fire and pull aside the great kettle which, in Icelandic houses, hung directly under the smoke vent in the roof, and thus kept any one above from looking down into the interior.” A god has just recited every roof in heaven, and now asks one favor: move the kettle so that heaven can see in through this roof. He wants to be looked down on. (Ull is named, Bellows says drily, “apparently for no better reason than that his name fits the initial-rhyme.”)
Two stanzas break in — “certainly interpolated, for they have nothing to do with the context,” as №28 already reported — and №28 quoted the first, the making of the ship Skithblathnir by Ivaldi’s sons, and the opening two lines of the second. The second, whole, is a list of bests:
The best of trees | must Yggdrasil be, Skithblathnir best of boats; Of all the gods | is Othin the greatest, And Sleipnir the best of steeds; Bifrost of bridges, | Bragi of skalds, Hobrok of hawks, | and Garm of hounds. — Grimnismol 44, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Presumably in faulty condition,” says Bellows; “One Ms. has after the fifth line half of a sixth,–‘Brimir of swords.’” A half-line of the best of swords, in one manuscript only. Of Hobrok, best of hawks, “nothing further is known.” And Bragi, best of skalds, “is mentioned only three times in the poems of the Edda” — in the Lokasenna (№31) he was the first god Loki went for. Then the message goes out:
To the race of the gods | my face have I raised, And the wished-for aid have I waked; For to all the gods | has the message gone That sit in Ægir’s seats, That drink within Ægir’s doors. — Grimnismol 45, trans. Bellows (1923)
“With this stanza the narrative current of the poem is resumed.” The gods are at Ægir’s — the hall of №30’s kettle and №31’s quarrel — and the god in the fire has raised his face and called them.
Then the names. Five stanzas of them, and Bellows says of the lot: “Concerning the condition of stanzas 46-50, quoted by Snorri, nothing definite can be said. Lines and entire stanzas of this ‘catalogue’ sort undoubtedly came and went with great freedom all through the period of oral transmission.” Grim, the Hooded; Gangleri, the Wanderer — the name Snorri gives his questioner, the man who “foolishly asks” whether the heroes drink water; Thekk, the Much-Loved; Thrithi, the Third — and here Bellows’ note goes somewhere unexpected: in Snorri’s Edda the answers come from Har, Jafnhar and Thrithi, and “Just what this tripartite form of Othin signifies has been the source of endless debate. Probably this line is late enough to betray the somewhat muddled influence of early Christianity.” (Last week’s short Völuspá ended on a nameless “greater than all” with a footnote of Bellows’ pointing the same way — there, only “possible.”) Bileyg, “the Shifty-Eyed,” and Baleyg, “the Flaming-Eyed” — the god of №1 has two names for his eye. Bolverk, “Doer of Ill,” the name he wore to steal the mead (№10). Harbarth, “Graybeard,” the ferryman of №32. Then:
Sithhott, Sithskegg, | Sigfather, Hnikuth, Allfather, Valfather, | Atrith, Farmatyr: A single name | have I never had Since first among men I fared. — Grimnismol 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
A single name have I never had since first among men I fared. The forty-ninth stanza — “Grimnir they call me | in Geirröth’s hall” — №35 quoted; the god is now naming himself in the room. And then he turns on the king:
Drunk art thou, Geirröth, | too much didst thou drink, . . . . . . . . . . Much hast thou lost, | for help no more From me or my heroes thou hast. — Grimnismol 51, trans. Bellows (1923)
The dots are the editor’s and not the scribe’s. “The manuscripts show no lacuna. Some editors supply a second line from paper manuscripts: ‘Greatly by me art beguiled.’” The vellum is whole here; it is the meter that has a hole in it, and a later paper copy that offers to fill it. Then:
Small heed didst thou take | to all that I told, And false were the words of thy friends; For now the sword | of my friend I see, That waits all wet with blood. — Grimnismol 52, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thy sword-pierced body | shall Ygg have soon, For thy life is ended at last; The maids are hostile; | now Othin behold! Now come to me if thou canst! — Grimnismol 53, trans. Bellows (1923)
False were the words of thy friends — the king was warned by a goddess’s maid that a magician was coming, and the warning was the lie. The maids are hostile: the Norns. Now Othin behold — and the fifty-fourth stanza, whose first line №35 gave, runs out through Ygg and Thund and Vak and Skilfing and Gaut and Jalk to its last two lines:
Ofnir and Svafnir, | and all, methinks, Are names for none but me. — Grimnismol 54 (lines 5–6), trans. Bellows (1923)
The Bewilderer and the Sleep-Bringer — the two serpents from stanza 34, gnawing at the twigs of the tree that holds up the world — are the last names the god claims before the king dies. Bellows’ note on the stanza: “Possibly out of place, and probably more or less corrupt.” The manuscripts’ closing prose — №35 quoted its last three sentences; the first two are new here — has the king sitting with “his sword on his knee, half drawn from its sheath,” and then, “when he heard that Othin was come thither,” rising “and sought to take Othin from the fire”: the sword slipping hilt-down, the stumble, the blade. The god vanishes. The boy who brought the horn rules long. The second stanza’s prophecy — alone shall rule Geirröth’s son — is paid out in the prose, and the tip for a single drink turns out to have included a kingdom.
Count what Bellows will not vouch for. Stanza 6, the god’s own house (Gering). Stanzas 18–20, the cook, the wolves, the ravens (“very possibly”). Stanza 24, Thor’s house measured (“almost certainly”). Stanzas 27–35, the rivers, the wading, the horses, the roots, the harts, the serpents, the rot (“may well be” — “possibly excepting 32”). Stanzas 37–41, the sun’s horses, the shield, the wolves behind the sun, Ymir (Müllenhoff). Stanzas 43–44, the ship and the bests (“certainly”). Stanza 54, the last names (“Possibly out of place, and probably more or less corrupt”). That is my tally, not Bellows’ — he never adds it up — and it comes to some twenty-two of fifty-four stanzas that the editor flags as interpolated, displaced, or corrupt; and it leaves out stanzas 46–50, the names, of whose condition “nothing definite can be said.” Nearly half the map of heaven may have been drawn in by other hands. And Bellows’ assurance stands beside the tally: “the beginning and end of the poem are clearly marked.” The fire is original. The names are original. Between them, across some three hundred years of telling, people who had the poem by heart added what else they had by heart, until the god between the fires was reciting not only his own memory but everyone’s.
I think that is what the title stanza is about, and why it sits where it does. A god who is nothing but what he knows — the one-eyed one, the hanged one, the thief of the mead — says, out of nowhere, in the middle of a list, that of Thought and Memory it is Memory he is more afraid to lose. And the poem he says it in is a memory that other people kept adding to because they were afraid of losing it too. Every interpolation Bellows flags is someone, somewhere, between the tenth century and the thirteenth, who knew a stanza about the sun’s horses or the serpents under the tree and could not bear for it to fall out of the record, and so put it into the god’s mouth, where it would be kept. The Grimnismol is not a poem about a god who fears forgetting. It is what fearing forgetting produces: a catalogue, dictated to a child, that everyone who heard it made a little longer.
That is also why, I think, it is not a dark telling, though a king dies in it. The dark poems this series told ran on things put into people — a cup that dissolved oaths, wolf-meat fed to a boy, a wooing in a borrowed shape. This one runs the other way. A boy gives a prisoner a drink, and the prisoner pours back into him everything he is afraid will be lost, and the boy grows up and rules, and the poem is kept — by heart, then in two books — for a thousand years. Bellows calls the whole business “encyclopedic,” and one hears a mild complaint in the word. But an encyclopedia is only what a frightened memory looks like when it has been written down. For Hugin I fear lest he come not home. But for Munin my care is more. The god said it once between two fires, and then, for three hundred years, everyone who remembered it made sure he said a little more.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week the series turns to the poem Bellows pairs with this one, and to the one question in it that is about what lives.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Grimnismol, its prose frame and its notes; the Vafthruthnismol (introductory note and stanzas 16 and 44–51, for the teaser). Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1916) — Gylfaginning XXIII, XXIV and XXVII. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Bellows says the Grimnismol and the poem that precedes it in both manuscripts “together, in deed, constitute a fairly complete dictionary of Norse mythology.” The other poem is the Vafthruthnismol — Odin, under the name Gagnrath, in the hall of “the Mighty in Riddles,” with his head wagered against a giant’s (№36 quoted the stakes; №12 the unanswerable last question; №3 the wife who tried to keep him home). What this series has never told is the middle: twelve numbered questions about how the world began, and then five about what comes after it ends — and the giant answers every one. Who lives when “The mighty winter” comes: two people hidden in a wood, eating “The morning dews | for meat.” What happens to the sun when the wolf takes it: “A daughter bright | Alfrothul bears,” to walk her mother’s road. Who rules when Surt’s fires sink: two sons of Odin and two sons of Thor, “Mothi and Magni | shall Mjollnir have.” And, in Odin’s own first answer, a river between the gods and the giants that “For all time ever | open it flows, / No ice on the river there is.” The Vafthruthnismol: the wisdom-contest that ends with a head, and, on the way to it, the oldest list in the North of what survives.