Carolyne Larrington
Óðinn is the protagonist of both these poems, which follow Hávamál in the Codex Regius. In Vafþrúðnismál he visits the giant Vafþrúðnir in disguise to compete with him in a wisdom-contest in which the stake is the loser’s head. Once he has established (by posing some questions about mythological facts) that Óðinn is a worthy opponent, the giant accepts the challenge. Óðinn interrogates him at length until, perhaps having gained the information he sought (how he will die at ragna rǫе), he terminates the contest by putting a question to which only he and his son Baldr can know the answer. Vafþrúðnir must admit defeat. The poem is composed in ljόðaháttr, the meter of wisdom dialogues, and is often considered to be among the older poems in the Edda.
Grímnismál is, in contrast to Vafþrúðnismál, a wisdom monologue rather than a dialogue. A long prose framework tells how Óðinn and Frigg quarrel over the merits of their respective protégés, Geirrøðr and Agnarr. Frigg alleges that king Geirrøðr is stingy to his guests. When Óðinn visits him in disguise to test the truth of the claim, Frigg tricks Geirrøðr into torturing him. Óðinn embarks on a monologue which gradually reveals his identity. By the end of it Geirrøðr is dead and kingship has passed to his son, Agnarr. Much of the lore which Óðinn reveals in Grímnismál is obscure, and parts of the poem are difficult to interpret. Scholars have assumed that the obscurity indicates that the poem is archaic; some discount the prose framework, regarding it as a later addition to a poem which might have had quite different origins. Much of the poem is in ljόðaháttr with metrical irregularity in the catalogue of Óðinn’s names with which the poem closes.
The two poems are classified as wisdom poems and have often been considered together. Critics have largely been interested in the structure and context of the poems, rather than the mythological lore itself, except insofar as it confirms information about the world given in Vǫluspá or by Snorri. For Vafþrúðnismál interest has focussed on the rules of the wisdom-contest, trying to suggest why Óðinn, despite his wife’s warnings, should risk his head in contest against Vafþrúðnir. Machan has recently edited the poem; in 1994 McKinnell contributed substantially to the debate about Óðinn’s motivations, while Ruggerini illuminated various stylistic and structural elements in the poem. Earlier critics, such as Ejder, had assumed that Óðinn learned new information from the giant, although Holtsmark makes clear that a wisdom-contest can only succeed where the questioner is in a position to verify the truth of the answers given.
Grímnismál has attracted more critical attention than Vafþrúðnismál. Fleck has suggested that Óðinn’s performance is part of a ritual initiating a candidate into the mythological knowledge he needs to be a successful king; he adduces various ethnological parallels to Óðinn’s ordeal. Are the details of Óðinn’s ordeal related to shamanism, a set of religious practices found among the northern neighbours of the Scandinavians, the Lapps? Fleck’s definition of shamanism is strict enough to exclude the possible Norse instances; Buchholz argues that the circumstances of Óðinn’s revelations in Grímnismál may be helpfully considered as shamanistic. Schjødt follows Fleck in suggesting that the revelations in Óðinn’s monologue qualify Agnarr to take over the kingship which Geirrøðr has forfeited but concludes that the torture between two fires is actually intended to annihilate a dangerous sorcerer who has entered Geirrøðr’s hall (as the prose framework suggests) rather than to initiate Óðinn into a higher state of knowledge. Ralph gives a useful account of the poem’s structure based on numerological considerations. He discounts the prose framework as secondary and marks certain of the verses for excision, since they do not fit the numerological scheme.
The two poems provide evidence for the belief that Óðinn travels through the world in disguise, both testing out the wisdom of others and revealing it himself to the chosen auditor. The mythological information outlines the history and geography of the universe for the attentive listener; as Kragerud has demonstrated, it also contributes thematically to the defining situations of the poems: the enmity between gods and giants in Vafþrúðnismál and the relationship between gods and men, placed in jeopardy by Geirrððr’s treatment of Óðinn in Grímnismál.
Carolyne Larrington
Vafþrúðnismál
Ejder, Bertil. “Eddadikten Vafþrúðnismál.” Vetenskapssocietetens i Lund årsbok (1960): 5–20.
Holtsmark, Anne. “Den uløselige gåten.” Maal og Minne (1965): 101–5.
Kragerud, Alf. “De mytologiske spørsmål i Fåvnesmål.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 96 (1981): 9–48.
Machan, Tim William, ed. Vafþrúðnismál. Durham Medieval Texts, 6. Durham: Dept. of English Language and Medieval Literature, 1988.
McKinnell, John. Both One and Many. Essays on Change and Variety in Late Norse Heathenism. Rome: II Calamo, 1994.
Ruggerini, Maria Elena. “Appendix. A Stylistic and Typological Approach to Vafþrúðnismál.” In McKinnell, 139–87.
Grímnismál
Bucholz, Peter. “Shamanism: The Testimony of Old Icelandic Literary Tradition.” Medieval Scandinavia 4 (1971): 7–20.
Fleck, Jere. “Konr—Ótt arr—Geirrøðr: A Knowledge Criterion for Succession to the Germanic Sacred Kingship.” Scandinavian Studies 42 (1970): 39–49.
——. “The ‘Knowledge-Criterion’ in the Grímnismál: the Case against ’Shamanism’.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 86 (1971): 49–65.
Hale, Christopher. “The River Names in Grímnismál 27–29.” In Edda: A Collection of Essays. Eds. R. J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 4. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1983. 165–86.
Ralph, Bo. “The Composition of the Grímnismál.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 87 (1972): 97–118.
Schjødt, Jens Peter. “The ‘fire ordeal’ in the Grímnismál—initiation or annihilation?” Mediaeval Scandinavia 12 (1988): 29–43.
Where are the gods? When did they create the world and mankind? And what are they doing now—how do they pass their time? These questions may seem ridiculously rational and anachronistic to ask of Old Norse religious thought and the Norse mythological system. Yet these questions certainly occurred to medieval Christians, who were concerned to map in detail the Other World: to trace the features of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory with their splendid palaces, flowery meadows, flaming lakes of pitch and knife-edge bridges. Medieval Christians had a clear notion of salvation history, cramming it into the 6000-year span since Adam was created. This early Christian interest in such matters points to a very ancient and fundamental tendency to organize knowledge within the epistemological categories of Time and Space. Yet the modern scholar of Old Norse myth gets few clues from Snorri, or from Eddic poetry, as to the exact location of Ásgarðr and Miðgarðr and their relations to one another, or where exactly Hel’s domain may be in relation to Niflheimr. As far as we can judge, Snorri’s thirteenth-century audience would be little better informed. Yet we cannot help but construct chronologies and mental maps of the Old Norse mythological world, much like the Norse world-picture in Ε. V. Gordon’s Introduction to Old Norse (196). We need such schema to orient ourselves in the universe of Norse myth with its potent oppositions of fire and frost, the hall and the outside; its giant-haunted mountains, fjords, islands and rivers; a half-otherworldly, half-human landscape. Margaret Clunies Ross (50–56) sketches a useful plan of Old Norse mythic space as consisting in a number of settlements: Ásgarðr, the “garðr” of the gods, and Miðgarðr, the “garðr” of humans, lying in more or less concentric and enclosed half-circles at the centre of the imagined universe, with Jǫtunheimar, the world of the giants, lying somewhere to the east. There is an outer sea where the Miðgarðsormr has its home; there are a number of territories below ground, chiefly the abode of Hel. Other types of underworld, sometimes scarcely distinguished from one another, also seem to exist. The spatial arrangement is envisaged broadly as horizontal, as Gurevich (44) suggests, but with the vertical axis of Yggdrasill and its roots determining the spatial relations of certain “lower” worlds.
Time in the Norse mythic system is apprehended as a series of succeeding ages. Clunies Ross (235–42) delineates it as divided into five periods: first, the beginning of everything, as recalled by the giants; second, the creation of the known world and mankind by the gods; third, the mythic present; fourth, the time of ragna rǫk, the doom of the gods; and finally, the new world of the post-ragna rǫk age. Most Eddic mythological poetry, with the exception of Vǫluspá and Vafþrúðnismál, is concerned only with events in the mythic present; the chronology of most of the gods’ recorded adventures within that period is unimportant. For most purposes it does not matter whether Þόrr’s encounter with Óðinn in Hárbarðsljόð takes place before or after the gods’ feast at the home of Ægir in Lokasenna. The poet (or poets) who composed these poems might well have found such a question laughable. Yet in the last fifty years, the mythological poetry of the Edda has increasingly been read in the light of its first poem Vǫluspá. In this poem, the vǫlva (or prophetess) traces a history of the cosmos which skips allusively from the earliest times, through one significant historical event followed by the next, all within the mythic present. The poem builds, as Nordal argues, into a master narrative of Norse myth, driven by the teleology of ragna rǫk: from the war with the Vanir to the death of Baldr and the binding of Loki. Thus certain historic events —that is, those which relate to ragna rǫk—are incorporated into the master narrative and, linked by the chain of cause and effect, are subjected to chronological ordering within the mythic present.
In this essay I want to argue that Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál, among their other concerns, address precisely the questions of Time and Space, history and geography outlined above. Although at one level both poems appear to consist of a multitude of randomly assembled mythological facts, at another level the facts work together to produce further, often subtextual meanings which could be described as ‘ideological’. Since the two poems are clearly biased in favor of Óðinn, placing the audience on his side in the wisdom-performances he stages, the ideology of Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál is Æsir-centred. It sets out the proper relationships of the three major groupings of the Old Norse cosmos: the gods, the giants and humans, as expressed in Time and Space. The gods will, of course, be shown to be dominant, despite the impending threat of ragna rǫk; the subordinate status of both men and giants will be made clear and, in Grímnismál, a program for human conduct will be offered.
Our two poems have been linked together as “wisdom poetry” since de Vries’s influential 1930 article “Om visdomsdigtningen.” Traditionally, Vafþrúðnismál has been plundered for the information that the mythologems contain, principally as support of or contradiction to the world-history gleaned from Vǫluspá. Since de Vries’s first article, the scholarly consensus has generally been that the poem is intended to present useful mythological facts to an audience, framed by a contest here made more interesting by a wager of heads. This form of didactic framework is common in texts from other European cultures, such as the Old English Solomon and Saturn II or the Irish Colloquy of the Two Sages. Later commentators have argued that Óðinn stages the contest in order to find out—or to double-check—information about the beginning of the world (e.g. Ejder, 8–11) or about ragna rǫk. It is no coincidence that the penultimate question of the contest (st. 52) should be about Óðinn’s own death. The contest is interpreted as being, like Vǫluspá, ‘about’ ragna rǫk, and it is read in conjunction with poems such as Lokasenna to produce a grand mythological narrative, driving ineluctably towards ragna rǫk and presenting the gods as potentially tragic. Recent critical interest focusses on the rules of the contest (McKinnell; Ruggerini); the audience’s pleasure in the text has been redefined as that of suspense: will Óðinn discover what he needs to know before Vafþrúðnir identifies his opponent and destroys him as an interloper in the giant’s hall? McKinnell, for instance, argues that the poem is principally concerned with ragna rǫk; Óðinn wishes to test whether Fate is really immutable, whether he must survive the encounter with Vafþrúðnir in order to die at ragna rǫk, or whether, by having the giant win the contest, the prophecy of ragna rǫk can be proved false.
Whether Óðinn is really intent on testing out the proposition of immutable Fate is, however, not our concern. I argue instead that the poem’s content addresses the history of the universe, as demonstrated in the structure of the questions. Most commentators have divided the questions and answers into three distinct groups:
A) Vafþrúðnir’s questions to Óðinn (sts. 13–18)
| 1. | Name: | the horse of the day |
| 2. | the horse of the night | |
| 3. | the river between gods and giants | |
| 4. | the battle-field where gods and giants will fight. |
B) Óðinn’s first series of questions, introduced by a numerical formula: (sts. 20–43)
| 1. | Where do | earth and sky | come from? |
| 2. | moon and sun | ||
| 3. | dav and night | ||
| 4. | winter and summer? | ||
| 5. | Which are older: gods or giants? | ||
| 6. | What was the origin of the oldest mentioned giant? | ||
| 7. | How did he reproduce? | ||
| 8. | What is the earliest thing that Vafþrúðnir remembers? | ||
| 9. | Where does the wind come from? | ||
| 10. | Where did Njǫrðr come from? | ||
| 11. | Who are the Einheriar? | ||
| 12. | How does Vafþrúðnir know all this? |
C) Óðinn’s six questions introduced by the “fiǫlð ek fόr” formula (sts. 44–54)
The questions relate to the whole span of mythological time, all five periods as identified by Clunies Ross. The organization of the first group of questions (A), asked by Vafþrúðnir to test Óðinn’s fitness as an opponent, makes clear the poem’s preoccupations, since it ranges through the past, present and future, sketching in little the themes of the longer part of the poem. The first two questions about the horse of day and of night refer to the past, to the origin of natural phenomena. The third question, about the river Ífing, refers to the mythic present, where hostile gods and giants are still kept apart by the river whose eternally ice-free surface offers no possibility of breaching that separation; the fourth question regarding the battle-field where the gods and giants will finally meet looks forward to the future, to the time of ragna rǫk. We note the spatial concerns of the last two questions, inquiring into particular features of the mythic landscape made significant both by their place in divine history and by their striking geographical peculiarities: the ice-free nature of the river, despite its proximity to the frost-giants, and the huge size of the plain Vígríðr, “a hundred leagues in each direction” (st. 18:4). Thus this short first sequence of questions marks out the broad plan of the questions which Óðinn will put to Vafþrúðnir in the rest of the poem.
The second sequence of the twelve-question group (B) is concerned mainly with the past, shading into the mythic present with the eleventh question (st. 40), which is incomplete in the manuscript but apparently concerned with the Einheriar, the group of warriors whom Óðinn is assembling at Valhǫll for ragna rǫk. This is an activity taking place in the mythic present but clearly looking forward to the future when the Einheriar will be called upon to fight real enemies, not simply to practise amongst themselves. The remainder of the questions in group В address the past: both the first age, before the gods were in existence, and the succeeding era, when the gods were creating and ordering the universe. Ejder, in contradistinction to McKinnell, stresses Óðinn’s interest in the past rather than the future, and indeed the majority of Óðinn’s questions are concerned with the past, in particular with the origins of natural phenomena.
If both Vǫluspá and Snorri’s interpretation of the myth of Ymir in Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál are correct, then Óðinn was present at the creation of the world and the arrangement of the heavenly bodies. Yet here he is clearly eager to hear about origins: the first four questions of group В begin with the word “hvaðan” (’from where’; see Ruggerini, 182–3). He is told of the origins of earth and sky, created from the body of the giant Ymir in the primordial act of violence; then he is told of the origins of moon and sun, day, night, winter and summer. The origins of these phenomena are expressed in genealogical terms: Vafþrúðnir’s answer gives the father of the moon and sun as Mundilfœri (’The One Moving Along at Fixed Times’, according to Finnur Jόnsson, s.v.); Dellingr (’The Shining One’) and Nǫrr (’The Narrow One’) as the fathers of Day and Night respectively; and Vindsvalr (’Windcool’) and Svasuðr (’Mild South’; see Machan, 80) as the fathers of Winter and Summer. Genealogy, a very frequent organizational strategy for introducing characters and their immediate history into family sagas, is here deployed on a metaphorical level. Thus the relationship between Dagr and his ‘father’ Dellingr is not literal or historical but rather ideogrammatical: the genealogical method is used to expand the depiction of Dagr ‘Day’ by juxtaposing the related concept ‘Shining One.’
As Óðinn questions Vafþrúðnir about these phenomena, he establishes the origins of the very mechanisms by means of which Time passes and in which history is formed: the daily revolution of the sun; the moon in its phases marking out the months; day and night, winter and summer, and the alternating seasons which make up the year. Just as in Vǫluspá st. 6, where the gods give names to the different measures of time “morgin … oc miðian dag / undorn oc aptan” (morning … and midday/ afternoon and evening),1 fixing in their paths the wandering sun and moon, so here the beginning of divine history is recalled.
The next four questions in section В continue to engage past history. However, it is no longer a question of eliciting mythological facts about origins; Óðinn, as a thorough historian, seeks to establish Vafþrúðnir’s authority for his knowledge of the past. Who was the oldest being in the universe? The giant Aurgelmir. What was his origin? The frozen poisonous drops of Élivágar. How did he reproduce if there were no giantesses? Parthenogenetically. What is Vafþrúðnir’s place in this genealogical chain? The earliest thing he remembers is Bergelmir lying on his “lúðr” (probably ‘bier’; see Holtsmark and Christiansen). Just as Ari Þorgilsson establishes the veracity of his contemporary informants by relating their early memories of persons who participated in the historical events he recounts in Islendingabόk (48), so Vafþrúðnir substantiates his information through a line of genealogically related informants. He remembers Bergelmir and thus is only three generations removed from Aurgelmir, the first and earliest of the giants in this poem. Better authority Óðinn could not hope to find. The god demands final authentication of Vafþrúðnir’s knowledge of the present by asking about what he has learned from his own experience, rather than from inherited lore in the last question of this section: how does Vafþrúðnir know so much about the affairs of gods and giants? Vafþrúðnir’s answer reveals him as a wanderer throughout the worlds, just like Óðinn, gathering knowledge:
Frá iǫtna rúnom, ok allra goða
ec kann segia satt,
þvíat hvern hefi ec heim um komit;
nío kom ec heima fyr Niflhel neðan,
hinig deyia όr helio halir. (st. 43)
(Of the secrets of the giants and of all the gods, /I can tell truly, / for I have been into every world; / nine worlds I have travelled through to Mist-hel, / there men die out of hell.)
Of the twelve questions in group B, nine are explained by Óðinn’s interest in actual history (the origins of natural phenomena) and in historical method (what is the source of his informant’s knowledge and how trustworthy is it?). The eleventh question, about the Einheriar, points forward to the final sequence (C), looking from the mythic present to the future culminating in ragna rǫk. Questions nine and ten remain in B. They are concerned with the origins of the wind and the Vanir god, Njǫrðr. Ruggerini characterises these as summary questions (173), recapitulating the form but not the thematic import of earlier ones. Thus they are both “hvaðan” (origin) questions in form: the first is about the wind, a natural phenomenon caused by a giant, while the question about Njǫrðr posits a being who comes neither from the genealogy of the giants nor from among the Æsir: a being who, apparently, will survive ragna rǫk and return home after it. These questions are not specifically concerned with history. The wind question serves to point up the power and ubiquity of the giants; the dauntingly-named Hræsvelgr (’Corpse-swallower’) sits at the edge of the sky, (not normally thought of as giant territory). The Njǫrðr question is multivalent; it points backwards to the unknown Powers who created Njǫrðr and looks forward to the final period of Time: the post-ragna rǫk age.
The third sequence of questions (C) is, as many scholars have indicated, primarily concerned with ragna rǫk and post-ragna rǫk. Some gods and humans will survive, but there is no mention of the giants when the world begins anew. Vafþrúðnir’s personal defeat in the poem mimics the defeat of the giants in Time despite their priority in the universe; it is a defeat which Vafþrúðnir is forced to admit. New human generations, the second generation of gods, a new sun, and, possibly (the import of sts. 48–9 is much disputed), new arbiters of fate2 will appear after ragna rǫk. Even if Óðinn is destroyed, Baldr, we may surmise, will return.
Alf Kragerud’s brilliant 1981 article on Fáfnismál and its mythological questions succeeds in making sense of Vafþrúðnismál’s “jumble of odd fragments of erudition” (Nordal, 104) by taking the mythic facts seriously, not simply for their content, but for their thematic thrust. For Kragerud, the subject of Vafþrúðnismál is identical with that of most of the mythological poems of the Edda: the fundamental opposition of gods and giants as figured in Time. Against the giants’ priority, and the authority this gives them, is set the ultimate survival of gods and humans: the former is the giants’ ‘trump-card’ (“trumfkort;” Kragerud, 35), but the gods’ trump-card, deployed by Óðinn so effectively here, is the knowledge of survival and, perhaps, of Baldr’s return.
Vafþrúðnismál is mimetic of ragna rǫk, the final confrontation of gods and giants, though the poem results in a temporary triumph for Óðinn. As often in the Edda, the conflict between the two groups is displaced into a contest of words, just as in Fáfnismál the expected fight between Sigurðr and Fáfnir is replaced by a verbal battle waged with gnomes, riddles and prophecies (Larrington 1993, 86). The final sequence of Vafþrúðnismál (sts. 44–51) depicts gods and humans allied in an idyllic new world, where nourishment comes to humans in the form of dew (cf. the fields which grow without sowing in Vsp. 62). Gods and humans settle, breed, eat, and carry weapons, while the giants disappear from the record, an erasure enacted when Viðarr destroys Fenrir in Vaf. 53. His victory is symbolic of the giants’ final overthrow.
Óðinn’s interest in past history throughout the greater part of Vafþrúðnismál is not simply a series of red herrings, meant to lull Vafþrúðnir into a false sense of security while Óðinn takes an indirect approach to the crucial question. Vafþrúðnismál sets out an allusive exploration of the origins and history of the cosmos, with all that entails for and explains about temporal power. It shows how, with the authority which their knowledge of the origins of the created world gives them, the giants come to be pre-eminent at the close of the mythic present and the coming of the ragna rǫk era. The future in Vafþrúðnismál may unfold promisingly as humans and gods begin a new history together; certainly there is no ominous figure like that of Níðhǫggr, the dragon of Vǫluspá st. 66, to trouble the vision of the new world. Yet there may be continuities from the past, possibly signaled by the mysterious ‘girls of Mǫgþrasir’ of sts. 48–9, which the inhabitants of the future would do well to heed.
Unlike most Eddic mythological poems (Rígsþula is the only other real exception), Grímnismál is set among humans, in the court of the human king Geirrøðr. The prose frame, with its folk-tale-like story of domestic rivalry, has sometimes been regarded as secondary to the poetic frame (sts. 1–3 and 51–4) which places Óðinn between the fires, receiving a horn of drink from Agnarr and embarking on the monologue which climaxes in the death of the king and tormentor Geirrøðr. Although certain scholars, such as Schröder and Ralph, have wished to discount even this framework, others (notably Jere Fleck) have fully investigated it, linking it to the controversial idea of a Germanic sacred kingship, one of the criteria for which is the possession of numinous knowledge. Fleck also argues for a link to ritual ascetic practices intended to give the sage (Óðinn) access to a hidden mythological wisdom. I shall argue that the prose context is crucial, not so much because of the conjugal rivalry which impresses Joseph Harris as an ancient motif (Harris, 81), but because it points up the central, organizing idea of the poem: Geirrøðr’s hospitality and its significance. Geirrøðr is accused by Frigg of being a “matníðingr” (someone who is stingy with food), a failing which, if it is not true when the accusation is made, becomes so. The king fails the test, not only in terms of the Germanic hospitality ethic, but in a far broader context: his failure places his kingship and the well-being of the kingdom in jeopardy, for the human feast is a re-enactment of the archetypal divine feast and the human feasters must acknowledge their celebration of the gods’ original act through sacrifice.
Georges Dumézil has outlined a paradigm for the Indo-European mythological motif of “the feast of the gods” as follows:
a) the gods intend to hold a feast for which the sacred drink must be prepared;
b) the enemy (giants or demons) try to prevent or disrupt the feast;
c) the gods triumph over the enemy and hold a victory feast;
d) humans imitate the divine feasting at their own feast.
Elements a through с can be clearly detected in the mythological poems concerned with the feasting of the gods, notably Hymiskviða and Lokasenna (see below). That Norse feasts were regarded in some senses as ritual is demonstrated strikingly in Snorri’s account in Heimskringla of Hákon gόði’s attempts to convert the farmers of the Trøndelag. Descended from king Hálfdan “inn mildi ok inn matarilli” (’Hálfdan the generous and stingy with food’; Heimskringla 1: 78), an epithet reminiscent of Frigg’s accusation against Geirrøðr, Hákon seeks to introduce Christianity at the Frostaþing. He proposes the end of sacrifice, the introduction of fasting, and keeping the sabbath holy. His audience objects, observing of Hákon’s ancestors that “þeir váru illir af mat, svá þόtt þeir væri mildir af gulli” (’they were stingy with food, even if they were generous with gold’; Heimskringla I, 169). For the present Hákon is forced to concede that he will sacrifice ‘for the harvest and for peace’ (170). At the “blόtveizla” (sacrificial feast) which follows, Sigurðr jarl, the local ruler, makes sure that the king presides in the high-seat. Sigurðr performs the traditional rites, dedicating the cup to Óðinn. Failure to dedicate the festive drink to Óðinn, in the view of the farmers, would bring about bad luck and poor harvests (171). The deeply-held belief that the human feast and the divine feast are fundamentally connected, as shown in this Heimskringla passage, gives a context in which Grímnismál can fruitfully be read.
Kragerud (45–7) discusses the mythic allusions surrounding what appears to be the central moment of revelation in the obscure st. 45: the invocation of the drink-bearing valkyries in st. 36 and the information about the tremendous heat of the sun and the protective shield which lies in front of it in sts. 37–9. He suggests that these allusions point towards, and thus confirm, the frame situation at a thematic level, echoing Óðinn’s heat and thirst. Earlier stanzas in the monologue also echo the frame situation, developing in particular the idea of the connection between human and divine feasting.
After Agnarr gives Óðinn the horn which releases him from the torture of heat and thirst (the action which permits the monologue to begin), Óðinn turns immediately to the fundamental relationship between gods and men. Óðinn’s perspective on the human world is given in the framing verses where he complains of his ill-treatment; but as he begins to speak he envisages the ideal and splendid world of the gods, ‘a sacred land’ (st. 4:1). Although his list of the dwellings of the gods offers textual problems,3 the world of the gods is exposed for the audience with twelve4 or thirteen halls and lands, each the property of a particular god. At this stage the divine world is not distinguished by physical features—mountains and rivers, forests and fjords, land forms which we find elsewhere in the mythological poetry—but rather by its inhabited settlements. Much like tenth-century Norway, the ‘sacred land’ consists of a number of territories ruled by an autonomous lord, in whose hall the social practices of lordship are performed. God and goddess drink together (st. 7); the gods assemble for mead-drinking (st. 13); a retinue is chosen (sts. 8, 14); weapons are displayed (st. 9). Divine property is inheritable: Skaði now rules over her father’s lands (st. 11), justice is dispensed (st.15), and treachery and malice are eschewed (sts. 12, 16). Nor is the obligation to avenge kin forgotten (st. 17); since ragna rǫk is not yet at hand, Víðarr, Óðinn’s son, occupies himself by practising his horsemanship. Training or tending to one’s horses, hawks and hounds is a marker of aristocratic and leisured status in the Eddic texts (cf. Þrymskviða st. 6 and Atlakviða st. 37; see Russom). Gurevich sees the Scandinavian mythological universe as “an aggregate of farmsteads” (45), but certainly in Grímnismál there is no apprehension of agricultural work, crop-growing or animal-raising. The gods are too aristocratic to need to work.
Thus the divine world stands in a perfected and archetypal relation to the flawed human world, in particular the hall of Geirrøðr where duties of hospitality are neglected and strangers ill-treated rather than given justice. That divine society should operate much as human society does is to be expected. The gods have an archetypal and exemplary function often overlooked, a function which tends to be obscured by the scandal of Lokasenna and the tricksterism of Óðinn. Nevertheless, such plural words for the gods as “bǫnd” (‘bonds’), “hǫpt” (’fetters’), and “regin” (’rulers’) suggest a community which lives and works closely together.
In a 1988 article on Lokasenna, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen suggests that the gods follow the practices of Scandinavian kings in demanding that their subjects feast and entertain them—hence the feasting at Ægir’s (the setting of Lokasenna) and, by extension (Meulengracht Sørensen does not mention it), the feast revealed in st. 45 of Grímnismál. Ægir first tries to avoid the obligation to host the feast by claiming that he has no cauldron suitable for brewing (Hymiskviða st. 3), but after the cauldron is successfully fetched from another group of giants, he can no longer demur (st. 39). The rout of Hymir and his forces at the end of Hymiskviða seems to result in the giants’ temporary submission to the overlordship of the gods, a submission sealed by the feast depicted in Lokasenna. In the exhaustive parallels from comparative mythology which Dumézil cites, it is clear that the feast of the gods is often threatened by giants or demons who seek to disrupt or prevent the gods’ gathering. Thus the feast is often one of victory over the forces of the Other, a repressed Other which returns with a vengeance in Lokasenna and which is absent from the ideal feast invoked in st. 45 of the present poem, as I shall argue later. In this opening sequence of Grímnismál the gods are seen to live a pleasantly leisured, noble existence as exemplary lords and rulers, combining individual power in their personal halls and lands with the collective activity of participation in feasts and councils of state. The catalogue culminates in the description of Valhǫll in sts. 18–20, the hall of Óðinn himself. Emphasis is placed on hospitality: the ever-renewed boar, Andhrímnir; Heiðrún the goat with her bountiful, mead-giving udders; and on nobility: the superb vision of Óðinn in his high-seat, a lord with transformed attributes, with wolves tamed to war (“gunntamiðr”), instead of hounds tamed to hunt, by his side, and ravens instead of hawks at his shoulder. The huge scale of the hall and its vast retinue of Einheriar point up the contrast with Óðinn’s current position: he is all alone, crouching thirstily on the floor of a hostile hall. The contrast between the behaviour of the human king and the divine model of lordship is marked throughout these verses.
Although at first the divine world in Grímnismál is mapped by a social geography of settlements and territories, subsequently the physical features of that world are described. Chiefly these are the rivers which flow down from the horns of the hart, Eikþyrnir, through both the divine and the human worlds. The mighty European rivers which carve up the known Germanic world, the Dvina and the Rhine, mingle with the “Nyt oc Nǫt / Nǫnn ос Hrǫnn, Slíð ос Hríð”, (st. 28:4–6), the rivers of another world. Rivers are major transport routes in the human world, but here they seem to function as barriers, separating the known from the unknown world (Hale). The river Þund (st. 21, a hard verse to construe) is difficult for those made cheerful by slaughter (the Einheriar?) to cross, while Þόrr seems to be obliged to wade through rivers in the divine world to go to a judgment seat beneath Yggdrasill.
Another barrier, the gate Valgrind, seems to block the way to the land of the gods (st. 22). The knowledge of how its lock works is restricted to a very few; this theme of the exclusivity of divine wisdom is developed further in the next few verses. The land of the gods seems to approach the human in the opening movement of Grímnismál, yet its separateness and distance are also stressed. The bridge “ásbrú” which should connect the worlds, across which Helgi rides to return to Valhǫll in Helgakviða Hundingsbana II, st. 49, is aflame and cannot be crossed. Men and gods are at cross-purposes.
Grímnismál continues with a catalogue of the fauna of the divine world: the harts, snakes, squirrel, and dragon which live around and upon Yggdrasill, gradually destroying it as they consume it. As the horizontal plane has been mapped in the catalogue of the gods’ dwellings, the vertical plane now comes into focus, making clear the spatial relation between the gods’ realm and the territory of the other major groups in the cosmos:
þriár rœtr standa á þriá vega
undan asci Yggdrasils;
Hel byr undir einni, annarri hrímþursar,
þriðio mennzcir menn. (st. 31)
(Three roots there grow in three directions / under the ash of Yggdrasill; / Hel lives under one, under the second, the frost-giants, / the third, humankind.)
Óðinn’s perspective broadens now from a close focus on the ‘sacred land’ out into a more inclusive view of the universe, situating the realm of death, of frost-giants and of humans below the central point of the divine land, Yggdrasill. The gods now seem to exist above humans, not contiguous with them.5
Pain and suffering are part of the divine world, just as they are part of the human world; Óðinn’s agony and the forthcoming condemnation of Geirrøðr, his torturer, are mirrored in the decay and pain of Yggdrasill with its gnawing dragons and serpents. While Þόrr wades through rivers to come to judgment at the tree of Yggdrasill in st. 29, the other Æsir follow on their splendid horses in st. 30. Though in these two mythic clusters the point appears to be the naming of the rivers and the listing of the horses, the symbolic import contributes to the theme of judgment, one which develops gradually through the poem, but which has been heralded from the outset by the juxtaposition and comparison of human and divine conduct.
As Óðinn’s monologue nears its climax, the two worlds seem to be set to converge. The threat of world destruction if the shield before the sun should fall away (st. 38:4–6) hints at the terrible consequences when the necessary barrier between gods and men is breached, when divine laws of hospitality and sacrifice are not obeyed. The human world was created violently from Ymir’s dismembered body parts, as recalled in sts. 41:1–2; the rest of the universe has the same grisly origin in a raw material which is anthropomorphic at a most fundamental level.6 As the worlds of gods and humans were created together in violence, so the incursion of the divine into the human threatens further violence.
Finally, with st. 45, the nexus between human and divine is made clear: what happens in the divine world and what happens in the human world are inextricably linked. The gods troop in to feast at Ægir’s, ready to receive hospitality just as Óðinn had come to Geirrøðr’s hall, intent on testing his host, and hoping that his protégé will treat him well. Geirrøðr has failed in his duty of hospitality towards a guest, but more importantly, he has failed to sacrifice to the god, whose sustenance and superiority are thereby threatened. At the very start of the poem, Agnarr’s ceremonial giving of the horn is, unbeknownst to Agnarr himself, an act of sacrifice, a dedication of festive drink to the god without which a feast should not begin (compare the actions of Sigurðr jarl above). Óðinn recognises the nature of Agnarr’s action when he blesses the boy, deliberately using the language of invocation (st. 3:1–2). To give drink to the god is to worship him: Agnarr and Óðinn are now aligned in the right relationship of worshiper and worshiped, whereas, by failing to honour the god, Geirrøðr had prejudiced the relationship between human and divine, a state of affairs fraught with danger for both parties.
The transfer of divine patronage from father to son is enacted in st. 42 with the bestowal of the “hylli” (favour) of Ullr and Óðinn upon whoever removes the mysterious kettles. The verse is notoriously obscure, but we may assume that it is Agnarr, in a continuation of his exemplary behavior at the beginning of Grímnismál, who ends the ordeal for Óðinn and becomes the beneficiary of this promise, since Agnarr replaces his father as king at the end of the poem. Then in st. 45 the divine archetype of the human custom is shown: the gods enter for their feast summoned by the “vilbiǫrg” (‘wished-for sustenance’) which Agnarr’s horn represents, ready to accept sacrifice once again. The theophany in st. 45, Óðinn’s uncovering of his face, leads to the gradual revelation of his identity through the recital of Odinic names which follows, culminating in the terrible destruction of the inhospitable king. Punishment comes to the one who failed to recognize the power of the god and who acted against the prevailing ethic of hospitality; reward to the worshiper who, through the humane action of relieving the sufferer’s thirst, sacrifices to the god.
The geography of Grímnismál is social, mapping the “heilakt land” and showing how the gods live in harmonious community with one another. No threat from the giants is perceived: Þjazi is dead and his daughter lives peacefully on his property, apparently assimilated into the world of the gods; Ymir is dismembered, forming the foundation of this peaceful world; Ægir is hosting the gods at a triumphal feast. Ragna rǫk seems very distant; even the Einheriar function as an ideally ordered retinue rather than as an ominous reminder of the final battle. The mapping of the divine land exemplifies how human lords should structure their lives, by imitating the customs of the gods within the microcosm of the human hall. The gods’ separateness and authority is marked by their existence elsewhere in a distant upper world, but their continuing awareness of and (self-)interest in the human world is intimated by Óðinn’s revelation. As he opens the way between the worlds he shows how the human feast must imitate the archetypal feast, maintaining the superiority of the gods over humankind as the feast demanded in Hymiskviða and given in Lokasenna signals the subjection of the giants. Where universal custom —the rule of hospitality and respect for the gods—is breached, the god manifests himself terrifyingly in the human world. Grímnismál thus plots the boundaries of the human and the divine, laying bare the ritual and sacrificial structures which underpin both the worlds of Ásgarðr and of Miðgarðr.
Grímnismál is thus closer to the human and social wisdom of Hávamál than previous scholars have allowed. Its stylistic similarities with Vafþrúðnismál, through the deployment of mythic facts in a symbolic mode, has obscured the fact that Grímnismál is, at one level, about how humans should behave in relation to the divine: they should follow the divine example. In Hávamál, Óðinn’s experiences are multiple and contradictory rather than archetypal; his drunken behaviour as a guest (st. 14:1–3) is quite the opposite of the ethic of moderation and caution which the opening sequence promotes as appropriate for the stranger in the hall. The god’s behaviour surpasses what is permitted to the human: his drunkenness results in great benefit for both gods and humanity by winning the mead of poetry (Larrington 1993, 24–5). Óðinn does not offer himself as archetype or as moral lesson in Hávamál; his anecdotes bear out the variety of human experience and the adaptable wisdom needed to respond appropriately. In Grímnismál, on the contrary, the themes of hospitality and its opposite, starvation and torture, suffering and judgment, violence and the pleasant aristocratic lives of the gods, are harnessed to a consistent moral lesson: the importance of correctly aligning, then steadily maintaining, relations between the human and the divine.
At the beginning of this essay I posed a series of questions about the gods: where are they, what are they doing, when do they perform the deeds told of them? I do not mean to suggest that for the original thirteenth-century audiences of the Codex Regius, or of Snorri’s Edda, that the gods were anywhere but dead and burnt, or in their grave-mounds at Uppsala (Ynglinga saga, chs. 9, 10) or providing a convenient disguise for the Christian devil as the narratives of Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr helgi in Heimskringla and Flateyjarbόk suggest (Harris and Hill). But the poets of Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál imagine the gods as alive and capable of manifesting themselves; they exist in a knowable and mappable elsewhere, contiguous with and capable of permeating the human world. Most often the gods were occupied in keeping the giants in their place by the strategies of assimilation, domination, appropriation of their possessions, or by vio lence, until ragna rǫk should come. Just as their human followers fought against enemies or enjoyed the fruits of peace in their halls, each god ruled over his or her individual domain, but they also gathered together harmoniously to assert a collective identity, to take counsel or to feast. In showing the gods triumphant over the giants and in a patronizing yet mutually beneficial relationship with humans, of all the Eddic poems our two poems come closest to providing a philosophical understanding of the Norse gods and their place in the Norse mythic world.
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1. Eddic citations are from Neckel and Kuhn; translations are from Larrington 1996.
2. The girls of Mǫgþrasir (st. 49) seem to come from three different tribes, like the Norns in Fáfnismál st. 13. If the two groups are identical, then these women may represent new figures of Fate. They are described in the present / future tense; thus they may already be present in the world, or be expected in the new world. It is equally possible that the girls of Mǫgþrasir are figures belonging generically to riddle rather than to the genre of mythic information, like the girls mentioned in Baldrs draumar st. 12, whose identities are quite unguessable.
3. The second half of st. 4 can scarcely fit the first half, and some disturbance is apparent in st. 6 (de Vries 1952 and Ralph).
4. According to the poem’s internal numeration.
5. Elsewhere the gods and giants certainly seem to exist on the same horizontal plane, as in the geography of Hárbarðsljόð for example, but since the gods interact so little with humans it is difficult to evidence a consistent spatial dimension when the gods journey to humankind.
6. Notably, apart from the brief reference to the world of the frost-giants in st. 31, this is the only role for the giants in Grímnismál. Right relations between gods and humans, not the superiority of the gods to the giants, is at issue here.