Hávamál
verses 111-137 Loddfáfnismál [present state: verse 111]
111.
ON Text and its word-for-word pseudo English translation
Mál er at þylja Time is to murmur (charms) [usually trans. by to discourse, or to chant. See Evans’ commentaries]
þular stóli á from the wise-men chair [hint at ‘magician’ always omitted in translations]
Urðarbrunni at, by the Spring of Urðr,
sá ek ok þagðak, I saw and I was silent,
sá ek ok hugðak, saw and I thought,
hlydda ek á manna mál; I heard [or : I yielded to] the words of the men ;
of rúnar heyrða ek dæma, of the runes I heard the lore
né of ráðum þögðu not of advices were they silent [They (runes or wise-men ? ) were not silent to give advice]
Háva höllu at, near High’s hall
Háva höllu í, in High’s hall
heyrða ek segja svá: heard I say thus :
Bellows’ translation
111. It is time to chant |
from the chanter's stool;
By the wells of Urth I was,
I saw and was silent, | I saw and thought,
And heard the speech of Hor.
(Of runes heard I words, | nor were counsels wanting,
At the hall of Hor,
In the hall of Hor;
Such was the speech I heard.)
[111. With this stanza begins the Loddfafnismol
(stanzas 111-138). Loddfafnir is apparently a
wandering singer, who, from his “chanter's stool,” recites the verses which he
claims to have received from Othin. Wells of Urth: cf. Voluspo, 19
and note. Urth (“the Past”) is one of the three
Norns. This stanza is apparently in corrupt form, and editors have tried many
experiments with it, both in rejecting lines as spurious and in rear ranging
the words and punctuation. It looks rather as though the first four lines
formed a complete stanza, and the last four had crept in later. The phrase
translated "the speech of Hor" is "Hova mol," later used as the title for the entire poem.]
Commentary
This verse
is obviously said to be obscure since it talks of magic. Whoever says ‘I’ here is
thus a magician who understands that it is time for him/her to mutter magic
charms. He/She thus goes near the fountain of Urdhr, the well of wisdom, where he/she
silently observes, where he/she meditates, where he/she acquires knowledge about
the runes. In the translation I ask whether runes or wise men speak to him/her
since the grammar gives no way to choose. My opinion, however, is that the runes
speak and “give their advice”.
The only
difficulty about understanding this verse lies in that it may be difficult to
accept that the speaker is simultaneously near Urdhr’s
well and High’s hall. This difficulty disappears whenever the speaker is Ódhinn.
Evans’ commentaries
111. On this
obscure and much-debated
strophe see p. 26 above [Note YK : see below
in this version] and Hollander
2, 282-7.
2 þulr
seems to mean something like ‘sage’ or perhaps ‘seer’. The word recurs in 134, where Loddfafnir is exhorted not to laugh at a ‘hoary
þulr’, since the old often speak
wisely, and in 80 and 142 the runes are said to have been coloured by fimbulþulr,
the mighty þulr (presumably Óðinn); the association with
age also appears in the other two occurrences in the Edda: inn Hára þul,
referring to Reginn, in Fáfnismál
34 and inn gamli þulr, used of Vafþrúðnir, in Vafþr.
3 Urþar
brunni at - editors differ as to whether
this should be taken with
what precedes or with what follows.
But since the strophe as a whole
is involved in so much obscurity
it seems risky to break the regular
pattern of ljóðaháttr
[Note YK : this is a pattern in Scaldic poetry] by placing a stop after the first ‘long line’ (i.e. at the end of line 2); the only parallel would be 69, but there a break occurs at the end of line 3 as well. The Urðar
brunnr is stated in Völuspá 19 to lie beneath
the evergreen ash Yggdrasill, and Snorri says in
the Prose Edda (Gylfaginning ch. 15) that þribja rót asksins stendr á himni, ok undir þeiri rot er brunnr sá, er mjök er heilagr, er heitir Urðarbrunnr. Þar eigu guðin dómstað
sinn. In a fragment of a Christian poem the tenth century skáld Eilífr
Guðrúnarson speaks of
Christ as having his
station sunnr at
Urðar brunni (Skj.
í 144), evidently
a Christian appropriation of the concept of the Well
of Fate as the seat of wisdom.
(p. 26 of Evans’ introduction)
As with
the Gnomic Poem, scholars disagree whether Loddfáfnismál as intended from the beginning as the utterance of Óðinn.
The first person pronoun appears twice, in 118 and 131,
but in neither case does
the speaker appear to possess
Odinic characteristics, and
the poem's advice is in general of a mundane, even petty,
kind (particular offence has been taken at the notion that the last line
of 112 could proceed from the lips of a deity; Müllenhoff even thought a touch of burlesque was intended here). The question is complicated by the problem of how 111 is to be understood. As the text stands in CR, this strophe introduces Loddfáfnismál, but its grand mystical tone, in contrast to the not very elevated contents of the poem that follows,
makes it doubtful that it
was originally composed for this purpose. A further objection has
been seen in the reference
in line 7 to runes, which are not in fact dealt with
in Loddfáfnismál (apart from a very cursory
allusion in 137). The strophe would in fact be more appropriately
placed among the miscellaneous fragments of Rúnatal; it is also
conceivable that it was at
one time intended to introduce
Ljóðatal. Even if we accept it
as the opening strophe of Loddfáfnismál,
its implications are far from
clear. Who is the ek who saw and was
silent in the hall of Hávi,
pondering and listening to counsels and talk of runes? Certainly
a god, says Finnur Jónsson 3,237, for only a god would
have been admitted to such exalted surroundings, and so most naturally
Óðinn, and it is Óðinn (Finnur continues) who utters Loddfáfnismál in the disguise of an aged þulr, giving an exaggerated portrait of himself
in 134. This may be so; but in the hall of Hávi it would seem
reasonable that Hávi, i.e. Óðinn, would be the speaker rather than that he
would be the listening ek. Müllenhoff believed that 111-137 were the utterance not of Hávi but of the þulr Loddfáfnir recounting what he claims has previously been addressed to him in Hávi's hall (Müllenhoff emended manna mál in 111/6 to Hávamál
- but
that leaves þögðu with no apparent pl. subject), and that 164 was the original conclusion of this
poem; in that strophe he expelled Háva
before höllu í and took the hall to be the one in which the þulr gave his performance; heill sá er kvað is his praise of Hávi
and heill sá er kann his praise of himself. This is ingenious, but obviously very speculative, and is still vulnerable
to the charge that the advice,
taken as a whole, is too trifling
for its grandiose frame. The most
plausible conclusion is that
what we have here originated, like the Gnomic Poem, as an independent set of impersonal didactic strophes of
six ljódaháttr lines each; at some
date it was adapted to the Loddfáfnir formula
and thereby somewhat disrupted; and it was then (like
the Gnomic Poem) incorporated in the ‘Words of Havi', only at that stage acquiring
a connection with Óðinn. Who Loddfáfnir can have been, and why the formula
was ever added at all, are totally mysterious; the name also occurs,
equally mysteriously, in
st. 162, where it has perhaps been inserted to provide a link between Ljóðatal and what has gone earlier in the
collection (though it is possibly just
conceivable that the
occurrence there is the primary one, from which the composer of the formula took
the name).