Judy Quinn
The two poems Baldrs draumar and Hyndluljóð are not found in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. Baldrs draumar is in a manuscript containing a number of Eddic fragments, AM 748 4°, while Hyndluljóð is preserved in Flateyjarbók. One stanza (st. 33) occurs in Snorri’s Edda where it is designated as part of Vǫluspd in skamma (The Short Vǫluspá). Sts. 29–44 of Hyndluljóð are normally regarded as part of as Vǫluspd in skamma, since the transition from st. 28 to 29 is abrupt, both in terms of style and content. At st. 45, Hyndluljóð appears to return to the frame situation.
Baldrs draumar is a short poem foreshadowing the death of Baldr. The doomed god is plagued by bad dreams, so Óðinn travels to Hel to find out their cause. At the edge of Hel he meets a dead vǫlva; at first she does not recognize Óðinn and he is able to elicit from her the crucial information that Baldr is expected in Hel’s domain shortly. Finally he asks an obscure riddle which reveals his identity. The vǫlva refuses to speak further and sinks back into her grave. Baldrs draumar was one of the first Eddic poems to be translated into English. Thomas Gray’s version “The Descent of Odin, ”published in 1768, established the poem, perhaps inaccurately, as the archetypal Gothick northern poem. Baldrs draumar presents few problems: the kenning hróðrbarm in st. 9 is difficult to interpret and possibly corrupt, while the riddle Óðinn asks in st. 12 is never answered, although the posing of the riddle reveals the asker to be Óðinn. Heinemann uses the idea that the mead is already brewed for Baldr in Hel’s hall to elucidate the motif of the cup or drink of death in other Germanic poetry. Lindow discusses the poem as part of his thesis that the Baldr myth as a whole reflects problems of kinslaying and feud in Old Norse society. Dronke edits, translates and comments on the text of the poem.
In Hyndluljóð’s frame situation, Freyja asks the giantess Hyndla to impart information about the kin and ancestors of a certain Óttarr who is her protegé. Óttarr is present throughout, disguised as the boar upon which Freyja rides. Hyndla’s discourse ranges far more widely than the simple listing of Óttarr’s genealogy. In the middle of the poem the tone changes, as outlined above. Finally the giantess refuses to speak further; Freyja requests a memory-drink for Óttarr so that he may remember all the lore he has heard when he has to contend with a certain Angantýr in some days’ time and the poem ends with the two females trading insults. The poem has been regarded as problematic. It is not certain whether it is one poem or two; the identification of various persons mentioned in the Vǫluspd in skamma section is also insecure. Fleck has compared the requirement for the hero Óttarr to acquire information about the ancestors of various tribal groups with the monologue of mythological information in Grþmnismál; he has suggested that both form part of an initiation ritual for a candidate for kingship. For the Marxist critic Gurevich, the poem hinges on the question of Óttar’s inheritance; he notes a tendency inherent in ancient mentality to mythologize and poeticize property relations. The giantess aims to hinder the alliance between Freyja and ãttarr, since it indicates a strategic fusion of interests between Miðgarðr and Ásgarðr against the giant world.
Gro Steinsland, like Fleck, connects Hyndluljóð with a global theory about the importance of the ideology of kingship in Old Norse, arguing for the poem’s essential unity. Knowledge of ancestry is a crucial requirement for the king, but so too is the marital alliance between gods and giantesses alluded to in the Vǫluspá in skamma section. This alliance produces the ideal future king, who will be able to transcend the warring factions, gods and giants, in the Norse cosmos: the mysterious figure of st. 35, whom Steinsland identifies with Heimdallr.
Judy Quinn’s essay links together the various vǫlur who appear in the Edda, clarifying their functions in the texts in which they appear. Ranging widely through the mythological poems concerned with the getting of wisdom, she provides an illuminating study of the roles of the vǫlur and the divine protagonists of the poems, shedding much incidental light on the figure of Freyja, a goddess unrecorded in Germanic tradition and thus perhaps unique to ancient Scandinavia.
Carotyne Larrington
Baldrs draumar
Dronke, Ursula, ed. and trans. The Poetic Edda. II: Mythological Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 154–8.
Heinemann, Frederik J. “Ealuscerwen-Meoduscerwen, the Cup of Death and Baldrs Draumar. ”Studia Neophilologica 55 (1983): 3–10.
Lindow, John. Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology. FF Communications, 262. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1997.
See, Klaus von, et al. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. 3: Götterlieder. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000.
Hyndluljóð
Fleck, Jere. “Konr—Óttarr—Geirroðr: A Knowledge Criterion for Succession to the Germanic Sacred Kingship. ”Scandinavian Studies 42 (1970): 39–49.
Gurevich, A. Ya, “Edda and Law: Commentary upon Hyndluljóð. ”Arkiv för nordisk filologi 88 (1973): 72–84; rpt. Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages. Ed. Jana Howlett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 190–99.
Gurevich, A. Ya. “Hyndluljóð. ”Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia. Eds. Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf with Paul Acker and Donald K. Fry. New York & London: Garland, 1993. 309.
See, Klaus von, et al. (As above).
Steinsland, Gro. Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi. Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991. 242–306.
(For further reading on Vǫluspâ, see the introduction to the essay by Lönnroth in this volume.)
The three poems Vǫluspá, Baldrs draumar; and Hyndluljóð are spoken by a female figure who is visited and interrogated by one of the gods (Óðinn in Vǫluspá and Baldrs draumar and Freyja in Hyndluljóð) because she possesses valuable information about past or future events that is otherwise unavailable to the Æsir. Together the three poems represent almost all the manuscripts that preserve medieval texts of eddic poems: Codex Regius (Vǫluspá), AM 748 I 4to (Baldrs draumar), Flateyjarbók (Hyndluljóð), and Hauksbók (a second text of Vǫluspá), and as such are witness to the importance of this figure both in the composition of eddic mythological poetry and in the articulation of Old Norse mythology. Never naming herself, this figure’s identity is left to the declarations and conjectures of her interlocutors, to the poems’ narrators and to Snorri Sturluson, the author of Gylfaginning (which preserves quotations of around thirty stanzas of Vǫluspá). Yet her field of knowledge, her manner of speaking, and her attitude toward the Æsir identify the speaker in each of these poems as the same, enigmatic mythological figure known as the vǫlva (prophetess, pl. vǫlur) and suggest that these three poems constitute a generic sub-class of eddic mythological poetry.1 By studying them together, and by examining the different representations of the vǫlva according to the identity and mythological traits of her interlocutor, the composition of her audience, and the subject of her recitation, a clearer picture emerges of the vǫlva’s function in the mythological scheme, if not of the vǫlva herself, whose presence is imagined almost exclusively as voice.
Baldrs draumar presents a dialogue between Óðinn (disguised as Vegtamr, son of Valtamr) and a vǫlva. She is so identified in the narrative introduction to the dialogue (Bdr. 4:4), in the introductory formulation to three of Óðinn’s questions: “Þegiattu, vǫlva! Þic vil ec fregna ”(Don’t be silent, prophetess! I want to question you) (8:1–2, 10:1–2, and 12:1–2), as well as in his angry repudiation of her at the close of their encounter: “Ertattu vǫlva, né vþs kona, heldr ertu Þriggia Þursa móðir ”(You are not a prophetess nor a wise woman, rather you're the mother of three ogres) (13:5–8).2 Despite this vituperative turn, there is no ambiguity about her identity as a vǫlva, although there is considerable and productive ambiguity as to cultural valence of such a figure across all three poems. The speaker of Vǫluspá is only identified within the poem as “ec ”or “hon ”(‘I’ or ‘she’) (the word vǫlva does occur in st. 22, but it describes Heiðr and not the speaker) and there is no title for the poem in either manuscript. The identification of the speaker as a vǫlva depends on the name Vǫluspá which is found only in the first section of Snorri’s Edda, Gylfaginning, where it is repeatedly used to introduce quotations from the poem. In general, the titles of eddic mythological poems are formed by the name of one of the speakers and a noun referring to the speech-act or genre of the poem: mál, qviða, senna, or bvǫt (see Quinn, 1990b). While there is considerable play in the names of speakers of poems (the dwarf Alvþss [All-wise], for instance, or Óðinn’s various noms de guerre used on his travels [Hávi, Grþmnir (High One, Masked One)]), the speakers of Vǫluspá and Baldrs draumar are not individualised even by a characterising nickname. The title Vǫluspá clearly marks the speaker as female; this is underlined by Snorri’s use of a feminine pronoun when he quotes the list of dwarf-names in Gylfaginning: “Svá segir þ Vǫluspá … Ok Þessi segir hon nǫfn Þeira dverganna … ”(thus it says in Vǫluspd.… And these she [the prophetess] says are the names of the dwarfs) (Gylfaginning, 15/37–8 and 16/11).3 But so general is the title Vǫluspá that Snorri uses it generically to refer to another spá (prophecy) spoken by a vǫlva, differentiated from the major poem he quotes by the epithet bin skamma (the shorter) (Gylfaginning, 10/15–17).
The stanza Snorri quotes from Vǫluspá bin skamma is also found as st. 33 of Hyndluljóð in Flateyjarbók. The editorial implications of Snorri’s citation will be addressed later in this article, but for the time being it is sufficient to note that in whatever context Snorri knew this stanza, he clearly thought of it as spoken by a vǫlva. In the full text of Hyndluljóð, the speaker is addressed by Freyja as Hyndla (7:1), and is referred to by the following array of terms: “mær meyia ”(girl of girls) (1:1), “mþn vina ”(my friend) (1:2), “Hyndla systir ”(Hyndla, sister) (1:3), “iǫtuns brúðr ”(giant’s bride) (4:6), “þviðia ”(troll-woman) (48:2) and “brúðr iǫtuns ”(bride of a giant) (50:3). In their oscillation between expressing respect or endearment and inscribing the cultural imperative of separation between the Æsir and giant-kind, these terms mirror the movements of Freyja’s rhetoric of cajolement as she works to extract Óttarr’s genealogy from the distrustful Hyndla. But they also mark out the curious semantic field of the word vǫlva, a word that is not used in the poem itself, but which casts its shadow over it because of Snorri’s citation and because of a variety of discursive and mythological characteristics of Hyndla’s recitation.
In both Baldrs draumar and Hyndluljóð the vǫlva is described as related to giants (“Þriggia Þursa móðir ”[mother of three ogres] according to Óðinn [Bdr. 13:7–8] and “brúðr iǫtuns ”[giant’s bride] according to Freyja [Hdl. 4:6]), an association that is more fully articulated in Vǫluspá, where the vǫlva declares that she was herself raised by giants (“Ec man iǫtna, ár um borna, / Þá er forðom mic fœdda hǫfðo ”(I remember giants, born early, who nurtured me then) (Vsp. 2:1–4). These descriptions do not expressly assign a giant nature to the vǫlva, but they closely associate her with their kind, especially in the view of the Æsir, who at critical moments feel the need to polarise the classes of beings into the two camps that ultimately clash at ragna rǫk (the doom of the gods). The distinction between vǫlur and giants is also underlined in stanza 33 of Hyndluljóð:
Ero vǫlor allar frá Viðólfi,
vitcar allir frá Vilmeiði,
scilberendr frá Svarthǫfða, [SnE: seiðberendr]
iǫtnar allir frá Ymi komnir.
(All the prophetesses are descended from Viðólfr, all the wizards from Vilmeiðr, and the seið-practisers from Svarthǫfði, all the giants come from Ymir.)
By association in this stanza, all four classes of being—vǫlur, wizards, diviners (or sezð-practioners) and giants—represent the arts of magic and sorcery that the Æsir simultaneously desire access to and disavow. The vǫlva is not descended from Ymir, the ancestor of the giant-race, but from a distinct dynasty headed by Viðólfr (who is not elsewhere mentioned), the apparently male progenitor of this otherwise exclusively female class of beings. The specific myths of this dynasty are lost, as is the identity of the mother of them all. In the Hauksbók text of Vǫluspá, the vǫlva also remembers nine “þviðior”4 from this period of her life (2:6), a word that occurs in Hyndluljóð (48:2) to describe the vǫlva. What this word means is open to debate: “‘she who dwells in the woods’, witch, giantess ”are suggested by La Farge and Tucker (139). Since the name of the patriarch of the vǫlur, Viðólfr, probably means “Forest-wolf, ”a connection of some kind is possible,5 linking vǫlur to the wild territory of the forest and the rearing there of a breed of devouring wolves (“Austr sat in aldna þ Iárnviði / oc fceddi Þar Fenris kindir ”[In the east sat an old woman in Iron-wood and nurtured there offspring of Fenrir] (Vsp. 40:1–4), one of whom will destroy the sun at ragna rǫk. In Gylfaginning Snorri makes the association explicit when he identifies the nurturer of wolves as a giantess (“gýgr ”14/19).
An important corollary of the relationship between vǫlur and giants is the common attribution of wisdom to them. The equation of the vǫlva with wisdom is made explicit, paradoxically, in Óðinn’s line “Ertattu vǫlva, né vþs kona ”(You are not a prophetess nor a wise woman) (Bdr. 13:5–6); in all three of the dialogues the vǫlva is characterised as possessing knowledge beyond her interlocutor. Hyndla’s knowledge of genealogies is implicit in Freyja’s command “Nú láttu forna niðia talða / oc upp bornar ættir manna ”(Now let’s count up the ancestors and the lineage of men born from them) (Hdl. 11:1–4), and the vǫlva of Baldrs draumar is petitioned by Óðinn “segðu mér ór helio—ec man or heimi ”(tell me the news from hell—I know what’s happening in the world) (Bdr. 6:3–4). The preeminence of the vǫlva in Vǫluspá in this regard is shown by her declaration “alt veit ec, Óðinn, hvar Þú auga falt ”(I know everything, Óðinn, where you hid your eye) (28:7–8) and by the description of the boundless potential of her knowledge: “sá hon vþtt oc um vþtt of verold hveria ”(she saw widely, widely into all the worlds) (Vsp. 29:5–6). The extent of her knowledge is reiterated in her refrain “vitoð ér enn, eða hvat? ”(do you understand yet, or not?), a point also underscored in Baldrs draumar in Óðinn’s refrain “Þic vil ec fregna, / unz alkunna ”(I want to question you, until I know everything) (Bdr. 8:2–3, 10:2–3, 12:2–3) and Hyndla’s refrain “Mart segiom Þér, oc munom fleira ”(Much I [lit. we] have told you, I will tell you more) (Hdl. 31:1–2, 36:1–2, 39:1–2).
In the world presented by the eddic mythological poems, the knowledge of the vǫlva is conceived of rather differently from the knowledge of the giant. The vǫlva’s knowledge is essentially experiential; she expresses it through the cognitive processes of remembering and seeing, whereas the giant’s knowledge, while having an experiential aspect, is chiefly sapiential, and is expressed through the cognitive process of knowing. The sequence of cognitive processes within the spá of Vǫluspá follows the chronology of the vǫlva’s earliest memories, through her experience of the world—the ash tree she knows, along with the actions of Heimdallr and óðinn that she knows about—to her envisioning of the future (Jesch, 143). The following list shows the pattern of verbs of cognition within the spá, which is fundamentally the same in the Codex Regius and Hauksbók versions of the poem.6
Ec man iǫtna (I remember giants) (2:1)
nþo man ec heima (I remember nine worlds) (2:5)
Asc veit ec standa (I know an ash stands) (19:1)
Þat man hon fólcvþg (She remembers a war) Veit hon Heimdalar hlióð um fólgit (21:1)
(She knows that Heimdall’s hearing is hidden) (27:1–2)
á sér hon ausaz (she sees a river pouring down) (27:5)
Sá hon valkyrior (she saw valkyries) (30:1)
Ec sá Baldri (I saw Baldr) (R31:l)
Hapt sá hon liggia (she saw a captive lying) (R35:l)
Sal sá hon standa … Nástrǫndo á (sér H)
(She saw [sees H] a hall standing on Corpse-strand) (38:1–3)
Sá hon Þar vaða (sér H)
(There she saw [sees H] wading) (39:1)
Sér hon upp koma (She sees coming up) (59:1)
Sal sér hon standa … á Gimlé
(She sees a hall standing on Gimle) (64:1–4).
Stanza 27 is pivotal in the spá, turning the vǫlva’s attention from what she knows or remembers from experience to what she sees with her prophetic powers. It is at this point, when her visions of the future are about to be divulged, that the vǫlva of the Codex Regius text directly challenges Óðinn and confirms her omniscience by revealing that she even knows about the private pledge of one of his eyes at Mþmir’s well (Vsp. 28).
The narrative frame of the poem, as distinct from the spá itself, presents a different set of verbs, which can be roughly divided into two subsets: one elaborating the cognitive processes of the prophecy, and one describing the physical encounter between the vǫlva and Óðinn (roughly, because the physical action of the poem depends so much on verbal delivery and its reception). The latter subset is indented in the following list:
Hlióðs bið ec allar (Attention I ask from all ) (1:1)
vildo at ec … vel fyrtelia forn spiǫ ll fira, Þau er fremst um man
(you wish that I should declare the ancient histories of men … ,
those which I remember from the first) (1:5– 8)
vitoð ér enn, eða hvat? (do you understand yet, or what?)
(27:8, 28:14, 33:8, 35:8, 39:10, 41:8, 48:8, 62:8, 63:6)
Ein sat hon úti (Alone she sat outside) (R28:l)
Þá er inn aldni kom … oc þ augo leit
(when the old man came … and looked in her eyes) (R28:2– 4)
Hvers fregnit mic? (To what end do you question me?) (R28:5)
hvþ freistið mþ n? (Why do you test me?) (R28:6)
alt veit ec, Óðinn, hvar Þú auga falt
(I know everything, Óðinn, where you hid your eye) (R28:7– 8)
Valði henni Herfǫ ðr hringa oc men (R29:1– 2)
(Father of Hosts chose for her rings and necklaces)
fecc7 spiǫ ll spaclig oc spáganda (R29:3– 4)
(he got wise speech and a rod of divination)
sá hon vþtt oc um vþtt of verold hveria (R29:5– 6)
(she saw widely, widely into all the worlds)
fiolð veit hon frœða, fram sé ec lengra
(much wisdom she knows, I see further ahead)
(44:5–6, 49:5–6, 58:5–6)
framm sé ec lengra, fiolð kann ec segia (H)
(I see further, much can I say)
nú mun hon søcqvaz (Now she must sink down) (66:8)
Verbs of seeing and saying predominate, especially in the Hauksbók version of the poem. In the Codex Regius text, the relationship of the vǫlva with Óðinn is rather different, a point I shall return to after looking at how the knowledge of the other vǫlur differs from that of the giants.
The vǫlva in Baldrs draumar provides Óðinn with details of Baldr’s death and its avenging in a series of three narrative tableaux:
Hér stendr Baldri of brugginn miðr
scþrar veigar, liggr sciǫldr yfir,
enn ásmegir þ ofvæni … 7:1–6
(Here the mead stands, brewed for Baldr, the shining liquid, a shield hangs above, and anxiety over the Æsir …)
Hǫðr berr hávan hróðrbarm Þinig;
hann man Baldri at bana verða
oc Óðins son aldri ræna … 9:1–6
(Hǫðr will dispatch the famous warrior to this place; he will be Baldr’s killer and steal the life from Óðinn’s son …)
Rindr berr Vála þ vestrsǫlom,
sá man Óðins sonr einnættr vega;
hǫnd um Þvær né hǫfuð kembir,
áðr á bál um berr Baldrs andscota … 11:1–8
(Rindr will give birth to Váli in western halls, Óðinn’s son will fight when one night old; he won’t wash his hands nor comb his hair, until he’s brought to the pyre Baldr’s enemy … )
Although the vǫlva does not phrase her information in terms of a vision (by using a verb of perception such as “ec sér ”[I see]), what she describes are events that have not yet happened in the time frame of the poem, at which point Baldr is alive and well but having baleful dreams. In this her knowledge is similar to the Vǫluspá vǫlva’s knowledge of future events, moving proleptically to ragna rǫk, the demise of the gods: “oc ragna rǫc riúfendr koma ”(and the Doom of the Gods, tearing all asunder, approaches) (Bdr. 14:7–8) and “fram sé ec lengra urn ragna rǫc, rǫmm, sigtýva ”(I see further ahead to the terrible doom of the fighting gods) (Vsp. 44:6–8, 49:6–8, 58:6– 8).
Although she does not use the phrase ragna rǫk, Hyndla’s knowledge also extends to those cataclysmic events. Her description of the apocalyptic weather that is the culmination of ragna rǫk is comparable to the description of the earth sinking into the sea in Vǫluspá (57:2), except that there the emphasis is on an inferno rather than a blizzard:
Haf gengr hrþðom við himin siálfan,
lþðr lǫnd yfir, enn lopt bilar;
Þaðan koma snióvar oc snarir vindar;
ðá er þ ráði, at regn um Þrióti. Hdl. 42
(The ocean stirs up storms against heaven itself, washes over the land, and the air yields; from there comes snow and biting winds; then it is decreed that the gods come to their end.)
Hyndla’s knowledge extends back in time as well. She knows the ancestry of the gods back through Baldr and Óðinn to Burr (30:1–2) and of the giants back to Ymir (33:7–8), but since the subject of her recitation is genealogy, the knowledge she has is expressed as details of lineage rather than description of events, as the Vǫluspá vǫlva’s is. Like the Vǫluspá vǫlva in her refrain (“vitoð ér enn, eða hvat?”) (do you understand yet, or not?), Hyndla draws attention to how much more extensive her knowledge is—
Mart segiom Þér oc munom fleira,
vǫromz, at viti svá, viltu enn lengra? Hdl.31:l–4, 36:1–4, 39:1–4
(Much I have told you, I will tell you more, it’s important that you know it, do you want to know more?)
—yet at the end of her recitation she expresses unwillingness to speak all that she knows:
áá kemr annarr, enn mátcari,
Þó Þori ec eigi Þann at nefna;
fáir siá nú fram um lengra,
enn Óðinn man úlfi mœta. Hdl. 44
(Then will come another, even mightier, though I do not dare to name his name; few can now see further than when Óðinn will meet the wolf.)
The circumstances under which a vǫlva is willing to tell all appear to be met in Vǫluspá but not in Hyndluljóð, for reasons that are not spelled out in either poem, but which presumably have to do with the mythological and discursive play of power between the actors in each of the poems.
From the evidence of Óðinn’s interrogation of VafÞrúðnir in VafÞrúðnismál, it is apparent that giants also know the details of ragna rǫk and the new world that follows it, as well as the early history of their race, and the creation of the world. When asked by Óðinn “hvat Þú fyrst mant eða fremst um veizt ”(what you first remember or what you know to be earliest) (Vm. 34:4–5), VafÞrúðnir makes a distinction between his experiential memory, and his store of acquired knowledge. He has already answered questions about the creation of the first giant out of the poison drops of élivágar (Vm. 31:1–3), who generates offspring under his armpits and by one leg with the other (Vm. 33). This first giant, whose name he gives as Aurgelmir, is the father of Þrúðgelmir and the grandfather of Bergelmir, who was born innumerable winters before the creation of the earth (Vm. 29). In answer to Óðinn’s question, VafÞrúðnir reveals that his first memory as a young giant was the funeral8 of Bergelmir:
Ørófi vetra, áðr væri iǫrð um scǫpuð,
Þá var Bergelmir borinn;
Þat ec fyrst um man, er sá inn fróði iǫtunn
var á luðr um lagiðr. Vm. 35
(Uncountable winters before the world was made, then Bergelmir was born; that I remember first when the wise giant was laid on his bier.)
The Vǫluspá vglva, on the other hand, seems to represent herself as remembering back as far as the time when Ymir lived (apparently the same figure as Aurgelmir), although the sequence of sts. 2 and 3 of the poem may not necessarily be chronological.
An important characteristic that sets the vǫlva apart from her giant allies-in-wisdom is her availability to the Æsir after death, to be summoned from her grave to describe events from any period in the history of the world. The vǫlva of Baldrs draumar is long dead, her grave covered in snow, beaten with rain and soaked with dew (Bdr. 5:5–8). She can only be roused to speak her “nás orð ”(corpse-words) through the performance of magic incantations which raise the dead (4:5–8), and which Óðinn is clearly adept at conducting. Óðinn knew the grave where the vǫlva lay, east of the gate to Hel’s house down in Niflhel, presumably one of the sites of wisdom beyond Æsir territory where he had to journey in times of dire need for knowledge. Hyndla is described as living in a cave (Hdl. 1:4) and riding a wolf (5:1). She is unenthusiastic about obliging Freyja, but she is not dead. We know less about the Vǫluspá vǫlva except that the description of her sinking down at the end of her recitation (Vsp. 66:8) is in line with a necromantic performance such as in Baldrs draumar, and it seems reasonable to assume she was understood to be dead (McKinnell, 116). The description in st. 28 of Vǫluspá, of the vǫlva sitting out alone when Óðinn came and looked into her eyes, is also associated with the practice of magic (Gering and Sijmons, 37–8).
Another distinction between the vǫlva’s knowledge and that of the giants is the manner in which it is formulated and presented. In all three poems, the vǫlva presents information in the pattern of a chronological narrative, although this is more apparent in the monologic form of the spá in Vǫluspá or in the genealogy of Hyndluljóð (which moves backwards in time, but along lines of descent) than in the short answer dialogue of Baldrs draumar, in which Óðinn asks the vǫlva for details of Baldr’s death, his killer, and then his avenger (see Pàroli). VafÞrúðnir, by contrast, poses questions to Óðinn according to topic—”hvé X heitir ”(what is X called) in the first round of the wisdom contest—and he is questioned by Óðinn in the same manner with “hvaðan X um kom ”(whence comes X), with some variations, in the second. The giant appears to be able to pose or answer questions on any topic in any order, with the knowledge he possesses formulated as facts (expressed using “vera ”and “heita”) rather than as stories. In the third round, Óðinn focuses on the events of ragna rǫk and its aftermath, and the answers change to predictions.
In order to win the wisdom contest, Óðinn must ask a question the giant cannot answer. The question—“hvat mælti Óðinn, áðr á bálstigi, siál-fr þ eyra syni? ”(what did Óðinn say into the ear of his son before he mounted the pyre?)—represents an interesting area of knowledge from which giants are apparently precluded, perhaps because only the speaker and hearer can know this. It is nonetheless on the public record for giants what Óðinn’s Einheriar do every day in preparation for the final battle (Vm. 41); that Óðinn is swallowed by a wolf at ragna rǫk (Vm. 53); and that he is not one of the Æsir who will people the new world after it (Vm. 51). It is tempting to think a vǫlva would have been able to answer Óðinn’s final question, since it is within her sphere of knowledge to know about “veð Valfǫðrs ”(Father-of-the-Slain’s pledge), the presumably secret pledge Óðinn made of his eye at the well of Mþmir in order to have access to its store of wisdom. But as we shall see, there were also questions Óðinn could pose to a vǫlva that she could not answer because of their epistemological formulation.
The vǫlva characterises her knowedge as “forn spiǫll ”(ancient histories) (Vsp. 1:7, as does the narrator 29:3), whereas VafÞrúðnir is famous for his mastery of “forn stafir” (ancient matters) (Vm. 1:5, 55:5), “rúnar ” (secrets) (42:4, 43:1) and “orðspeki ”(wisdom) (55:8), descriptions of his wisdom that all share a conceptualisation of knowledge as information transformed and reified, a specialised form of wisdom that must be actively pursued.9 VafÞrúðnir reveals that he has acquired this wisdom through travelling to nine worlds (Vm. 43)—presumably the same as those that the Vǫluspá vǫlva (Vsp. 2) remembers from long ago (McKinnell, 115)—and in particular the world of the dead below Niflhel, the world where the vǫlva of Baldrs draumar has her resting place by the eastern gate. This is the source of knowledge, to which both giants and Óðinn go for their raw material, which then forms the stuff of their male-to-male contests. The exchange in Baldrs draumar suggests that when Óðinn needed information urgently he went directly to an inhabitant of this world, a dead vǫlva; Vǫluspá suggests that when he wanted to hear the whole story, rather than answers to quiz questions, he went directly to a vǫlva. The vǫlva never travels, she is always journeyed to, with the site of interrogation always being on her home turf. She likewise never tests her knowledge, conceived as she is as a psyche retaining all the happenings of the world, without need of question-and-answer testing in order to memorise and reproduce it. Her recitations are always cast in fornyrðislag, the metre used for narration in the eddic corpus, as distinct from the Ijóðaháttr metre the giants and Óðinn use when they contest gnomes and other formulated kinds of knowledge (Quinn 1992, 106–7). The direct and apparently unstudied quality of her intellect in no way diminishes its value in the Old Norse mythological system: in fact both memory and far-sightedness are cited in the list of heiti for wisdom in Snorri’s Edda.10 The way the Vǫluspá vǫlva tells her story with regard to Óðinn’s acute interest in the events of the future displays an artful kind of shadow-boxing compared to the giant’s slap-happy competitiveness in VafÞrúðnismál.11
Just as the vǫlva’s knowledge is portrayed as latent, so too her being is represented as passive and inert. If, as Clunies Ross has argued (1994, 82), there are three pairs of terms that represent the organisational structures of Old Norse myths—nature and culture, female and male, disorder and order—then the vǫlva can be read as an incarnation of the association between the feminine, death, and the disorderly world of wolves, forests, and the future. The concentration in her person of so many negatively-valued aspects of the mythological system has the effect of condensing her representation to that of a type rather than a named individual. Like the gýgr, or the unnamed giantess who makes occasional appearances in eddic poems (Vsp. 42, Vm. 32, Hymiskviða 14, Helreið Brynhildar 14 and in Gylfaginning (14/19), the vǫlva is a functionary of the mythological system. Unlike giantesses, however, who are mortal, the vǫlva is represented as already dead (or in Hyndla’s case, asleep) but perpetually accessible. She gives voice to the knowledge that is conceived of as vested in the dead and among giants, but sometimes in the elaboration of the circumstances of her recital she is embodied beyond her voice, and other strands of the mythological web of associations are brought into play.
Both giant and vǫlva play an important part in the Old Norse mythological scheme as repositories of wisdom: just as the type of knowledge they have is differentiated according to gender, so too were the rules they had to play by when they were summoned to exhibit their knowledge. A comparison of the opening exchanges of VafÞrúðnismál (sts. 6–11) and Baldrs draumar (sts. 3–6)—after the narrative has delivered Óðinn to each of his interlocutors’ homes—makes this clear. When meeting the giant, Óðinn greets him (Vm. 6), and declares his mission: is the giant wise, or does he know everything?12 In response, VafÞrúðnir rises to the challenge, immediately pronouncing this a life-and-death contest between quiz champions (st. 7). The vǫlva on the other hand, sinks away from what is no challenge to her, but an intensely physical trial (Bdr. 5). The niceties of hospitality insisted on by Óðinn in giantland (Vm. 8) are not mentioned to the vǫlva, presumably because it is only the dead who are offered a welcoming beer in Hel (Bdr. 7). Once he has identified himself, Óðinn gets straight to the matter of his enquiry (st. 6), and the vǫlva answers directly, but reluctantly, attempting to terminate the interview after each successive reply.
The giant is in an altogether different rhetorical mood. Warming to the excitement of the challenge, he invites his guest to sit down (Vm. 11), so they can begin to “freista ”(contest), the verb repeatedly used to describe the interaction between speakers in a wisdom contest (see Ruggerini, 160). Óðinn too is in a more expansive mood, and pauses to utter a gnome as he reflects on his situation (Vm. 10).13 There is a certain contrived bonhomie between the god and the giant as they measure each other up, which is entirely absent from Óðinn’s fraught encounter with the vǫlva. The two poems dramatise different aspects of mythological time. In the opening stanzas of VafÞrúðnismál, Óðinn is pictured as sitting at home with his wife, curious about the reputed wisdom of the giant VafÞrúðnir, and eager to test himself against him. Frigg is mindful of the danger of leaving “garðr goða ”(the court of the gods) to travel into the territory of a giant known for his unequalled physical strength (Ruggerini, 146), but fulfils her wifely duty by giving supportive advice and bidding him a safe journey (Vm. 2, 4). There is no specific information Óðinn is seeking in this mission, simply the reassuring experience of still being able to outsmart the wisest of the giants, or in McKinnell’s interpretation of the poem, of “testing whether Fate is as immutable as it seems ”(102). Frigg tacitly acknowledges the need for Óðinn to reassure himself, a need for intelligence which is a chronic affliction for Óðinn up until ragna rǫk. The success of Óðinn’s mission—in which he won his contest with the giant, but presumably learnt nothing he did not already know—is indicated by VafÞrúðnir’s declaration of defeat at the end of the poem; although the narrative frame is not concluded, his victory implies his safe restoration home to “garðr goða”.
The mise-en-scène of Baldrs draumar is a much more specific moment in mythic time, when a crisis arises which the gods have to call an urgent meeting to discuss. The opening of the poem (“Senn vóro æsir allir á Þingi/ oc ásynior allar á máli ”[All together the Æsir came in council / and all the Asynior to speak together], Bdr. 1:1–4) describes a narrative moment similar to the series of crises recounted in Vǫluspá: “Þá gengo regin ǫil á rǫc-stóla, / ginnheilog goð, oc um Þat gættuz ”(Then all the Powers went to the thrones of fate,/ the sacrosanct gods, and considered this) (sts. 6, 9, 23, 25). Óðinn makes a different kind of journey in this situation, to the world of the dead, not of giants, to find out specific information: “segðu mér ór helio ”(tell me the news from hell) (Bdr. 6:3). The animosity between Óðinn and the vǫlva is intense. In her first response the vǫlva does more than answer Óðinn’s question, she spells out the implications of Baldr’s death for the gods: “enn ásmegir þ ofvæni ”(and the Æsir in anxiety) (7:5–6). Having discovered who his son’s murderer will be, and who will avenge him, Óðinn has accomplished all he can from the mission. In an interesting variation on his strategy in VafÞrúönismál,14 Óðinn asks the vǫlva a riddle,15 the kind of formulated, sapiential wisdom giants and male seers are adept at trading, but which is beyond the experiential scope of the vǫlva whose expertise is the world of the dead.16 Just as asking about Óðinn’s words spoken into the dead Baldr’s ear changes the ground rules of the quiz and disqualifies the giant from further contest, so too a riddle rules out an answer from the vǫlva because it is beyond her epistemological and discursive ken. Although the vǫlva is less gracious in defeat than the giant, neither of them are any match for Óðinn, the master of the discursive feint in any eddic situation.17
In the following stanza, the vǫlva unmasks Vegtamr/Óðinn (Bdr. 13:1– 2), and in retaliation, he attempts to unmask her.18 In so doing, he reveals that the root of his antipathy towards her is her association with giants, (whose eventual victory over the gods, Óðinn knows [Gylfaginning 46/14– 15; tr. Faulkes 1987, 49], becomes ineluctable after Baldr’s death):
Ertattu vǫlva, né vþs kona,
heldr ertu Þriggia Þursa móðir. Bdr. 13:3–4
(You are not a prophetess nor a wise woman, rather you’re the mother of three ogres.)
Óðinn’s trick question leads VafÞrúðnir to capitulate, but the mythological terms of his encounter with the vǫlva are different. Once she has discovered that it is Óðinn who has raised her from her grave, her irritation finds its focus in a taunt:
Heim rþð Þú, Óðinn, oc ver hróðigr!
Svá komit manna meirr aptr á vit,
er lauss Loki lþðr ór bǫndom
oc ragna rǫc riúfendr koma. Bdr. 14
(Ride home, Óðinn, and be proud of yourself! No more men will come to visit me, until Loki is loose, escaped from his bonds and the Doom of the Gods, tearing all asunder, approaches.)
Originally sought out as an expert on the world of the dead, the vǫlva also demonstrates a knowledge of the gods’ impending destruction at ragna rǫk, when Loki—linked in other sources with the treacherous killing of Baldr— will steer one of the ships bearing down on the gods (Vsp. 51). The poem ends in the mode of a senna, with the gods and their nemesis locked in abusive exchange. Whereas in Lokasenna it is Loki himself who taunts the gods and goddesses about ragna rǫk (sts. 42, 58, 65), here the vǫlva assumes that role, and justifies Óðinn’s assumption that she is aligned with the enemies of the gods. Although the vǫlva declares that this is the last interview she will give, Óðinn has already learned what he wished to know, though it brings him little joy. The vectors and stages of ragna rǫk are more fully articulated now, but as Loki says to Þórr at the end of Lokasenna “Lifa ætla ec mér langan aldr, / Þóttu hœtir hamri mér” (I intend to live for a good time yet, / though you threaten me with a hammer) (Ls. 62:1–3). The gods too live a long time with the knowledge of ragna rǫk, and it is during this period—termed the mythic present by Clunies Ross (1994, 237)—that the eddic mythological poems are all set, several of them making specific reference to Baldr’s death (Vm. 54, Ls. 28, Vsp. 31–33).
The eddic mythological poems portray a number of dramatic situations in which Óðinn’s anxiety about the future is played out, and a number of different ways in which his ambivalent position of dependence and antipathy towards the vǫlva is figured. Baldrs draumar dramatises the moment of crisis when Baldr first becomes the site of Æsir vulnerability, while Vǫluspá treats the series of crises the Æsir face in the unfolding drama of the world, from its beginnings to its end. The Codex Regius version of Vǫluspá narrates Baldr’s death within a series of stanzas which focuses on Óðinn (Vsp. 28–33), and describes in more detail his encounter with the vǫlva (Vsp. 28– 9). The Hauksbók version only mentions the narrative context of the spá in the first and last stanzas, and does not focus on Baldr’s death, making only an allusive reference to the vengeful action against Loki, following the account of the Æsir-Vanir war (Vsp. 21–4).19 This is immediately followed by the baying of Garmr and the crowing of the cocks, suggesting that it is this event that precipitates ragna rǫk, but its personal implications for Óðinn are not brought to the fore in the Hauksbók version.
Óðinn’s relationship with the vǫlva is figured differently in all three of the texts where he directly encounters her: the Codex Regius text of Vǫluspá, the Hauksbók text of Vǫluspá and Baldrs draumar. In Baldrs draumar, Óðinn places himself at considerable risk by his action of riding down to the world of the dead, where the bloodied hound barks at him and the earth resounds; it is a world from which few return.20 Having placed himself in geographical jeopardy, Óðinn further jeopardises his status by compromising his masculinity in the performance of “valgaldr ”(a corpse-reviving spell). In Ynglingasaga the use of seiðr (magic) is said to be accompanied by such effeminacy that it is taught to the female ásynjur (goddesses) rather than male deities, although Óðinn continues to practise it (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla 1:19). And it is just this kind of behavior that makes Loki declare “oc hugða ec Þat args aðal ”(and that I thought the hallmark of a pervert) (Ls. 24:6) after he reveals that Óðinn has himself taken on the guise of a vǫlva and carried out her magic acts in Sámsey. The poem therefore presents a fraught situation, in which Óðinn has particular reason to distinguish himself from the vǫlva and re-establish his credentials as both áss (god) and male. It is perhaps little wonder that his interview with her should end in trickery and abuse, and that her antipathy towards him should be aroused to the point of retaliation, at least rhetorically.
In Vǫluspá, Óðinn and the vǫlva respond to each other rather differently, for reasons that are not made explicit in the poem. The action in most of the eddic mythological poems is constituted by speech, ranging in style from monologic recitation (Hávamál and Grþmnismál), to dialogue as formal stanzaic exchange with two (VafÞrúðnismál and Alvþssmál) or more (Lokasenna) speakers, to speech quoted between stanzas of narrative (Þrymskviöa). The degree to which the dramatic situation that the eddic speakers enact is elaborated varies between poems—some texts telling readers of the late-twentieth century bafflingly little (Hávamál), others adumbrating narrative context through verbal exchange (VafÞrúðnismál and Alvþssmál) and others framing speech with prose explanation (Grþmnismál and Lokasenna) and interleaved prose commentary between stanzas (Skþrnismál and Vǫlundarkviða). Whereas Baldrs draumar is a blend of the formal styles of Þrymskviða and VafÞrúðnismál, having a narrative introduction followed by a dialogue, Vǫluspá has an analogue of sorts in the so-called Loddfáfnismál section of Hávamál (sts. 111–37), where a monologue is directed to a named addressee, but where details of the dramatic circumstances of the delivery are obscure.21
For reasons we can only guess at, the vǫlva of Vǫluspá has all the confidence of a court poet,22 addressing her patron and the assembled audience of listeners:
Hlióðs bið ec allar helgar kindir,
meiri oc minni, mǫgo Heimdalar;
vildo, at ec, Valfǫðr, vel fyrtelia
forn spiǫll fira, Þau er fremst um man. Vsp. 1
(Attention I ask from all the sacred people, greater and lesser, the offspring of Heimdall; Father of the Slain, you wish that I should declare the ancient histories of men, those which I remember from the first.)
What is more, according to st. 29 of the Codex Regius text, Óðinn is so keen for her to perform he gives her rings and necklaces, odd gifts, one would have thought, for a woman already in the grave.23 Nonetheless, the one who sinks down in st. 66 seems ready to accept such gifts in st. 29, and perhaps more significantly, Óðinn is willing to offer them (Nordal, 59–60), just as he apparently suffers in silence when she makes her revelation of his pledge of an eye a stanza earlier. What is telling about their interaction is its similarity to a wisdom contest, particularly in the speakers’ apparently equal footing. The vǫlva is not raised from a grave by Óðinn, rather she is pictured as sitting out alone when he visits her, and he gazes into her eyes. She in fact uses the term “freista ”to describe Óðinn’s attitude to their interaction, but she does so with a certain disdain—“Hvers fregnit mic, hvþ freistið mþn?/ alt veit ec, Óðinn … ”(Why do you question me? Why do you test me? I know everything, Óðinn) (Vsp. 28:5–7). She also warns Óðinn that previous attempts to destroy a vǫlva—the figure Gullveig who is repeatedly tortured and burnt “þ hǫll Hárs ”(in the hall of the High One) (21:5) and who is known as a vǫlva among humans (Vsp. 22:3)—have been futile because the vǫlva is immortal: “Þó hon enn lifir ”(yet she lives still) (21:10).
The potential antagonism between vǫlva and áss that is inscribed in their encounter is not played out. Rather than taunting Óðinn with the awful events of ragna rǫk, the vǫlva displays a certain sensitivity to his feelings in her euphemistic description of his death—“Þá mun Friggiar falla angan ”(then the beloved of Frigg must fall) (Vsp. 53:7–8), and solemnly describes its avenging: “Þá kømr inn micli mogr Sigfǫður … Þá er hefnt fǫður ”(Then the great son of War-father advances … then his father is avenged) (Vsp. 55:1–8). In performing before an audience which includes human as well as divine listeners, and in being imagined as enjoying gifts of jewellery, the Vǫluspá vǫlva has more in common with the human vǫlva who is described in saga literature24 than she does with the vǫlva of Baldrs draumar who has no audience apart from Vegtamr and who is more revenant than woman.
The apparent inconsistency in the two main poems involving a vǫlva in the medieval Icelandic eddic corpus in fact bespeaks an important condition of their preservation. Unlike a written œuvre, in which a single author has conceived the manner of engagement between characters and the background of their relationship, the oral transmission of eddic poems and their diffuse preservation (singly in various manuscripts as well as in anthologies) reveal a different cultural mode of expression. The vǫlva embodies the power of narrative visualization and has the potential to articulate a detailed history of the world, at least to the extent that the Æsir-centric conceptualization of her will allow. She has been differently imagined in individual poems because the pulses of cultural value and anxiety have been played out apparently without self-conscious regard for what Óðinn and a vǫlva may have been recorded as saying elsewhere.
This is nowhere more apparent than in Vǫluspá hin skamma, the poem Snorri knew but which no one can now identify with any certainty. Snorri’s citation of st. 33 of Hyndluljóð as belonging to a poem called Vǫluspá hin skamma has had a powerful effect on editors of the poem, who, following Sophus Bugge, have dissected sts. 29–44 of Hyndluljóð as a separate poem, although the manuscript marks no such divisions. Before turning to the relationship of Hyndluljóð with the other poems representing a dialogue with a vǫlva, this and one other editorial intervention into the text need to be discussed.
An argument for the unity of Hyndluljóð can be made on both formal and thematic grounds (Steinsland, 461–94). There is no indication in the text that the speaker of sts. 29–44 is other than Hyndla, and st. 29 is knitted by its refrain to the previous run of stanzas that all end with the line “alt er Þat ætt Þþn, Óttarr heimsci ”(all these are your ancestors, Óttar the foolish). The second refrain—“Mart segiom Þér oc munom fleira,/ vǫromz, at viti svá, viltu enn fleira? ”(Much I have told you, I will tell you more,/ it’s important that you know it, do you want to know more?) (sts.31, 34, 36 and 39)—echoes the earlier repeated line “varðar, at viti svá, viltu enn lengra? ”(it’s important that you know it, do you want to know more?) (sts. 17 and 18), another sign of textual cohesion throughout the extant poem. Thematically, too, the poem is of one cloth, although its pattern is based on eddic mythological design rather than modern notions of literary unity. Hyndla’s recitation is of ancient lineages, focussed on the genealogy of Óttarr, but its scope encompasses dynastic connections to other lines, as well as the tracing of each ancestral line to its progenitor. Freyja’s instructions to Hyndla are quite explicit in this regard:
Nú láttu forna niðia talða
oc upp bornar ættir manna:
hvat er Sciǫldunga, hvat er Scilfinga,
hvat er Ǫðlinga, hvat er Ylfinga,
hvat er hǫlðborit, hvat er hersborit,
mest manna val und miðgarði? Hdl. 11
(Now let’s count up the ancestors and the lineage of men born from them: which are of the Skiǫldungs, which are of the Skilfings, which are of the Ǫðlings, which are of the Ylfings, which are born of farming stock, which are born of fighting stock, the greatest choice of men on the face of the earth?)
This list is repeated by Hyndla five stanzas later (“Þaðan ero Sciǫldungar ”[From them come the Skiǫldungs]), ending with the refrain “alt er Þat ætt Þþn, Óttarr heimsci ”(all these are your ancestors, Óttar the foolish) (Hdl. 16). Hyndla lists the heroes who have come from these dynasties (“enn Eylimi frá Ǫðlingom ”[and Eylimi of the Ǫðlings], 26:5–6) as well as the founders of other dynasties (“iǫtnar allir frá Ymi komnir ”[all the giants come from Ymir], 33:7–8),including the extraordinary circumstances in which the line of flagð (troll-women) began when Loki conceived after eating a half-cooked woman’s heart (Hdl. 41). Again these patterns are threaded across the supposed seam (st. 28/ st. 29) where Vǫluspá hin skam-ma is purported to have been interpolated into Hyndluljóð. It was a commonplace in medieval Icelandic culture to trace genealogies back through human history deep into the mythological past, as Ynglinga saga and many other texts testify (Krag). The transition between sts. 28 and 29 of Hyndluljóð is of precisely this nature (Ólason, 98), as Hyndla moves from Óttarr’s divinely-blessed ancestors—“Þeir vóro gumnar goðom signaðir ”(they were men blessed by the gods) (28:9–10) to those who were themselves divine–“Vóro ellifo Æsir talðir ”(Eleven were the Æsir when all counted up) (29:1–2); “alt er Þat ætt Þþn, Óttarr heimsci ”(all these are your ancestors, Óttar the foolish) (28:11–12 and 29:9–10). Freyja’s original request was for information about “ættir… gumna Þeira er frá goðom qvómo ”(lineage of … those men who are descended from the gods) (8:4– 6), and already in Hyndla’s account of Óttarr’s parents’ and grand-parents’ generations (20:3–4), she indicates that her genealogical wisdom stretches much further back: “fyrnd er sú mægð, fram tel ec lengra ”(forgotten is that kinship; I can recite further back) (Hdl. 20:5–6). The voice of the vǫlva sounds in these words, as it does in the question posed in the sixth stanza of her recitation: “viltu enn lengra? ”(do you want to know more?) (Hdl. 17:8), which is repeated five times in the rest of the poem. It is also appar-ent that Hyndla’s knowledge, like a vǫlvd’s, is experiential: “kunna ec báða Brodd oc Hǫrvi ”(I knew both Brodd and Horvir) (Hdl. 20:7–8, 25:1–2).
The stanza Snorri quotes from Hyndluljóð, and which he identifies as spoken by a vǫlva, deals with genealogical origins, indicating that such a subject was regarded as falling within the sphere of knowledge of such a speaker. What may have induced editors of Hyndluljóð to identify a section of it as another poem is their supposition that the poem Snorri referred to as Vǫluspá hin skamma must have been very short. This is not necessarily warranted, as the poem the Codex Regius compiler refers to as Sigurðarkviða hin skamma (at the end of the prose introduction to the poem that is in fact entitled simply kviða Sigurðar) is 71 stanzas long, though it was presumably shorter than the poem about Sigurðr copied earlier in the manuscript (either one now entirely lost in the lacuna, or the one that survives only as a fragment, the so-called Brot [Fragment]). By referring to the poem as Vǫluspá hin skamma, Snorri may simply have been acknowledging that he was quoting from a source separate from Vǫluspá, distinguished from it by its shorter length. As it is preserved, Vǫluspá is 62 stanzas long (59 in the Hauksbók text) while Hyndluljóð is 50 stanzas long.
That Hyndluljóð and Vǫluspá hin skamma may have been names for the same poetic entity (Boer, 254) is lent some support by the different names for other poems across manuscripts. Codex Regius gives the title Fǫr Scþrnis for the poem that in AM 748 I 4to is called Scþrnis mál. The rubric to Hyndluljóð in Flateyjarbók is in fact “Hér hefr upp hyndlu hlioð qveðit um ottar heimsca”25 (italics mine), which may not involve the error editors have presumed when emending the second element in the title to lióð (song).26 A hlióð is what the Vǫluspá vǫlva asks for at the beginning of her delivery (Vsp. 1:1), and the notion of a ‘listening’ or ‘audience’ is not so distant in sense from that of ‘recitation’ or ‘announcement of prophecy’ which the generic term spá denotes, especially in the oral world in which both poems are set. The divergence between the titles Vǫluspá and Hyndluljóð is therefore one of generic focus: between spá and Ijóð (or hlióð) on the one hand, and between the speaker’s identity as Hyndla or as a vǫlva on the other. The stanza Snorri quotes from the poem begins “Eru vǫlur allar frá Viðólfi ”(Gylfaginning, 10), which brings the speaker’s identity as a vǫlva into the foreground, although the quotation of this stanza and the following ones (VafÞrúðnismál sts. 30–1) is used as corroboration of Snorri’s statement that Ymir is the ancestor of all the giants.
A second editorial intervention in the text of Hyndluljóð that bears reconsideration is the dialogue between Freyja and Hyndla that closes the narrative frame in the last six stanzas of the poem. The speakers are not indicated in the manuscript, but the sense of the stanzas and the repeated refrain—“hleypr Þú, eðlvina, úti á náttom,/ sem með hǫfrom Heiðrún fari” (you gallop, noble lady, out into the night,/ as Heidrun runs in heat among the he-goats), in which Hyndla defames Freyja by imputing to her the sexual profligacy of a she-goat—makes attribution fairly straightforward: Freyja speaks a single stanza (45) that prompts a speech of four stanzas by Hyndla (46–9), answered by a single stanza from Freyja (50). Curiously, stanza 48 has been emended and attributed to Freyja in most modern editions of the poem.27 Manuscript ‘af’ is emended to ‘of’ in stanza 48:2 (first made in the Arnamagnæan edition of the eddic poems of 1787–1828) and Hyndla’s refrain is deleted from this stanza and the following one (sts. 48 and 49). Unemended, the manuscript text of stanza 48 is as follows:
Ec slæ eldi af þviðio,
svá at Þú ei kemz á burt heðan.
hleypr Þú, eðlvina úti á náttom,
sem með hǫfrom Heiðrún fari
(I will cast fire from the troll-woman, so that you can never get away from here; you gallop, noble lady, out into the night, as Heidrun runs in heat among the he-goats).
In order to determine if the emendation is warranted (yielding ‘I will cast fire around the troll-woman’), it is first necessary to decide which speaker is most likely to be threatening the other with fire, and what the probable location of this encounter is—since the speaker is using fire to try and prevent her interlocutor from getting away. The physical actions of Freyja and Hyndla are never directly narrated in the poem, only implied in the course of their speech. Freyja’s initial command to Hyndla is to ride with her to Valhǫll (Hdl. 1), apparently as part of her delegation to win favour for Ottarr—disguised as a boar upon which Freyja is riding—from Óðinn and the gods. We are not told what Hyndla’s role was to be at Valhǫll, but perhaps she was to present Óttarr’s lineage before the gods as a formal recitation, much as the vǫlva does for Óðinn and the assembled company of men in Vǫluspá. Steinsland (463) has argued that the scene in Valhǫll probably represents a sacred initiation rite for a future king. We are later told that Óttarr has made a pact with Angantýr that in three mornings’ time they will recite their respective lineages (Hdl. 9 and 45). Ottarr’s “fǫðurleifð ”(patrimony) (9:7) is at stake, and it has been suggested that his legal right of succession may also have depended on establishing his lineage (see Gurevich). Freyja’s intervention on behalf of her human favourite involves two strategies: to find out from Hyndla his genealogy so that Óttarr can prove a superior lineage to Angantýr’s, and to win the gods’ favour for Óttarr, presumably to ensure his succession and inheritance (Fleck).
Things do not go as Freyja planned. Hyndla quickly sees through Óttarr’s disguise, declaring Freyja’s mount too slow to travel the road to the gods and refusing to saddle her wolf as ordered (Hdl. 5:5–8). When she exposes the boar’s identity as Freyja’s lover, Hyndla specifically locates the odd couple on the road to the slain (Hl 6:5–6), a location Freyja repeats (Hdl. 7:3–4). Like the vǫlva in Baldrs draumar, Hyndla is located at the periphery of the world of the dead, and is reluctant to move. Hyndla’s exposure of Freyja’s trick is cast as a senna response (“Flá ertu, Freyia, er Þú freistar mþn ”[Deceitful you are, Freyja, when you question me], 6:1–2), as is Freyja’s attempt to maintain her lie (“Dulin ertu, Hyndla, draums ætlig Þér … ”[You’re confused, Hyndla, you must be dreaming …], 7:1– 2), but their senna leaves Hyndla unmoved. Although Freyja has attempted to assume an “Odinic role ”(Ruggerini, 160) in relation to the vǫlva, her move to “freista ”is rebuffed by Hyndla. Freyja therefore compromises, suggesting they carry on their discussion out of the saddle, proceeding at once to the topic of princely genealogy (Hdl. 8). She then reveals Óttarr’s wager and his abiding faith in ásynjur, before posing the direct question to Hyndla (“hvat er Sciǫldunga? … ”[which are of the Skiǫldungs]) that elicits the genealogical recitation. At its close, Freyja makes another demand of Hyndla, that she bring her boar a “minnisǫl ”(memory-ale) (45:1) so that he may remember the lineage Hyndla has just recited when he meets Angantýr.
Just as the vǫlva in Baldrs draumar reacts with anger to Óðinn’s dissembling, so too has Hyndla nothing but scorn for Freyja’s delayed admission that her boar is indeed Óttarr. Like the vǫlva in Baldrs draumar, Hyndla longs to return to the state she was in before being roused (Hdl. 46:2), and like her, she sends her interrogator away (“snúðu burt heðan! ”[go away from here!], 46:1). “Heðan ”seems, then, to refer unequivocally to Hyndla’s abode on the road to the world of the dead, the place where once left alone, she can return to her cave and go back to sleep. Freyja would have preferred Hyndla’s recitation to have been given in Valhǫll, on her own home ground, and is herself at risk lingering on enemy turf among giants and the dead. The manuscript reading of st. 48 therefore makes sense without emendation: Hyndla retaliates against Freyja’s imposition by casting fire from herself to prevent Freyja returning to Ásgarðr. The textual cohesion of Hyndla’s utterance (‘heðan’ in sts. 46 and 48) is reinforced by the refrain “hleypr Þú eðlvina ”(you gallop, noble lady) in this stanza as well as the stanzas preceding and following it (sts. 47 and 49).
The significance of fire is elaborated in the next stanza, when, like the vǫlva in Baldrs draumar, Hyndla turns her attention to ragna rǫk, and the imminent destruction of all but a few of the Æsir:
Hyr sé ec brenna, enn hauðr loga,
verða flestir fiǫrlausn Þola; Hdl. 49:1–4
(Fire I see burning and the earth aflame, most when suffering will try to ransom their lives)
This gesture would have little dramatic effect if it were Freyja who had just threatened to engulf Hyndla in flames. At ragna rǫk it is the giants and their allies Surtr and the sons of Muspell who set fire to the world (Vsp. 51–5), an image of conflagration Hyndla rekindles to intimidate Freyja. The memory of her recitation, which Óttarr may still be able to use (depending on how “heimskr ”[foolish] he in fact was), is symbolically poisoned by Hyndla in a further taunt to Freyja:
Ber Þú Óttari biór at hendi,
eitri blandinn miǫc, illo heili! Hdl. 49:5–8
(Put this beer into Óttarr’s hand, mixed with a great deal of poison and ill fortune!)
Being a vǫlva might entail prophetic insight and even rhetorical fervor but it does not entail physical efficacy, and Freyja turns at once to the second stage of her strategy, the petitioning of the gods to favour Óttarr. Through their power, Hyndla’s curse can be negated, and Óttarr can establish his legal rights using the knowledge he has gained from Hyndla (st. 50). Although the enmity between ásynja and “brúðr iǫtuns ”(giant’s bride) is brought out into the open, the dominance of gods over giants that prevails in the mythic present is reinstated. The ending of the poem suggests that Freyja and Óttarr escape unburnt, just as Óðinn returns victorious at the end of Baldrs draumar and VafÞrúðnismál. In another article (Quinn 1995) I have explored the way in which the gender of speakers affects the rhetorical manoeuvres they make in speech-acts such as this, most notably, how much more aggressive the vǫlva is in dealing with an ásynja compared with an áss. Despite Freyja’s winsome approach to Hyndla, calling her “sister ”(Hdl. 1), her insinuation of friendship is thrown back at her when Hyndla uses the rhetorical strategy of the senna to broadcast details of Freyja’s sexual profligacy. By referring to Freyja as “eðlvina”28 in the thrice-repeated taunt, Hyndla’s sarcasm undermines any notion of friendship between them, as well as raising doubts about Freyja’s presumption of noble status.
The relative status of the two speakers and the relationship of their kin groups is very much at issue in Hyndluljóð, even within the recitation of genealogical knowledge (Steinsland, 476–7). Hyndla mentions two marriages of giantesses (Gerðr and Skaði) to Vanir gods (Freyr and Niǫrðr, Hdl. 30), the group of divine beings to which Freyja herself belongs. Hyndla also draws attention to the fact that the god Heimdallr was the son of nine mothers, all of whom were giantesses (Hdl. 35), and to Loki’s parenting role with the giantess Angrboða (Hdl. 40), although their offspring was the wolf Fenrir. Across the broad sweep of mythological history, then, giantesses have played a more important role in Æsir society than the Æsir might like to acknowledge, especially the Vanir among them, who represent an earlier wave of assimilation into Æsir culture.29 But whereas giant esses can count themselves among the Æsir only by virtue of a divine husband or lover, Freyja secured her elevated position in divine society as the daughter and sister of the Vanir gods who were accepted into Æsir society on the condition that they abandon their custom of incest (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla 1:13). The prohibition against marrying her brother seems to have made Freyja something of a free agent, and although she is mentioned in connection with Óðr (Vsp. 25, Hdl. 47, Gylfaginning 29/25), her marital status—and Óðr’s identity—is rather shadowy. According to Hyndluljóð 47, Óðr was only one of many who enjoyed Freyja’s sexual pleasure, and in Lokasenna 30, she is accused of having been the lover of every áss and álfr (elf) in the hall.
Loki also calls Freyja a “fordæða ”(witch) (Ls. 32:2), connecting her to witchcraft and evil-doing. In Ynglinga saga, Freyja is said to have taught seiðr (magic) to the Æsir (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla 1:13), an art that was practised among humans by a vǫlva named Heiðr, according to Vǫluspá, st. 22. Heiðr’s name among the gods was Gullveig, and her capture and torture appears to have been a significant event in the first war of the world between the Æsir and Vanir. Because of these associations, Gullveig and Heiðr have been identified as hypostases of Freyja (Dronke 1988, 228), which makes the dramatic engagement between Freyja and Hyndla an extraordinarily nuanced articulation of mythological tensions. The practice of seiðr forms a nexus between the vǫlva, Freyja and Óðinn, who are also closely associated with the world of the dead: the vǫlva dwells among the dead and yet is perpetually able to be reborn or roused to speak, and Óðinn and Freyja divide the dead between them each day, according to Grþmnismál 14, presumably to maintain some power over them and the knowledge the dead were attributed as having. None of the vǫlva in the eddic poems are represented as performing seiðr themselves, but the underlying tension between the gods and the vǫlur/giantesses about who has ultimate mastery of secret powers and foreknowledge (Nordal, 45) is felt in each of the poems.
Hyndla’s recitation reaches forward as far as ragna rǫk, at which point she seals Freyja’s fate by declaring “Þá er þ ráði, at regn um Þrióti ”(then it is decreed that the gods come to their end) (Hdl. 42:7–8). Before terminating her performance, Hyndla returns to the description of Heimdallr’s birth (Hdl. 35), this time stressing his role as progenitor of human dynasties: (Hdl. 43:5–8). Although the topic of Hyndla’s recitation is Óttarr’s genealogy, her agonistic relationship with Freyja is never far from the surface. In closing, Hyndla makes it clear that her knowledge stretches further forward, to “enn mátcari ”(the more powerful one) who will one day hold sway (Hdl. 44), but obliquely hints that Freyja does not have the power to make her name him, nor to articulate the future beyond Óðinn’s death.
In Old Norse mythology, Freyja is also an important focus of the human desire for divine intercession; she is described in Ynglinga saga as “blótgyðja ”(‘goddess of sacrifice”, Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla 1:13) and in Gylfaginning as “nakvæmust mǫnnum til á at heita ”(‘most favourable for invoking’, Gylfaginning, 25/2–3). Accordingly, the dramatic situation of Hyndluljóð involves not just Freyja, but also Óttarr. In the narrative frame of the poem he is referred to as “Óttarr ”(Hdl. 10:7, 49:5, 50:7), “Óttarr iungi ”(9:3) or “Óttarr iungi, Innsteins burr ”(Óttarr the young, son of Innsteinn) (6:7–8), but within her recitation Hyndla repeatedly refers to him as “Óttarr heimsci ”(Ottarr the foolish), an epithet that marks him as ignorant, even if the reason for his ignorance is simply his youth (Fleck, 43). Hyndla’s recitation is therefore didactic in tone, at times quite imperious: “hlýð Þú sǫgo minni!” (listen to my account!) (Hdl. 25:8) The vǫlva’s recitation is for the sole benefit of a human in Hyndluljóð, and in Vǫluspá her audience is said to include people of all social classes,30 underlining the vǫlva’s importance not only in divulging her knowledge to the gods, but also in informing people of the history of the world from its beginning to its end. As Hyndla advises Óttarr in no uncertain terms, there was a great deal to listen to and remember. Hyndla’s attitude to Óttarr probably also underlies the feelings of the vǫlva in Vǫluspá, when at the beginning of her recitation, she requests & x201C;hlióð ”(hearing) from us all.
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1. I am not including in this sub-class the dialogue between Gróa and her son in Grógaldr (preserved only in post-medieval paper manuscripts) because in its metre (ljóðaháttr) and its content (galdrar), Gróa’s recitation is more akin to Sigrdrþfa’s enumeration of runes and counsel in Sigrdrþfumál. The point of similarity between Gróa and the vǫlva is simply their deceased state.
2. All quotations of eddic poems from the edition of Gustav Neckel revised by Hans Kuhn (fifth edition, 1983), unless otherwise indicated. Translations adapted from Larrington 1996.
3. Quotations from Gylfaginning are taken from Faulkes’ edition (1982) and follow his practice of giving page and line numbers.
4. For a survey of interpretations of “þviðia ”in Vǫluspá, see Nordal, 9–10. Stef–n Karlsson’s re-examination of the Codex Regius under ultra-violet light suggests that “þviðior ”is the correct reading of Vsp. 2:6 in both versions, ending the need for ingenious interpretations of “þviði ”which the worn letters have long invited.
5. The fact that the number of þviðjur is nine might invite an association with Heimdallr’s birth by nine giant mothers. The number nine might be a prompt to other myths, however, since the vǫlva also remembers nine worlds in the same line of stanza 2 in both the Regius and Hauksbók texts of Vǫluspd.
6. The versions do differ in the patterning of tenses and the order of stanzas, a subject I have addressed elsewhere (Quinn, 1990a).
7. The manuscript reads “fe, ”indicating that the ‘Father of Hosts chose for her … wealth, wise speech and a rod of divination’, as well as jewellery. The implications of this textual emendation (from the noun “fe ”to the verb “fecc,” with the consequent reversed direction of part of the exchange between Óðinn and the vlǫva) are treated in Quinn (forthcoming).
8. While it is not certain what the word “lúðr ”means in this stanza, a “bier ”is the usual interpretation (see Holtsmark). The argument that “lúðr ”means cradle here and that Bergelmir’s birth is being referred to (see Machan, 82–3) seems unlikely given the mention of the giant’s great wisdom. Snorri interprets the verse rather differently, taking the word to mean ‘ark’ (Faulkes 1982, 121). He does not quote Vm. 29 in which the lineage Aurgelmir, Þrúðgelmir, Bergelmir is given; rather his account has Bergelmir as the only survivor of a deluge caused by the letting of Ymir’s blood. Either way, Vafþrúðnir’s earliest memory, in terms of generational time, is the death of Ymir, if not that of his grandson.
9. The distinction between knowledge as narrative vision and abstractly categorised knowledge which is memorised and rehearsed does not always run along gender lines. The valkyrie Sigrdrþfa, for instance, has knowledge of all worlds and is able to teach it to Sigurðr. Like Vafþrúðnir, she describes her knowledge in terms of “stafir ”and “runar ”(“fullr er hann [biór] lióða, oc lþcnstafa, / góðragaldra oc gamanrúna ”[it is full of spells, and favorable letters, / good charms and joyful runes], Sd 5:5–8).
10. “Vit heitir speki, rað, skilning, mini, ætlvn, hygiandi, tavlvisi, langsæi, bragðvisi, orðspeki, skavrvngskapr …” (Wisdom is called sagacity, counsel, under standing, memory, deliberation, intellect, numeracy, far-sightedness, subtlety, eloquence, genius) (F. Jónsson, 192; tr. Faulkes, 1987, 155).
11. As McKinnell observes (112): “ …Óðinn does represent wisdom as opposed to the mere knowledge of the vǫlva; but in fact, she also shows an understanding of the causal connections which link and explain what she knows, and so is not blindly knowledgeable in the way that Vafþrúðnir and Alvþss are.”
12. In Alvþssmál, the dwarf Alvþss (All-wise) apparently does know everything, and has to be outsmarted by daylight trickery rather than word games; see the essay by Acker in this volume.
13. It is not explicit in either manuscript of the poem who speaks this verse. To keep the alternating pattern of speakers it is usually attributed to Óðinn, to whose position as guest the gnome is directed, and who elsewhere shows himself to be a master of such advice (HÁv. 19, 27, 29). The gnomic aside could indeed be read as a hint to Óðinn’s identity, unheeded by Vafþrúðnir (Ruggerini, 168), who soon learns the price of too much unguarded talk (McKinnell, 99).
14. See de Vries, 1:125.
15. The formulation “hveriar ro þær meyiar, er at muni gráta ”(who are those girls who weep for love) (Bdr. 12:3–4) is also found in Vafþrúðnismál 48: “hveriar ro þær meyiar, er lþða mar yfir … ”(who are those girls who journey over the sea …”). See Gering and Sijmons (344), Clunies Ross (1990, 225) and Ruggerini (184–5).
16. As Ruggerini has also noted (186): “The question which Óðinn has put to her is not formulated in the clear, direct manner of someone who wants an answer, but in the metaphorical, imaginative form used by someone who is more intent on testing the wit of the person being questioned.”
17. See Ruggerini’s similar conclusion (178): “The final question [Vm. 54] is well thought out, but must be regarded as foul play (except in the view of Óðinn, who regards any trick as permissible if it achieves his ends.)”
18. Lindow argues that Angrboða, the mother of Hel, Fenrir and the Miðgarð serpent, is “a good candidate for the identity of the seeress ”(46). As he notes, “the poetic tradition, however, does not quite verify the relationship, ”nor is identification necessary for the rhetorical resolution of the encounter between Óðinn and the vǫlva. See also Dronke (1997), 158.
19. The stanza in the H text is as follows:
Þá kná Vála vþgbǫnd snúa,
heldr vóro harðgor hǫpt, ór þǫmom.
þar sitr Sigyn þeygi um sþnom
ver vel glýiut vitoð þér enn, eða hvat?
(Then oppressive bonds were twisted, rather severe fetters made of Váli’s entrails. There sits Sigyn, not at all happy about her husband—do you understand yet, or what?)
For a discussion of this difficult stanza, see Nordal, 70–1).
20. The dangers involved in such a journey are described by Snorri in Gylfaginning (47/7–35) when he tells the story of Hermóðr’s journey to Hel. On the theme of the other-world journey in Old Norse sources, see Lönnroth, 154–7.
21. Larrington (42, 64) views Loddfáfnir as a representation of members of the audience of Hávamál.
22. Jochens (272–3) has drawn attention to the different presentation of the vǫlur of Baldrs draumar and Vǫluspá, remarking on the latter’s self-assurance and attitude of superiority. Damico’s assertion that the vǫlur act “under compulsion, usually exhibiting pain ”(721) overlooks the evidence of Vǫluspá and generalises across the corpus from Baldrs draumar. McKinnell, too, speaks of Óðinn’s “raising up of prophetesses, forcing them to prophesy for him (Vsp. and Bdr.)” (102), based on the bewitching implied in Vsp. 28. However Óðinn initially brought about the recitation, Vǫluspá presents a vǫlva who is markedly different in the tone of her recitation and in the material way her information is valued compared with the vǫlva of Baldrs draumar. Dronke (1997, 51–2) provides an eloquent commentary on the encounter between Óðinn and the vǫlva in stanzas 28–9 of Vǫluspá.
23. On exchanges between the living and the dead in the medieval period, see Geary (77–87).
24. For example in Eþriks saga rauða, ch. 4; see Kress.
25. See Vigfússon and Unger (11) and Neckel-Kuhn (289).
26. For a survey of the possible meanings of “hlióð ” in this line, see Pipping (39).
27. Modern editors indicate their interpretation of the sequence of speakers by quotation marks. By this means, Neckel and Kuhn attribute stanzas 45, 48 and 50 to Freyja and stanzas 46, 47 and 49 to Hyndla. In order to support this reading, they delete the refrain “hleypr þú, eðlvina, úti Á náttom ”from stanza 48, but also from stanza 49, even though stanza 49 is attributed to Hyndla in their edition. A similar interpretation is given by Jón Helgason in his edition of the poem. In his 1927 edition of eddic poems, Finnur Jónsson cuts out stanzas 29 to 44 (the so-called Vǫluspá hin skamma, which is printed separately, pp. 213–6) and severely edits the last stanzas of the poem, reducing six stanzas to three. Stanza 45 is attributed to Freyja (“Berk minnisöl …) and the poem ends with only a half-stanza contribution by Hyndla (49:5–8)—a brief threat (edited out of context) which is easily rebuffed by Freyja’s full stanza statement (st. 50). Guðni Jónsson also edits Vǫluspá hin skamma separately (pp. 499–503), and cuts the refrain from the second and third to last stanzas, attributing the third to last stanza (Hdl. 48) to Freyja, not Hyndla.
28. The meaning of “eðlvina ”is not certain, but the definition proposed by La Farge and Tucker (42) following Neckel, “noble (female) friend (?), concubine,” supports a reading which has the potential for considerable sarcasm.
29. On the manner in which the Æsir first distinguish themselves from the giant race, and the stages in which they assimilate the Vanir and then certain giantesses into their kin-group, see Clunies Ross (1994, 56–60 and 93–102).
30. [See the article by Lönnroth translated earlier in this volume. Eds.]