September 28, 2026
Last week's telling ended in a giant's hall with a god asking who lives? five times and getting five names back, and with Bellows' note on the two survivors sending the reader somewhere this series had never been: a poem where the world-tree is called Mimameith, and "fire nor iron shall fell it." I followed the note. It leads to a young man standing at the doors of the dead, calling for his mother.
The Svipdagsmol is the same game as the Vafthruthnismol, played the other way round. Last week the guest was a god in disguise, and the host was a giant, and the guest asked the questions, and the host lost his head. This week the guest is a boy in disguise, and the host is a giant, and the guest asks the questions — eighteen of them — and nobody loses anything. The gate opens. There is a kiss. After the cups and rings and pyres of the fall, I want to say plainly at the top that this is the first telling in the series that ends with the two people in it getting exactly what they both wanted, and saying so.
But before the gate, the paper. Because this poem is different from every poem this series has opened, and Bellows says so in his first sentence, and the rule here is that what the editor says up front, the telling says up front too.
Every poem this series has told from the Poetic Edda has come out of vellum — the Codex Regius, mostly, the great manuscript that lost eight leaves of the Völsung cycle (№24), or the Arnamagnæan Codex that picks up the Vafthruthnismol in the middle of a line (№40). The Rigsthula (№37) and the Hyndluljoth (№38) came out of other vellum books. This one comes from none of them. Bellows:
The two poems, Grougaldr (Groa's Spell) and Fjolsvinnsmol (the Ballad of Fjolsvith), which many editors have, very wisely, united under the single title of Svipdagsmol, are found only in paper manuscripts, none of them antedating the seventeenth century. — Bellows (1923), introductory note to the Svipdagsmol
Seventeenth century. Whatever this poem is, nobody wrote it on a calfskin that we have, and the oldest copy of it is younger than the printing press by a long way. And Bellows, who has spent the last dozen tellings of this series flagging stanzas as spurious in poems he otherwise trusts, here lays out the case against the whole thing in one breath: "Everything points to a relatively late origin for the poems: their extensive use of 'kennings' or poetical circumlocutions, their romantic spirit, quite foreign to the character of the unquestionably older poems, the absence of any reference to them in the earlier documents, the frequent errors in mythology, and, finally, the fact that the poems appear to have been preserved in unusually good condition."
Read the last item again. In №29, good condition was what the editor praised the Thrymskvitha for. Here, good condition is evidence against the poem. A text that has come down clean, with no gaps and no run-together stanzas and no scribe's Roman numerals, has not been through the centuries of mouths that leave those scars. The vellum ledger this series keeps — the abbreviated refrains, the initial-letter stanzas, the "eleven" that fails to make sense — is a ledger of damage, and damage is what old things have. This poem is too whole to be very old.
So Bellows sets it down as what it is: "under any circumstances, a very charming romance told, in the main, with dramatic effectiveness." He notes that "the love story of Svipdag and Mengloth is not referred to elsewhere in the Poetic Edda, nor does Snorri mention it" — but that Groa, the mother, is in Snorri: "a wise woman, the wife of Orvandil, who helps Thor with her magic charms." Readers of №34 have met her. She is the Gróa who sang the hone loose from Thor's skull and forgot her spells for joy when he told her that her husband's frozen toe was a star. That Groa. In this poem she is dead, and her son wakes her, and she chants nine charms, and forgets none of them.
He notes, too, that "the essence of the story, the hero's winning of a bride ringed about by flames, is strongly suggestive of parts of the Sigurth-Brynhild traditions." Hold that. His own footnotes will make it more than suggestive before this post is done. And he waves off, with the driest sentence in the introduction, the readers who wanted the whole thing to be about the sun: "Whether or not it is to be regarded as a nature or solar myth depends entirely on one's view of the whole 'solar myth' school of criticism, not so highly esteemed today as formerly." That was 1923. The names in this poem are what they are, and I will tell you what Bellows says they mean, and hedge as he hedges.
And one last thing from the introduction, which matters for the shape of what follows. The two poems do not join. Between the mother's last charm and the giant at the gate, there is nothing — no stanza, no prose. Bellows thinks there never was: "on the whole it seems likely that the story was sufficiently well known so that the reciter of the poem (or poems) merely filled in the gap with a brief prose summary in pretty much his own words." Which is what Bellows then does. Under stanza 16, at the seam, he writes the missing link himself and says so: "All the link that is needed between the poems is approximately this: 'Then Svipdag searched long for Mengloth, and at last he came to a great house set all about with flames. And before the house there was a giant.'" An editor of the Edda, writing a sentence of the Edda, in quotation marks, and signing it as his own. The series has watched him reconstruct a lost stanza (№40) and supply a giant's death in a note (№40 again). This is the first time he has written the story.
The first poem, Groa's Spell, is sixteen stanzas, and it begins with a son at a grave:
"Wake thee, Groa! | wake, mother good! At the doors of the dead I call thee; Thy son, bethink thee, | thou badst to seek Thy help at the hill of death." — Svipdagsmol 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thou badst — she told him to. Before she died, she told her son that if he ever needed her he should come to the grave and call, and now he has. The names of the speakers, Bellows notes, "are lacking in the manuscripts" — the paper is as bare of speaker-tags as the vellum ever was — and Svipdag means "Swift Day." She answers from the mould:
"What evil vexes | mine only son, What baleful fate hast thou found, That thou callest thy mother, | who lies in the mould, And the world of the living has left?" — Svipdagsmol 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
Mine only son. And his answer is the oldest engine in the fairy tales, older than any of the names in this poem:
"The woman false | whom my father embraced Has brought me a baleful game; For she bade me go forth | where none may fare, And Mengloth the maid to seek." — Svipdagsmol 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
A stepmother. Bellows: "Svipdag's stepmother, who is responsible for his search for Mengloth ('Necklace-Glad')." The false woman has set the dead woman's son an impossible errand — go where none may fare, and find a girl — and the boy has gone to his real mother to ask how. And what his mother says is the line this post is named for, and I think it is the most beautiful thing anyone says in the whole light-turn so far:
"Long is the way, | long must thou wander, But long is love as well; Thou mayst find, perchance, | what thou fain wouldst have, If the fates their favor will give." — Svipdagsmol 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
Set that beside №27. There, a god sat in a high seat and saw a girl and could not eat or sleep, and when his servant finally won her a date three nights off, the god's reply was Long is one night, long is the second — and this series, with a straight face, made that the title. Impatience was the whole of Freyr's love; it could not wait three nights. Here a dead woman tells her son that the road is long and the wandering is long and love is at least as long as either. Perchance — she promises nothing. If the fates their favor will give. But she puts love in the same sentence as the distance, and at the same length, and sends him. Nobody in the Skirnismol would have known what she meant.
He is frightened, and he says so, which is rarer in these poems than you would think:
"Charms full good | then chant to me, mother, And seek thy son to guard; For death do I fear | on the way I shall fare, And in years am I young, methinks." — Svipdagsmol 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
In years am I young. Sigurd, at his age, had killed a dragon and taken advice from birds. This boy stands at his mother's grave and says he is afraid of dying. And she gives him nine charms.
Bellows' note sends the reader straight to №18's ground: "For this catalogue of charms (stanzas 6–14) cf. the Ljothatal (Hovamol, 147–165)" — the eighteen songs the hanged god counted off and would not fully share. Groa counts off nine, and shares every one. The first:
"Then first I will chant thee | the charm oft-tried, That Rani taught to Rind; From the shoulder whate'er | mislikes thee shake, For helper thyself shalt thou have. — Svipdagsmol 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two names, and the manuscripts have them backward — "the manuscripts, have these words in inverse relation; I have followed Neckel's emendation." Rind, Bellows says, "was the giantess who became the mother of Vali, Othin's son, the one-night-old avenger of Baldr" — the Vali who, last week, was named as one of the four who rule after the end. "Rani is presumably Othin, who, according to a skaldic poem, won Rind by magic." So the first charm a dead mother gives her son is the one Odin used on a giantess. The paper does not say what it does, exactly, beyond shake off what mislikes thee and be thine own helper. The second is fate's own hardware:
"Then next I will chant thee, | if needs thou must travel, And wander a purposeless way: The bolts of Urth | shall on every side Be thy guards on the road thou goest. — Svipdagsmol 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
Urth is the first of the Norns of №4, the one whose well the tree is watered from. Her bolts — the bars of her door — are to stand round him on the road. Keep Urth in mind; she comes back in the last stanzas, and it matters who says her name. The third is for rivers — Yet to Hel shall turn | both Horn and Ruth, / And before thee the waters shall fail — and Bellows cannot find the rivers: "these two rivers, here used merely to symbolize all dangerous streams, are not included in the catalogue of rivers given in Grimnismol, 27–29, for which reason some editors have changed the names to Hron and Hrith." In №39 the series walked that river-catalogue and heard Bellows sigh over it; here are two rivers that are not in it, and the editors' first instinct was to rename them until they were. The fourth turns enemies' hearts into his hands. The fifth is the one this series has seen before, in another mouth:
"Then fifth I will chant thee, | if fetters perchance Shall bind thy bending limbs: O'er thy thighs do I chant | a loosening-charm, And the lock is burst from the limbs, And the fetters fall from the feet. — Svipdagsmol 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows: "This stanza is a close parallel to Hovamol, 150, and the fifth line may well be an interpolation from line 4 of that stanza." Here is the god's version, which №18 did not have room to quote:
A fourth I know, | if men shall fasten Bonds on my bended legs; So great is the charm | that forth I may go, The fetters spring from my feet, Broken the bonds from my hands. — Hovamol 150, trans. Bellows (1923)
The same charm. Odin's fourth is Groa's fifth. He knows it for himself — I may go; she chants it over her son's thighs. And the extra line at the end of hers, the one that makes the stanza five lines instead of four, is the one the editor thinks wandered in from his. This is what a paper poem looks like when it is made out of older things: the joints show.
Sixth, the sea — never shall wind | or wave do harm, / And calm is the course of thy boat. Seventh, frost on the crags — The fatal cold | shall not grip thy flesh. And then the eighth, which is the one I want to stop on, because it is the strangest thing in the poem and the editor's note on it is the best thing in the apparatus:
"Then eighth will I chant thee, | if ever by night Thou shalt wander on murky ways: Yet never the curse | of a Christian woman From the dead shall do thee harm. — Svipdagsmol 13, trans. Bellows (1923)
A charm against the ghost of a Christian. In a pagan poem. Bellows: "this passage has distressed many editors, who have sought to emend the text so as to make it mean simply 'a dead witch.' The fact seems to be, however, that this particular charm was composed at a time when Christians were regarded by all conservative pagans as emissaries of darkness. A dead woman's curse would naturally be more potent, whether she was Christian or otherwise, than a living one's. Presumably this charm is much older than the poem in which it here stands."
Now put that beside the introduction. This is the series' first late poem — paper-only, romantic, full of "errors in mythology," too well preserved to be old. And the editor's judgment on the one line that made the other editors reach for their pens is that it is older than the poem it stands in — a charm from the years when the new faith was a thing you warded against, that survived because a mother's spell-list was a good place to hide, and came down through four centuries of Christian Iceland and into a seventeenth-century paper copy with the word Christian still in it. The editors wanted to make it say witch. Bellows would not. The oldest thing in the youngest poem is the one line they wanted to cut, and it is a charm against the very people who ended up copying it out.
The ninth charm is the one that makes the second half of the poem possible:
"Then ninth will I chant thee, | if needs thou must strive With a warlike giant in words: Thy heart good store | of wit shall have, And thy mouth of words full wise. — Svipdagsmol 14, trans. Bellows (1923)
She has equipped him for exactly the game the series watched last week. A word-contest with a giant. That is what the second poem is, and she knew it, dead, before he set out. Then she sends him off, and tells him where she has been standing:
"Now fare on the way | where danger waits, Let evils not lessen thy love! I have stood at the door | of the earth-fixed stones, The while I chanted thee charms. — Svipdagsmol 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Bear hence, my son, | what thy mother hath said, And let it live in thy breast; Thine ever shall be the | best of fortune, So long as my words shall last." — Svipdagsmol 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
Let evils not lessen thy love. So long as my words shall last. And the poem ends. The mother goes back into the mould, and the next thing on the page — after Bellows' own sentence of prose, in his own quotation marks — is fire.
The second poem opens on the hero seeing the house, and Bellows takes a paragraph to explain the numbering: most editors start again at one here, but "if the Grougaldr and the Fjolsvinnsmol are to be considered as a single poem, it seems more reasonable to continue the stanza numbers consecutively." So the second poem's first stanza is 17, and it opens with two lines of narrative — someone at the house beholding someone coming — before the talking starts. Bugge thinks a stanza is missing before it, "including Fjolsvith's name, so that the 'he' in line 1 might have something to refer to." And the speeches of the first four stanzas, "in the absence of any indications in the manuscripts," are assigned "more or less" by "guesswork." The paper is no better than the vellum at telling you who is talking.
The house is "the home of the giants high," and the boy's first words are a question that is also a description: What giant is here, | in front of the house, / And around him fires are flaming? Ringed with fire, as the teaser promised and the introduction warned. The giant's answer is the same one the Vafthruthnismol's giant gave, in a worse temper:
"What seekest thou here? | for what is thy search? What, friendless one, fain wouldst thou know? By the ways so wet | must thou wander hence, For, weakling, no home hast thou here." — Svipdagsmol 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
Friendless one. Weakling. Last week Odin was made to stand on the floor. This week the guest is told to turn round and walk back through the wet. He asks again — What giant is here… To the wayfarer welcome denying? — and gets a name and a policy:
"Fjolsvith am I, | and wise am I found, But miserly am I with meat; Thou never shalt enter | within the house,-- Go forth like a wolf on thy way!" — Svipdagsmol 20, trans. Bellows (1923)
Fjolsvith, "Much-Wise" — the warder of the house where Mengloth lives, per Bellows' note. Miserly am I with meat. Vafthruthnir offered his guest a bench; this giant will not offer him supper. And the boy, who a few stanzas ago was telling his mother he was afraid of dying, answers with the most confident thing anyone says in the poem:
"Few from the joy | of their eyes will go forth, When the sight of their loves they seek; Full bright are the gates | of the golden hall, And a home shall I here enjoy." — Svipdagsmol 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
A home shall I here enjoy. He has not seen her. He has been told to go where none may fare and find a maid, and he has found a house on fire with a giant in front of it, and he says: I live here now. Then the giant asks his name, and he lies:
"Vindkald am I, | and Varkald's son, And Fjolkald his father was. — Svipdagsmol 22, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows' note is the key to this whole passage: "Vindkald ('Wind-Cold'), Varkald ('Cold of Early Spring') and Fjolkald ('Much Cold'): Svipdag apparently seeks to persuade Fjolsvith that he belongs to the frost giants." Wind-Cold, son of Spring-Cold, son of Much-Cold. Three generations of cold, invented on the spot, at the gate of a house ringed with fire. Last week Odin walked into a giant's hall and called himself Gagnrath. This week Swift Day walks up to a giant's fire and calls himself Cold — and his real father, as we will learn in the last stanzas, has a name Bellows renders as Sun-Bright. I said I would tell you the names and hedge as Bellows hedges. He calls the solar-myth reading not necessary, and I will not make it. But the names are on the page, and the boy chose the false one to match the giant's kind, and it is the only lie in the poem, and it does not work. Not because the giant sees through it. Because, as we are about to find out, the giant already knows exactly who is allowed through this gate, and it is not anyone named Cold.
Then the contest. Every one of the boy's questions begins the same way, and the way it begins is worth setting beside last week's:
"Now answer me, Fjolsvith, | the question I ask, For now the truth would I know:
Odin's formula was Much have I fared, much have I found, / Much have I got from the gods — a résumé, a claim of standing. This boy's is now the truth would I know. He is not claiming anything. He is asking. Eighteen times — I counted — from stanza 23 to stanza 57, and the giant answers every one, and here is the first thing to notice about the answers: they are a tour of the house. Last week the questions were how was the world made and what will be left. This week they are what is that gate called, what is that dog's name, who built this. The whole cosmology of the Vafthruthnismol is here, but it has shrunk to fit inside one woman's walls.
Who owns the house? Mengloth is she, | her mother bore her / To the son of Svafrthorin — and Bellows gives up on the father at once: "who he was, or what his name means, or who his son was, are all unknown." What is the gate called?
"Thrymgjol they call it; | 'twas made by the three, The sons of Solblindi; And fast as a fetter | the farer it holds, Whoever shall lift the latch." — Svipdagsmol 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thrymgjol, "Loud-Clanging." Made by the sons of Solblindi, "Sun-Blinded" — dwarfs, Bellows says, the traditional craftsmen, "who could not endure the light of day." Readers of №36 will remember what the day did to the last dwarf who stayed out in it. And the gate, Bellows says, "like the gate of the dead, shuts so fast as to trap those who attempt to use it," and he sends the reader to Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, 68. I went.
Stanza 68 of the Short Lay is Brynhild, dying, giving orders for the pyre. №24 told that scene and quoted the stanzas around this one — the sword laid between them once more, Truth I have said, and so I die — but not this:
"The door of the hall | shall strike not the heel Of the hero fair | with flashing rings, If hence my following | goes with him; Not mean our faring | forth shall be. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma 68, trans. Bellows (1923)
And Bellows' note under it: "The door: The gate of Hel's domain, like that of Mengloth's house (cf. Svipdagsmol, 26 and note), closes so fast as to catch any one attempting to pass through. Apparently the poet here assumes that the gate of Valhall does likewise, but that it will be kept open for Sigurth's retinue."
So the introduction's hedge — the story is "strongly suggestive" of Sigurd and Brynhild — becomes, two footnotes later, a piece of hardware the two stories share. Brynhild's last request, before she says so I die, is that the door of the dead not slam on Sigurd's heel — that it stay open long enough for her to follow him through. It is the same door, Bellows says, as the one at Mengloth's gate: a gate that catches whoever tries it. In the dark telling, a woman asks for it to be held open so that she can go through after a dead man. In this one, a living man stands outside it and asks its name. I will let the two doors stand side by side and not push them closer than the editor did.
What is the house called? Gastropnir — Bellows glosses it as a crusher of guests — and the giant built it himself, "From the limbs of Leirbrimir," which Bellows explains is "a poetic circumlocution for 'clay'; cf. the description of the making of earth from the body of the giant Ymir, Vafthruthnismol, 21." The stanza №40 quoted, where the world is a giant's flesh. Here a giant's house is built from a giant's limbs, and the giant says it will stand "So long as the world shall last." And then the question Bellows' note sent us here for:
"Mimameith its name, | and no man knows What root beneath it runs; And few can guess | what shall fell the tree, For fire nor iron shall fell it." — Svipdagsmol 30, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Mimir's Tree": the ash Yggdrasil, Bellows says, "that overshadows the whole world." №13 stood under it and watched it rot; №40 hid two people in it through the winter. Here it grows over a lady's house, and no one knows its root, and neither fire nor iron will bring it down. Then what its fruit is for — and this is the answer that tells you what kind of house this is:
"Women, sick | with child, shall seek Its fruit to the flames to bear; Then out shall come | what within was hid, And so is it mighty with men." — Svipdagsmol 32, trans. Bellows (1923)
The fruit of the world-tree, cooked, is for childbirth. "The fruit of Yggdrasil, when cooked," Bellows writes, "is here assumed to have the power of assuring safe childbirth." (His note here says Gering thinks "two stanzas have been lost between stanzas 15 and 16," a suggestion Bellows waves off — "the giant's answer fits the question quite well enough" — and it stands under stanza 32. That is the old numbering, the one Bellows argued against in his note on stanza 17; his renumbering did not reach his own footnote. I mention it only because this series keeps a ledger of what the page actually says, and the page, gently, disagrees with itself.)
On the tree's highest bough is a cock that "glitters all with gold":
"Vithofnir his name, | and now he shines Like lightning on Mimameith's limbs; And great is the trouble | with which he grieves Both Surt and Sinmora." — Svipdagsmol 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows thinks he is "apparently identical with either the cock Gollinkambi" or the cock Fjalar of the Voluspo, "the former of which wakes the gods to battle, and the latter the giants." Surt is the fire-giant of №14's last day, "here used to represent the giants in general, who are constantly in terror of the cock's eternal watchfulness." And Sinmora is "presumably Surt's wife, the giantess who possesses the weapon by which alone the cock Vithofnir may be slain." Hold onto Sinmora and the weapon. They are the lock.
Before the house are two hounds:
"Gif call they one, | and Geri the other, If now the truth thou wouldst know; Great they are, | and their might will grow, Till the gods to death are doomed." — Svipdagsmol 36, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Both names signify 'Greedy,'" says the note — and Geri is the name of one of the two wolves Odin feeds at his own table, in the stanza №39 quoted. The same Greedy guards a giant's gate and a god's board. And the vellum ledger, which I said this poem was too clean to have entries in, gets one after all: "The first part of line 3 is conjectural; the manuscripts indicate the word 'eleven,' which clearly fails to make sense." Great they are is Bellows' guess at what stood where the paper says eleven. Even a poem too whole to be old has a word in it that nobody can read.
Can a man get in while the dogs sleep? No:
"Together they sleep not, | for so was it fixed When the guard to them was given; One sleeps by night, | the next by day, So no man may enter ever." — Svipdagsmol 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
Is there meat that would distract them? Yes, one kind:
"Two wing-joints there be | in Vithofnir's body, If now the truth thou wouldst know; That alone is the meat | that men may give them, And leap within while they eat." — Svipdagsmol 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
The only thing the dogs will eat is the cock. What kills the cock?
"Lævatein is there, | that Lopt with runes Once made by the doors of death; In Lægjarn's chest | by Sinmora lies it, And nine locks fasten it firm." — Svipdagsmol 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Lopt is Loki — the name he gave himself walking into Ægir's hall in №31, "I, Lopt, from a journey long." So the one weapon that can kill the gold cock on the world-tree was made by Loki, "with runes," "by the doors of death," and it lies in a chest belonging to Lægjarn — "Lover of Ill," which Bellows says is Loki too, by Falk's emendation of the manuscripts' "Sægjarn," "Sea Lover" — under nine locks, in the keeping of Surt's wife. (The manuscripts, Bellows adds, "differ as to the form of this name"; his own note spells the sword a letter differently from his stanza. I have followed the stanza.) Can a man go there and take it, and come back?
"Thence may he come | who thither goes, And tries the sword to take, If with him he carries | what few can win, To give to the goddess of gold." — Svipdagsmol 44, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Goddess of gold" is a kenning for a woman, Bellows says, "here meaning Sinmora." And what does the pale giantess want?
"The sickle bright | in thy wallet bear, Mid Vithofnir's feathers found; To Sinmora give it, | and then shall she grant That the weapon by thee be won." — Svipdagsmol 46, trans. Bellows (1923)
A tail-feather of the cock. And Bellows closes the loop in one sentence, and it is the sentence this whole post has been walking toward: "With this the circle of impossibilities is completed. To get past the dogs, they must be fed with the wing-joints of the cock Vithofnir; the cock can be killed only with the sword in Sinmora's possession, and Sinmora will give up the sword only in return for the tail feather of the cock."
You cannot get the feather without killing the cock. You cannot kill the cock without the sword. You cannot get the sword without the feather. The giant has answered every question truthfully, and the truth is that there is no way in. Vafthruthnir's answers built the world; Fjolsvith's build a lock with no key. And the boy keeps asking.
What is the hall called, "encompassed here / With flickering magic flames"?
"Lyr is it called, | and long it shall On the tip of a spear-point tremble; Of the noble house | mankind has heard, But more has it never known." — Svipdagsmol 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Heat-Holding." And on the spear-point, the best note in the second poem: "just what the spear-point reference means is not altogether clear. Presumably it refers to the way in which the glowing brightness of the lofty hall makes it seem to quiver and turn in the air, but the tradition, never baffled by physical laws, may have actually balanced the whole building on a single point to add to the difficulties of entrance." Never baffled by physical laws. The editor of the Edda, shrugging at a house on a pin.
Who built it?
"Uni and Iri, | Bari and Jari, Var and Vegdrasil, Dori and Ori, | Delling, and there Was Loki, the fear of the folk." — Svipdagsmol 50, trans. Bellows (1923)
Nine dwarfs and Loki. "Loki, the one god named, was the builder of the hall, with the aid of the nine dwarfs." Three of the dwarfs are in the Voluspo's catalogue; Delling was a name in last week's poem, "in the latter case, however, the name quite possibly referring to some one else." So the one god who built the lady's hall is the one who forged the only sword that can open it — and that god is Loki, whose lips №28 watched being sewn shut by a dwarf. He built her a house and he built the key to it and put the key behind nine locks in a giantess's chest. That is Loki as the poems keep meeting him: the maker of the problem and the maker of its only solution, and in no hurry to bring the two together.
What is the mountain the maid is lying on?
"Lyfjaberg is it, | and long shall it be A joy to the sick and the sore; For well shall grow | each woman who climbs it, Though sick full long she has lain." — Svipdagsmol 52, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Hill of Healing." Bellows: "This stanza implies that Mengloth is a goddess of healing" — and hence, perhaps, he adds, "an hypostasis of Frigg, as already intimated by her name." №39 gathered up the goddesses the editor keeps suspecting of being Frigg under other names — Saga, Freyja at Folkvang — and here is the paper-manuscript entry in that ledger. Mengloth, "Necklace-Glad": Bellows' note on her name says it "has suggested that Mengloth is really Frigg, possessor of the famous Brisings' necklace, or else Freyja," and sends the reader to his note on the Lokasenna, where it "may be the Brisings' necklace, which appears in the Thrymskvitha as Freyja's, but which, in some mythological writings, is assigned to Frigg." №29 watched that necklace burst with Freyja's fury and then get bound on Thor to certify a bride. Whose it was, the sources cannot agree; the girl on the healing-hill is glad of it, and that is all the poem says.
Who are the maidens at her knees?
"Hlif is one named, | Hlifthrasa another, Thjothvara call they the third; Bjort and Bleik, | Blith and Frith, Eir and Aurbotha." — Svipdagsmol 54, trans. Bellows (1923)
Nine, as there were nine charms and nine dwarfs and nine locks. Bellows renders them, approximately: "Helper, Help-Breather, Folk-Guardian, Shining, White, Blithe, Peaceful, Kindly (?), and Gold-Giver." Two of the nine have lives outside this poem. Eir, Bellows says, "according to Snorri (Gylfaginning, 35) is herself the Norse Hygeia." Snorri, in Brodeur, is briefer: "she is the best physician" — third of the goddesses, after Frigg and Saga. (The transcription of Brodeur I read prints her name in that sentence as Fir. It is a scan's error, not the translator's; I note it because this series tells you what the page says.) So a healing-goddess sits at the knee of the lady of the healing-hill, and the editor's suspicion that Mengloth is Frigg's shadow gets one more small weight on its side.
And the last of the nine, Aurbotha, Gold-Giver. Bellows' note says nothing more about her. But there is an Aurboda in Snorri, in the chapter that tells the story №27 told: "A certain man was called Gýmir, and his wife Aurboda: she was of the stock of the Hill-Giants; their daughter was Gerdr, who was fairest of all women." Gerth's mother. The same name in two translators' spellings, at the knee of a girl behind a wall of flame, in a poem the editor says is full of "errors in mythology." Bellows does not connect them; I will not either, beyond setting them side by side. But the Skirnismol's bride was also a girl in a house you could not get into, and her mother has a name, and here the name is.
Do the nine help those who ask? Soon aid they all | who offerings give / On the holy altars high — and note that one manuscript leaves out this question and its answer altogether, and that the first line of the answer "is based on a conjectural emendation." Even the kindest stanza in the poem is a patch.
Then the eighteenth question, and the eighteenth answer, which is the only one that matters:
"Now answer me, Fjolsvith, | the question I ask, For now the truth would I know: Lives there the man | who in Mengloth's arms So fair may seek to sleep?" — Svipdagsmol 57, trans. Bellows (1923)
"No man there is | who in Mengloth's arms So fair may seek to sleep, Save Svipdag alone, | for the sun-bright maid Is destined his bride to be." — Svipdagsmol 58, trans. Bellows (1923)
The boy has been Vindkald, Wind-Cold, for thirty-six stanzas. He drops it in one line:
"Fling back the gates! | make the gateway wide! Here mayst thou Svipdag see! Hence get thee to find | if gladness soon Mengloth to me will give." — Svipdagsmol 59, trans. Bellows (1923)
And the giant — the miserly one, the one who said no man may enter ever — goes:
"Hearken, Mengloth, | a man is come; Go thou the guest to see! The hounds are fawning, | the house bursts open,-- Svipdag, methinks, is there." — Svipdagsmol 60, trans. Bellows (1923)
The hounds are fawning. The two Greedies who never sleep at the same time, who could only be bribed with the flesh of a cock that cannot be killed, are wagging. The house bursts open — the gate that holds the farer fast as a fetter, the house balanced on a spear-point, the hall Loki built. He has not fed the dogs. He has not killed the cock. He has not gone to Sinmora with a feather, or opened nine locks, or lifted the sword Loki made by the doors of death. He has said his name. The circle of impossibilities was complete, Bellows said — and it was; every answer the giant gave was true; there was no way through. And there did not need to be, because the eighteenth answer already had his name in it. The lock was never the dogs or the cock or the sword. The lock was who are you, and he had been answering it wrong on purpose.
Now, the thing last week's teaser skipped, because it went from the gate bursting open straight to the welcome. It is not what happens next. What happens next is that Mengloth threatens to have the giant's eyes eaten:
"On the gallows high | shall hungry ravens Soon thine eyes pluck out, If thou liest in saying | that here at last The hero is come to my hall. — Svipdagsmol 61, trans. Bellows (1923)
Those are her first words. Not to Svipdag — to Fjolsvith. If you are lying to me about this, I will hang you and the birds will have your eyes. That is a woman who has been waiting a long time, and been told before that someone was at the gate, and has decided what the price of a false alarm is. The teaser sold her short. She is not a girl on a hill waiting for the story to end. She is a lady with a warder and a gallows, and she does not take the warder's word. She turns to the man and asks for proof:
"Whence camest thou hither? | how camest thou here? What name do thy kinsmen call thee? Thy race and thy name | as a sign must I know, That thy bride I am destined to be." — Svipdagsmol 62, trans. Bellows (1923)
As a sign. The name and the lineage are the token. And here is where I will, once, put the two fire-ringed brides beside each other, since Bellows put them there first. Brynhild in №21 slept behind fire so that the fire would sort the applicants, and a man came through it in another man's shape, and she had no sign to ask for, and the wrong true thing happened for three tellings. Mengloth's gate does the sorting too — and then she asks anyway. Thy race and thy name as a sign must I know. The romance Bellows calls "strongly suggestive" of the Sigurd story is, at this one hinge, the Sigurd story with the lie taken out: the girl checks.
And the boy, who lied to the giant, does not lie to her:
"Svipdag am I, | and Solbjart's son; Thence came I by wind-cold ways; With the words of Urth | shall no man war, Though unearned her gifts be given." — Svipdagsmol 63, trans. Bellows (1923)
Solbjart — Sun-Bright, in Bellows' rendering, "not elsewhere mentioned." Thence came I by wind-cold ways — the false name, Vindkald, folded back into the true sentence as the road he took. And then the third line, which is the poem's whole theology in ten words: the words of Urth, "the decrees of fate," Bellows says, and sends you back to the mother's second charm, the bolts of Urth. The dead woman set the bolts of fate round her son on the road; the son, at the end of the road, tells his bride that no one wars with fate. Though unearned her gifts be given. He says it himself. He did nothing. He did not earn this. He asked eighteen questions and answered one and the door opened, and he stands in front of the woman he was sent to find and says: this was given, and I did not earn it, and no one argues with the one who gave it.
Then the welcome.
"Welcome thou art, | for long have I waited; The welcoming kiss shalt thou win! For two who love | is the longed-for meeting The greatest gladness of all. — Svipdagsmol 64, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Long have I sat | on Lyfjaberg here, Awaiting thee day by day; And now I have | what I ever hoped, For here thou art come to my hall. — Svipdagsmol 65, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Alike we yearned; | I longed for thee, And thou for my love hast longed; But now henceforth | together we know Our lives to the end we shall live." — Svipdagsmol 66, trans. Bellows (1923)
Long have I waited. Long have I sat. Long is the way, long must thou wander, but long is love as well. The mother's word at the grave is the bride's word on the hill, and the poem does not remark on it, and neither, so far as I can find, does Bellows. The one who sent him and the one who waited for him use the same measure. Alike we yearned — she says it was mutual, and equal, and that they both knew. The poem ends on the word live.
Here is what I think this poem is doing at this point in the series, and why I think Bellows' note on the two survivors sent us here and not somewhere else. Last week the wisest giant in the world answered who lives? five times with names, and lost his head on a question whose only answer was the name of the man asking it. This week a boy asks eighteen questions whose honest answers all say no one gets in — and the eighteenth answer is his own name, and he says it aloud, and everything the giant said was impossible stops mattering. Two contests, and both end the instant the guest's true name is in the room. One name was hidden, and the giant died of not knowing it. One was spoken, and the house burst open. That is the whole difference between the dark tellings and this one. The Völsungs ran on names in the wrong mouths — Gunnar's shape, Sigurd's voice, the ring that told the truth at the river. This poem has one lie in it, a boy calling himself Cold, and the lie is what keeps him outside, and the truth is what lets him in, and the woman checks the truth before she takes it. And the gift, he says himself, was unearned.
It is a late poem. It is on paper. It has, by the editor's count, errors in its mythology and too few scars to be old, and its most ancient line is a charm against a Christian ghost that the other editors wanted to turn into a witch. Bellows calls it very charming, which from Bellows is nearly a confession. I will go a little further than he does, since it is my telling and not his: after a fall in which everything anyone wanted was paid for in blood or forgetting, the North kept one poem in which a dead mother says love is as long as the road, and a girl on a hill of healing says she waited, and a boy says he did not earn it, and the giant at the gate — much-wise, miserly with meat — is the one who runs to tell her he has come.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — no giant at the gate, and nobody will ask your father's name.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Svipdagsmol (Grougaldr and Fjolsvinnsmol), its introductory note and its notes; Hovamol 150; Sigurtharkvitha en skamma 68 and its note; the Lokasenna, note on stanza 20; the Vafthruthnismol, note on stanza 45. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1916) — Gylfaginning XXXV and XXXVII. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the poem that follows this one in Bellows' book is the Völundarkvitha — and it is the light-turn's hardest test, because it is a poem about a smith. Three swan-maidens land on a lakeshore and marry three brothers and fly away after seven winters; two brothers go looking, and one stays at his forge and waits. A king comes for him while he sleeps, takes his ring and his sword, hamstrings him, and sets him on an island to make treasures. What the smith makes next, and out of whom, is the darkest craftsman's revenge in the North — and it ends in the air, with the smith laughing, and a king who asked for the truth and got it. Völund: the smith the story could not keep on the ground.