--- "akoddsson" wrote:

> Hávamál, its language and content

Do you have Evans' edition? It has a brilliant introduction,
containing a few real eye-openers. One of my favourite pieces
of academic writing:

"We should not, then, be justified in thinking of Hávamál
as a more or less mechanical stringing together of some
half-dozen distinct poems; it would come nearer the truth
to say that, in the text as we now have it, we can glimpse
the half-submerged hulks of such poems."

"First, the Gnomic Poem has very little to say of the heroic:
there are no references to feuds or to the duty of vengeance,
and only the most casual and passing allusions to weapons and
fighting. [...] Secondly, the ætt, the family, one's kinsmen,
are barely mentioned at all [...] Conversely, much stress is
laid on friendship. The dominant image in the Gnomic Poem,
the implied recipient of the advice proffered, is that of the
solitary, a man with no apparent attachments of family or
kin, often travelling alone, playing no part in the social or
political structure of the community ... Yet if, as has so
often been believed, the poem is rooted in the world of the
Norwegian smallholder, where the family lived on the ancestral
farm from generation to generation, why does it simply ignore
the ætt, so centrally present in the sagas and laws? And is
it not also remarkable that there is no trace of the gradations
of the class system of the Norwegian laws, with their konungr,
jarl, hölðr, lendr maðr and so on, nor any trace either of
superstition, of cult and ritual, of the gods who watched
over the ancestral fields? To meet this difficulty, Sigurður
Nordal suggested that the poem mirrors, not the ancient world
of the small farmer, but the new world of the Viking Age where
men tore up their ancestral roots and abandoned their kin and
their home bound gods, and wandered at large over the northern
hemisphere, free-ranging equals, knowing no tie but that of
comradeship. Instead of the ætt, the frændr, we have the friend,
the comrade: "with half a loaf and a titlted bowl I got myself
a comrade, fekk ek mér félaga" says st. 52, using the word
which occurs repeatedly in runic memorial for a comrade in the
Viking Age ... Nordal's hypothesis does, it is true, entail
some difficulties of its own. The travelling on which the Gnomic
Poem lays so much stress is all inland, and much of it plainly
on foot; only the rather obscure st. 74 contains references to
journeying by ship, and even here it is almost certainly sailing
in coastal fiords rather than ocean voyaging that is in question.
Foreign travel, the life of the warrior, how to behave at the
king's court: these are conspicuously absent. So it is not Viking
life itself, in the strict sense, which the poem reflects, but the
life of Norway in a period tinged by the individualism and the
loosening of inherited sanctities that the Viking expansion
brought in its train."

Another recent monograph I recommend that you find is Ottar
Grönvik's "Håvamål: Studier over verkets formelle oppbygning
og dets religiöse innhold" (Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi,
Oslo, 1999). It should be easily available. It sets out a
really interesting interpretation of the þulr and his relation
to Odin - the purpose of the whole monograph is basically to
clarify the meaning of stanza 138. Grönvik believes that this
part of the poem should be read as uttered by the þulr (a
priest of Odin), who has achieved a 'unio mystica' with his
god.

> I think that it would be wise for us to lead a collective process
> toward a superior, future redaction, making it available online.

A lofty goal, indeed. A jörmun-task.

> Raising the shoulders of giants... ;)

Shrugging mightily, I dare say! Would Atlas shrugging
be the equivalent of Þórr raising Jörmungandr's hump
heavenwards?

"Giant monsters staggered
steep crags reverberated
the ancient earth was all ashudder."

> Ekki á sveitaböllum ennþá, en víst á ýmsum fundum um þióðlaga-
> tónlist. Ég spilaði síðustu viku með íranskri konu, flutti ýmsa
> slætti og kvað fornar vísur eftir tónum munngígju í G.

Þú ert greinilega á réttum stað! Ertu fluttur endanlega?
Er Noregur þitt nýja óðal?

Blessaður alltaf,
Eysteinn