September 15, 2026
Last week’s telling ended with a god between two fires, reciting the map of heaven to a boy, and with Bellows’ remark that the Grimnismol and the poem that precedes it in both manuscripts “together, in deed, constitute a fairly complete dictionary of Norse mythology.” This is the other half of the dictionary. It is shorter and tighter, and it has a body count of exactly one, and the one is the person who answered every question correctly.
This series has been in this hall before, three times, and never for long. №3 stood in the doorway with Frigg while Odin asked his wife whether he should go. №36 quoted the giant’s wager — our heads, O guest, / Shall we wager our wisdom upon — and his surrender at the end. №12 quoted the question that beats him, the one about what Odin whispered into his dead son’s ear. Those are the frame: the first four stanzas and the last two. Everything between them, forty-nine stanzas of a giant and a god asking each other how the world was made and what will be left of it, this series has only pointed at, twice, in passing. That is the middle, and the middle is where the light is.
Last week’s teaser made two claims about this poem that the poem does not quite make, and the rule here is that a teaser is a claim and gets checked.
The teaser said the river Ifing was “Odin’s own first answer.” It is his third. The giant asks four questions before the wager (Bellows counts them: stanzas 11, 13, 15 and 17), and Odin answers each — the day-horse, the night-horse, the river, the battlefield. Ifing is the third of the four. I had the river right and the arithmetic wrong.
The teaser also said Odin asks “twelve numbered questions about how the world began, and then five about what comes after it ends.” That is Bellows’ own summary — “a series of twelve numbered questions regarding the origins and past history of life,” then “five more questions, this time referring to what is to follow the destruction of the gods.” But his note on the tenth question says something more exact: “With this stanza the question-formula changes, and Othin’s questions from this point on concern more or less directly the great final struggle.” So the seam in the poem is not at twelve. It is at ten. The last three of the numbered questions are already, more or less, about the end; the five that follow are about what is left after it. Hold onto that. It matters for how the poem is shaped, and the shape is the point.
Here is what Bellows tells us about the object itself. The Vafthruthnismol follows the Hovamol in the Codex Regius. “From stanza 20 on it is also included in the Arnamagnæan Codex, the first part evidently having appeared on leaf now lost” — and the fragment, his note adds, “begins in the middle of the first line of this stanza.” The second great manuscript of the Eddic poems picks this poem up mid-sentence, on the far side of a missing page. “Snorri quotes eight stanzas of it in the Prose Edda, and in his prose text closely paraphrases many others.” It is “wholly in dialogue form except for a single narrative stanza.” It dates, Bellows thinks, from “about the same period as the Voluspo: in other words, the middle of the tenth century.” And, unlike last week’s poem, whose stanzas he flagged by the score: “While there may be a few interpolated passages in the poem as we now have it, it is clearly a united whole, and evidently in relatively good condition.”
The vellum ledger this series keeps gets two entries. The speaker-tags — Othin spake, Vafthruthnir spake — “appear in abbreviated form in both manuscripts,” and so, Bellows says, are the two-line introductory formulae, “here, and in general throughout the poem.” And in Odin’s numbered questions, “both manuscripts replace the words ‘next,’ ‘third,’ ‘fourth,’ etc., by Roman numerals.” The scribes were not writing a poem out. They were writing down a poem everyone already had, as fast as the pen would go, with the repeated parts shortened to initials and the counting done in numerals. That is what a dictionary looks like when it lives in people’s mouths.
The one narrative stanza is the fifth, and Bellows thinks even that is “presumably a later interpolation”:
The wisdom then of the giant wise Forth did he fare to try; He found the hall | of the father of Im, And in forthwith went Ygg. — Vafthruthnismol 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Im: “the name appears to be corrupt, but we know nothing of any son of Vafthruthnir.” The giant has a child, and the child’s name did not survive the copying. The father’s did. Vafthruthnir, Bellows glosses, is “the Mighty in Riddles,” and “nothing is known of this giant beyond what is told in this poem.” He exists for one evening, and the evening kills him.
Odin walks in and asks, in effect, whether the giant is as wise as people say. The giant’s answer is a threat and the terms of the evening in one breath:
“Who is the man | that speaks to me, Here in my lofty hall? Forth from our dwelling | thou never shalt fare, Unless wiser than I thou art.” — Vafthruthnismol 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Gagnrath they call me, | and thirsty I come From a journey hard to thy hall; Welcome I look for, | for long have I fared, And gentle greeting, giant.” — Vafthruthnismol 8, trans. Bellows (1923)
Gagnrath, “the Gain-Counsellor”: “Othin on his travels always assumes a name other than his own.” Readers of the last two weeks will notice what he asks for. Last week a boy handed a prisoner a horn and got the map of heaven for it; this week the god arrives thirsty and asks for a welcome. He does not get one. He gets a question about why he is still standing:
“Why standest thou there | on the floor whilst thou speakest? A seat shalt thou have in my hall; Then soon shall we know | whose knowledge is more, The guest’s or the sage’s gray.” — Vafthruthnismol 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
And Odin, still on the floor, answers with a proverb instead of sitting down:
“If a poor man reaches | the home of the rich, Let him wisely speak or be still; For to him who speaks | with the hard of heart Will chattering ever work ill.” — Vafthruthnismol 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note: “This stanza sounds very much like many of those in the first part of the Hovamol, and may have been introduced here from some such source.” It does sound like the Hovamol — the guest’s wisdom, the poor man’s manners at the rich man’s door — and the Hovamol is the poem this one follows in the manuscript. Whether the line wandered across the page-break or was always here, the effect on the scene is the same: the giant offers a seat, and the god declines to take it, and stays on the floor to be questioned like a beggar. The next four stanzas from the giant all begin Speak forth now, Gagnrath, | if there from the floor / Thou wouldst thy wisdom make known. From the floor. He is not letting it go.
The four questions are about the furniture of the world, and Odin answers them like a man reciting his own address:
“Skinfaxi is he, | the steed who for men The glittering day doth draw; The best of horses | to heroes he seems, And brightly his mane doth burn.” — Vafthruthnismol 12, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Hrimfaxi name they | the steed that anew Brings night for the noble gods; Each morning foam | from his bit there falls, And thence come the dews in the dales.” — Vafthruthnismol 14, trans. Bellows (1923)
Shining-Mane and Frosty-Mane. Snorri has both, and gives the dew its mechanism a little more plainly: Night “rides before with the horse named Frosty-Mane, and on each morning he bedews the earth with the foam from his bit. The horse that Day has is called Sheen-Mane, and he illumines all the air and the earth from his mane.” The dew on the grass at dawn is the slaver of the night-horse. Keep the dew; it comes back at the end of the poem, and it is the most important thing in it.
Then the river, which is what this post is named for:
“Ifing is the river | that ’twixt the realms Of the gods and the giants goes; For all time ever | open it flows, No ice on the river there is.” — Vafthruthnismol 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows: “there is no other reference to this river, which never freezes, so that the giants cannot cross it.” Read that twice. The border between the gods and the giants is not a wall. It is water that stays open. In a mythology where the end of the world is announced by a winter — we are coming to it — the one thing that keeps the two sides apart is the one river that winter cannot touch. And it is a giant who asks about it, and a god who answers, in the giant’s own hall, on the far side of the water.
The fourth question is the battlefield:
“Vigrith is the field | where in fight shall meet Surt and the gracious gods; A hundred miles | each way does it measure. And so are its boundaries set.” — Vafthruthnismol 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Snorri quotes this stanza.” A hundred miles is “a general phrase for a vast distance” — the North’s way of saying as big as it needs to be. So Odin’s four answers, in order, are: the horse that brings day, the horse that brings night, the river that keeps the peace, and the field where the peace ends. He has told the giant the whole calendar of the world in four stanzas, from morning to the last morning. And that is what impresses the giant. Which is the giant’s mistake.
№36 quoted the wager, so I will only point at it: Wise art thou, guest! | To my bench shalt thou go — and then the heads. What №36 did not have room for is Bellows’ note on the stanza, which changes what the wager is: “With this stanza Vafthruthnir, sufficiently impressed with his guest’s wisdom to invite him to share his own seat, resigns the questioning to Othin.” The invitation to the bench is the surrender of the questioning. The giant has been asking from a position of power — the stranger on the floor, the host in the seat — and he gives it up because he is impressed. He moves the god up beside him, and in the same breath stakes his head, and hands over the right to ask. From this stanza on, Vafthruthnir only answers. He never asks another question in his life. The poem is the story of a wise man who lost because he was generous to a guest who was cleverer than he was, and it does not once say so; it just lets you watch the seating change.
Odin’s first numbered question is about the beginning:
“First answer me well, | if thy wisdom avails, And thou knowest it, Vafthruthnir, now: In earliest time | whence came the earth, Or the sky, thou giant sage?” — Vafthruthnismol 20, trans. Bellows (1923)
This is the stanza the Arnamagnæan fragment begins in the middle of. The second manuscript of the Eddic poems joins the poem here, part-way through the line that begins First answer me well.
Here is the middle, which nobody quotes and everybody uses.
“Out of Ymir’s flesh | was fashioned the earth, And the mountains were made of his bones; The sky from the frost-cold | giant’s skull, And the ocean out of his blood.” — Vafthruthnismol 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
The giant tells the god that the world is made of a giant. Snorri’s prose agrees on the blood — “of his blood the sea and the waters; the land was made of his flesh, and the crags of his bones.” Then the sun and moon:
“Mundilferi is he | who begat the moon, And fathered the flaming sun; The round of heaven | each day they run, To tell the time for men.” — Vafthruthnismol 23, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note on this one is a small delight: “Note that, curiously enough, Mani is the boy and Sol the girl.” The sun is a daughter. The moon is a son. Snorri tells why they are up there at all, and it is a story about a father who loved his children too loudly: Mundilfari “had two children; they were so fair and comely that he called his son Moon, and his daughter Sun” — and “the gods were incensed at that insolence,” and took the brother and sister and set them in the sky to drive the real sun and the real moon as punishment for their names. Remember that the sun is a girl. She will have a daughter before the poem is over.
Day and night have fathers too — Delling and Nor — and then the giant is asked where winter and summer came from, and this is where the vellum does something worth stopping for:
“Vindsval he was | who was winter’s father, And Svosuth summer begat;” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . — Vafthruthnismol 27, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two lines, and then the dots. Bellows: “Neither the Regius nor the Arnamagnæan Codex indicates a lacuna. Most editors have filled out the stanza with two lines from late paper manuscripts: ‘And both of these shall ever be, / Till the gods to destruction go.’” Last week this series found exactly this at Grimnismol 51 — no gap in the vellum, a gap in the meter, and a paper copy centuries younger offering to fill it — and here it is again, in the poem that sits beside it. The stanza about winter and summer is the one where the lines run out. Snorri fills in the temperaments instead: Svásudr, father of Summer, “is of pleasant nature, so that from his name whatsoever is pleasant is called ‘sweet,’” while Winter’s father and grandfather “were kinsmen grim and chilly-breasted, and Winter has their temper.” (Snorri’s spellings, in Brodeur, carry their accents — Svásudr, Vindsvalr, Vafthrúdnir; Bellows drops them. Both are on the page here, and I have let each translator spell his own.)
Then the giants’ own genealogy, which Odin asks for and the giant gives with something like pride:
“Winters unmeasured | ere earth was made Was the birth of Bergelmir; Thruthgelmir’s son | was the giant strong, And Aurgelmir’s grandson of old.” — Vafthruthnismol 29, trans. Bellows (1923)
“Down from Elivagar | did venom drop, And waxed till a giant it was; And thence arose | our giants’ race, And thus so fierce are we found.” — Vafthruthnismol 31, trans. Bellows (1923)
Aurgelmir, Bellows explains, “was the frost-giants’ name for Ymir himself. Thus Ymir was the first of the giants, and so Othin’s question is answered.” The giants have their own name for the giant the world is made of; the god has to ask for the lineage in the giants’ terms, and gets it. And thus so fierce are we found — Snorri’s version of the same stanza ends “So it is | they are savage forever,” and Snorri introduces it with the words “But concerning this says Vafthrúdnir the giant.” The Prose Edda cites the giant by name, as an authority, on the origin of the giants. And notice the note under stanza 31: “Snorri quotes this stanza, and the last two lines are taken from his version, as both of the manuscripts omit them.” Our giants’ race and so fierce are we found are not in either codex of the poem. They survive because the man who used the poem as a dictionary copied them out.
Then the question that gets the strangest answer in the Edda:
“They say ’neath the arms | of the giant of ice Grew man-child and maid together; And foot with foot | did the wise one fashion A son that six heads bore.” — Vafthruthnismol 33, trans. Bellows (1923)
How did the first giant have children with no giantess? Under his arms, and between his feet. Bellows, unbothered: “That this offspring should have had six heads is nothing out of the ordinary, for various giants had more than the normal number, and Ymir’s mother is credited with a little matter of nine hundred heads” — she is the nine-hundred-headed grandmother of №30. “Of the career of Ymir’s six headed son we know nothing.”
Odin’s eighth question is not about the world. It is about the giant:
“Eighth answer me well, | if wise thou art called, If thou knowest it, Vafthruthnir, now: What farthest back | dost thou bear in mind? For wide is thy wisdom, giant!” — Vafthruthnismol 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
What is the oldest thing you remember? It is the only question in the contest about the giant’s own memory, and the giant answers it with the same first two lines he used for the giants’ genealogy, and then something new:
“Winters unmeasured | ere earth was made Was the birth of Bergelmir; This first knew I well, | when the giant wise In a boat of old was borne.” — Vafthruthnismol 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows’ note under stanza 29 has already told the story the boat belongs to: “when the gods slew Ymir in order to make the world out of his body, so much blood flowed from him that all the frost-giants were drowned except Bergelmir and his wife, who escaped in a boat.” A flood; one couple; a boat. Any reader from a Christian century knows the shape of that, and so did the editors.
Now go to Snorri, in Brodeur. “The sons of Borr slew Ymir the giant; lo, where he fell there gushed forth so much blood out of his wounds that with it they drowned all the race of the Rime-Giants, save that one, whom giants call Bergelmir, escaped with his household; he went upon his ship, and his wife with him, and they were safe there.” And Snorri quotes the stanza:
Untold ages | ere earth was shapen, Then was Bergelmir born; That first I recall, | how the famous wise giant On the deck of the ship was laid down. — Gylfaginning VII, trans. Brodeur (1916)
A ship, with a deck. And under the word ship in the prose — he went upon his ship — Brodeur puts a footnote, one line long, which is the find of this post: “Literally, mill-bench or mortar.”
I have no Old Norse to offer you, and this series does not pretend to any; I can only tell you what the two public-domain translators printed. Bellows printed a boat. Brodeur printed a ship, and then confessed in a footnote that the word he was translating means a mill-bench, or a mortar — the wooden trough a thing is ground in. The oldest thing the wisest giant in the world remembers is a giant being laid down on something, and the something, by the translator’s own admission, is not a vessel. It is a piece of household equipment. Two men working in English within seven years of each other both reached for a boat, because the story around the word has a flood in it and a flood wants a boat. The translators are not wrong to have done it. But the footnote is there, and the series’ creed is the old words as they actually are, and the old word, Brodeur says, is a mortar. What the giant actually remembers may be much stranger than Noah. The text does not say what. It says laid down.
The ninth question is where the wind comes from, and the answer is a giant in a bird’s shape at the edge of the sky:
“In an eagle’s guise | at the end of heaven Hræsvelg sits, they say; And from his wings | does the wind come forth To move o’er the world of men.” — Vafthruthnismol 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
“The Corpse-Eater.” Snorri, who quotes it, adds the motion: “when he stretches his wings for flight, then the wind rises from under his wings.” Every wind that has ever blown across the sea is the downdraft of one giant deciding to take off.
The tenth question is the seam. The formula changes — if thou knowest all / The fate that is fixed for the gods — and from here the questions look forward. Odin asks about a hostage:
“Tenth answer me now, | if thou knowest all The fate that is fixed for the gods: Whence came up Njorth | to the kin of the gods,– (Rich in temples | and shrines he rules,–) Though of gods he was never begot?” — Vafthruthnismol 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
“In the home of the Wanes | did the wise ones create him, And gave him as pledge to the gods; At the fall of the world | shall he fare once more Home to the Wanes so wise.” — Vafthruthnismol 39, trans. Bellows (1923)
(The parenthesis is Bellows’ own: line 4 “is presumably spurious.”) Njorth is the hostage of №8, the sea-god of №17 who could not sleep for the wolves and whose hall sat five halls from his wife’s on last week’s map. This is the one place I know of in the poems that tells you what happens to him at the end: he goes home. The war that ended in hostages is unwound at Ragnarök, and the pledge is returned. A giant knows this. Odin asks him to say it.
The eleventh question is a wreck, and the wreck is instructive:
“Eleventh answer me well, | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What men . . . . . . | in . . . . . . home Each day to fight go forth?” — Vafthruthnismol 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows: “In both manuscripts, apparently through the carelessness of some older copyist, stanzas 40 and 41 are run together.” He gives the mash the scribes left — “Eleventh answer me well, what men in the home mightily battle each day? They fell each other, and fare from the fight all healed full soon to sit” — and then: “Luckily Snorri quotes stanza 41 in full, and the translation is from his version.” The answer, restored from the Prose Edda:
“The heroes all | in Othin’s hall Each day to fight go forth; They fell each other, | and fare from the fight All healed full soon to sit.” — Vafthruthnismol 41, trans. Bellows (1923)
The question is Bellows’ guess, and he says so — “Stanza 40 should probably run something like this” — and the answer is Snorri’s. Which means the stanza about Valhalla, the one that describes the Valkyries’ whole harvest (№7) at its daily work, killing each other and getting up healed for supper, does not survive intact in either manuscript of the poem. It survives because a Christian scholar in the thirteenth century copied it into a handbook for poets. That is the third hole in this one poem, and the second that Snorri fills: two lines of stanza 31, the whole of stanza 41 — and the two lines of stanza 27 that editors keep supplying from paper, which Snorri does not have either. Bellows called this poem a dictionary. Twice over, the dictionary is what repaired its own source.
The twelfth question is the giant’s credentials, and his answer is one of the widest claims anyone makes in the poems:
“Of the runes of the gods | and the giants’ race The truth indeed can I tell, (For to every world have I won;) To nine worlds came I, | to Niflhel beneath, The home where dead men dwell.” — Vafthruthnismol 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
He has been to all nine worlds, down to Dark-Hell. It is the credential the dwarf in №36 was going to claim in a stanza Bellows would not admit; here it is admitted, in the giant’s own mouth, in the older poem. And now Odin stops counting.
The last five questions all begin the same way, and the way they begin is the hinge of the poem, so I want to set it beside a stanza this series has paraphrased and never quoted. Here is Odin at home, in the doorway, before he left, answering his wife’s plea to stay:
“Much have I fared, much have I found. Much have I got from the gods; And fain would I know how Vafthruthnir now Lives in his lofty hall.” — Vafthruthnismol 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
And here is the god at the giant’s bench, forty-one stanzas later, having dropped the numerals:
“Much have I fared, | much have I found, Much have I got of the gods: What shall live of mankind | when at last there comes The mighty winter to men?” — Vafthruthnismol 44, trans. Bellows (1923)
The formula of the five questions about what survives is the line he said to Frigg on his way out. Much have I fared, much have I found. He said it to her as a reason for going — I have already done and seen so much that I want to see this too — and he says it to the giant as the preface to every question about the end. Whether the poet meant the echo I cannot tell you; the manuscripts abbreviate the formulae, and no note remarks on it. But it is on the page seven times — once in the doorway, then before each of the last six questions — and the five in the middle are all about who is left. And the seventh time, in the one question nobody can answer, the line is the doorway line word for word: the five survivor-questions say Much have I got of the gods, and the last one, like the first, says from. He walks out of his house on that line and he walks into the giant’s death on it.
“The mighty winter: Before the final destruction three winters follow one another with no intervening summers.” The giant:
“In Hoddmimir’s wood | shall hide themselves Lif and Lifthrasir then; The morning dews | for meat shall they have, Such food shall men then find.” — Vafthruthnismol 45, trans. Bellows (1923)
№13 met this pair under the tree and called them Life and Stubborn Life; Bellows’ own gloss, question mark and all, is “Sturdy of Life”? — and here is the stanza whole. “Snorri quotes this stanza.” Hoddmimir’s wood, Bellows thinks, “is the ash-tree Yggdrasil,” which is “sometimes referred to as ‘Mimir’s Tree,’ because Mimir waters it from his well.” Two people hide in the tree that is being gnawed to death (№13), through a winter with no summers in it, and they eat the morning dew. The dew from stanza 14 — the foam from the night-horse’s bit, falling in the dales. Whatever else ends, the night-horse still rides, and the foam still falls, and two people live on it. That is the whole of the North’s survival plan for the human race: a tree, and the dew.
Then the sun:
“Much have I fared, | much have I found, Much have I got of the gods: Whence comes the sun | to the smooth sky back, When Fenrir has snatched it forth?” — Vafthruthnismol 46, trans. Bellows (1923)
“A daughter bright | Alfrothul bears Ere Fenrir snatches her forth; Her mother’s paths | shall the maiden tread When the gods to death have gone.” — Vafthruthnismol 47, trans. Bellows (1923)
Alfrothul, “the Elf-Beam,” is the sun — and the sun, remember, is a girl, Mundilfari’s daughter, set in the sky for having a name too fine for her. Before the wolf takes her she has a daughter of her own, and the daughter walks the mother’s road. Bellows’ note, told plainly: “there appears to be a confusion between the wolf Fenrir (cf. Voluspo, 39 and note) and his son, the wolf Skoll, who steals the sun.” Last week’s map named Skoll and Hati as the wolves behind the sun and moon; this poem says Fenrir, and the editor calls it confusion. The series’ fifth telling was about Fenrir, and I will not adjudicate between a tenth-century poet and his twentieth-century editor on which wolf ate the sun; the poem says the father, the note says the son, and the daughter comes up either way.
Then a question whose answer is on the giants’ side:
“O’er Mogthrasir’s hill | shall the maidens pass, And three are their throngs that come; They all shall protect | the dwellers on earth, Though they come of the giants’ kin.” — Vafthruthnismol 49, trans. Bellows (1923)
Odin asked What maidens are they, | so wise of mind. / That forth o’er the sea shall fare? Bellows: “apparently Norns, like the ‘giant-maids’ in Voluspo, 8. These Norns, how ever, are kindly to men.” The Norns of №4 came in threes and were not always kind. These come in three throngs after the end, and protect the people on the earth, and the giant says — though they come of the giants’ kin — that they are his own relatives. Nobody in the hall remarks on it.
Then the rulers:
“In the gods’ home Vithar | and Vali shall dwell, When the fires of Surt have sunk; Mothi and Magni | shall Mjollnir have When Vingnir falls in fight.” — Vafthruthnismol 51, trans. Bellows (1923)
Who then shall rule | the realm of the gods, / When the fires of Surt have sunk? Two sons of Odin and two sons of Thor. Vithar, who avenges his father; Vali, “the son whom Othin begot to avenge Baldr’s death”; and “Wrath” and “Might,” who inherit the hammer “when Vingnir falls in fight” — Vingnir being Thor, “the Hurler.” “This stanza is quoted by Snorri.” Readers of the Thor run will recognize two of these names from the notes: Vithar’s mother is the giantess Grídr, who lent Thor her belt and gloves and staff in №35, and Magni’s mother is the giantess Járnsaxa, whose three-night-old son lifted a giant’s foot off his father in №34. The hammer that was “the greatest defence against the Rime-Giants” (№28) passes, when the world is over, to a boy who is half giant; the god who kills the wolf and lives in the gods’ home afterward is a giantess’s son. The poem does not say this. Snorri, elsewhere, does, and this series has read him. I set it down without pressing on it: the answer to who shall rule the realm of the gods includes, on the sources’ own genealogy, the giants’ grandchildren.
And then Odin asks how he dies.
“The wolf shall fell | the father of men, And this shall Vithar avenge; The terrible jaws | shall he tear apart, And so the wolf shall he slay.” — Vafthruthnismol 53, trans. Bellows (1923)
What shall bring the doom | of death to Othin, / When the gods to destruction go? — and the giant tells him to his face, in four lines, without knowing yet who he is telling. Or perhaps knowing. The poem does not say when the giant guesses. It only says that in the next stanza Odin asks what he whispered to Baldr (№12), and the giant answers, No man can tell, and then, With Othin in knowledge | now have I striven, / And ever the wiser thou art (№36) — and the poem ends. There is no stanza in which the head is taken. Bellows supplies the death in a note: the giant “was rash enough to wager his head against his guest’s on the outcome of the contest of wisdom, so he knows that his defeat means his death.” The last words on the page are the giant’s, and they are a compliment.
Count what the giant got right. Everything. The earth, the sky, the sun and moon, day and night, winter and summer, the first giant, the giant’s children, the oldest thing in his memory, the wind, the hostage, Valhalla, the nine worlds, the two who live, the sun’s daughter, the kindly maidens, the four who rule, and the death of the god sitting next to him. Not one wrong answer in the whole contest. He loses on a question that has no answer, asked by the only being who could have one, and he loses his head for it — off the page, in a note. Fafnir in №20 was a dragon who told the truth while dying; Vafthruthnir is a giant who told the truth and then died of it, and told it with fated mouth, knowing.
And here is what I think the light in this poem is, since the series turned toward the light after the Völsungs fell and has been feeling along the wall for it ever since. The dark tellings — the cup, the wolf-meat, the ring — were about people who did not know what they were doing; Sigurd drank forgetting and rode through the fire in another man’s shape. This poem is the opposite object. Two beings who know everything sit on a bench and say it all aloud, including the end of one of them and the death of the other, and the poem is not sad. It cannot be. Ask what its last five answers are. They are names. Lif and Lifthrasir. Alfrothul’s daughter. The maidens over Mogthrasir’s hill. Vithar and Vali, Mothi and Magni. The god who is about to be eaten by a wolf asks, five times in a row, who lives? — and the wisest giant in the world, who is about to lose his head, answers every time with someone who does. The dew still falls. The sun has a daughter. The Norns after the end are kind. The people on the earth are protected by giants’ kin. And the river between the two sides of this contest, the god’s and the giant’s — the border the whole mythology is built across — is the one thing in the North that never freezes. For all time ever | open it flows. A giant asked about that river, and a god answered, and I think the poem knew what it was doing when it put that answer third, before the battlefield, and let the winter come after.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — and next week the same question-contest is run again, by a young man at a gate ringed with fire, and for once it ends with the gate opening.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Vafthruthnismol, its introductory note and its notes; the Svipdagsmol (introductory note and stanzas 4, 30, 58 and 64, for the teaser). Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1916) — Gylfaginning V, VII (and Brodeur’s footnote there), VIII, X, XI, XVIII and XIX. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Bellows’ note on the two survivors sends the reader to a poem this series has never opened — the Svipdagsmol, where the world-tree is “Mimameith” and “fire nor iron shall fell it.” It is two poems that editors have “very wisely” joined into one, “found only in paper manuscripts, none of them antedating the seventeenth century,” and Bellows calls it, without embarrassment, “a very charming romance.” A young man wakes his dead mother at the doors of the dead to ask for help, and she tells him “Long is the way, | long must thou wander, / But long is love as well,” and chants him nine spells. Then he comes to a hall ringed with flame — Bellows hears Sigurd and Brynhild in it — where a giant warder named Much-Wise stands at the gate, and the two of them play the Vafthruthnismol’s game the other way around: the traveler asks, the giant answers, eighteen times, until the giant’s last answer is that no man may sleep in the lady’s arms “Save Svipdag alone, | for the sun-bright maid / Is destined his bride to be.” And then the gates open, and she says the words this series has waited twenty tellings to hear anyone say: “Welcome thou art, | for long have I waited.” The Svipdagsmol: a wisdom-contest that ends, for once, in a kiss.