This is weird.
Did everybody just get this? I sent this post back in May -- not this
weekend. It must have been resent by the mail server,
somehow.
Jamie
It is sometimes interpretted as
meaning "effeminite" or "homosexual,"
but that may have been a case of the
translators allowing their own
cultural bias to color the
translation. I haven't yet found a clear
definition of the word, in
the context of Snorri's passage. It's been
speculated (see the
article by Neil Price, in the Smithsonian's
"Vikings: The North
Atlantic Saga") that only women (and possibly
homosexual men) practiced
Seidhr -- a form of divination, in which the
practitioner enters into a
shamanic trance state, to communicate with
the dead. Odin, of course,
was an exception to the rule, but Loki
teases him about it in
Lokasenna.
Jamie