1988 Einar Haugen, Edda as Ritual: Grimnismal Excerpt

Let us turn now to the Eddic poems themselves, and see what they have to tell us about Odin. I shall take my starting point in one of the strangest and most confusing of the poems of the Elder Edda, one in which Odin is the main character as well as the sole narrator, the Lay of Grimnir (Grm). This monologue by the greatest and most powerful of all the gods takes place in a curious setting. Odin tells us that he is placed between two fires that are uncomfortably close to him:

Grm 1:
Hot art thou, fire! too fierce by far;
Get ye gone, ye flames!
The mantle’s burned, though I bear it aloft,
And the fire is scorching its fur.

He is not only exposed to heat; for eight nights he has had neither food nor drink, and he has not moved during all this time. But now he has been given a drink by one Agnar, the son of Geirrod, king of the Goths. As a reward, Odin grants Agnar not only his father’s throne, but also gives him a lecture on the eternal verities. At the end of the lecture, Odin turns to the aging father Geirrod, telling him that he is drunk and has not been listening, and then he reveals who he is:

Grm 52:
Small heed did you take to all that I told,
And false were words of your friends;
For now the sword of my friend I see,
That waits all wet with blood.

Grm 53:
Your sword-pierced body shall Ygg have soon,
For your life is ended at last;
The fates are hostile; behold now Odin!
Come near me, if you can!

The poem is fifty-four stanzas long, but the setting and the narrative I have just reported occupy only the first three and the penultimate there stanzas, with possibly one more in the middle. The rest is all lecture, Odin dispensing wisdom to Agnar, or to anyone who will listen. The story part, in fact, is so skimpy that the compiler of the Edda felt it needed an explanation in prose. So he added a preface in which he explained how Odin got into this odd predicament: it was the result of a quarrel with his wife Frigg, which ended in a wager. Geirrod, king of the Goths, said Frigg, is so stingy that he even tortures his guests. Odin maintained that this was a damnable lie about his friend and favorite, and he set off to prove that she was wrong. But Frigg poisoned the king’s mind before Odin arrived, so that he was very suspicious of the stranger who came to his court disguised in a dark mantle and called himself Grimnir. Since he would not tell King Geirrod anything about himself, he was indeed tortured, by being placed between the fires for eight nights. At the end, the compiler adds a conclusion, telling us that Geirrod slipped and fell on his sword: after that his son Agnar, who had handed Odin a beaker of beer, became the ruler of the kingdom. So Odin’s prophecy came true, and Odin revealed his power, using it against the man who, according to the prose introduction, had been his favorite.

Now it is clear that any attempt to interpret this story as history or reality must fail. there is no record of a Gothic king named either Geirrod or Agnar. Nor can one exactly interpret it as a moral tale invented to show men how to behave, except perhaps to teach them to be hospitable to strangers. Odin behaves in a morally reprehensible manner by putting his supporter and favorite to what can only be called an unfair test. He appears disguised, calls himself Grimnir, which means ‘the masked one,’ and still expects his host to receive him well and even listen to an hour’s tiresome lecture about the philosophical problems of the universe. But the poem does have an unmistakable quality of myth about it, since it presents an encounter of humanity with the divine, of mankind with the sacred. More than that, it involves men of high rank, the royal family of the Goths, and at a juncture in their lives of the greatest importance to them and all their followers: the accession to the throne of a new king after the death of the old. In spite of his divine power, Odin has submitted to the intense pain of fire and hunger, apparently for the sole purpose of conveying sacred knowledge to the new king. When he speaks to Agnarr, he says:

Grm. 3:

Hail to you, Agnar! For hailed you are
By voice of the Lord-Men;
For a single drink you will never receive
A greater gift as reward.

It is clear that the main gift is not just the kingship, which he would get anyway, but the insight into the workings of the universe that a king must have to fulfil his sacred fuction as ruler and high priest of his people. So Odin begins, rather prosily, by enumerating the mansions and the regions in which each of the gods dwell. He emphasizes above all his own Valhalla by devoting three stanzas to it, and later coming back to it in a fourth:

Grm. 23:

Five hundred doors and forty there are
I know, in Valhall’s walls;
Eight hundred fighters, through each door fare
When to war with the Wolf they go.

From there he goes on to tell about the great tree that holds the universe, in spite of all the evil forces that infest it, and this leads him back to the creation of the earth out of the flesh of the giant Ymir. At times it seems as if he loses his thread, but this may be due to eager copyists who put in extra stanzas they knew from other poems. Then he rises to the real climax, beginning with a stanza that is variously interpreted, but which I take to mean the following:

Grm 45:

Visions I have now given to the sons of the gods,
From this will come a welcome blessing.
To the gods it will come
on Ægir’s benches,
at Ægir’s ale-feast.

We will hear more about the ale-feast in Ægir’s hall, but let us hurry on. Odin then begins his impressive recital of all the names by which he is known, the masks under which he has concealed himself at one time or another. In chant-like verses he recites these names, many of which we cannot interpret with certainty; but it makes a magnificently resounding chant. Let me quote one stanza in the original:

Grm. 47:

Saðr oc Svipall oc Sanngetall,
Herteitr oc Hnicarr,
Bileygr, Báleygr, Bolvercr, Fiölnir,
Grímr oc Grímnir, Glapsviðr oc Fiölsviðr

Taylor and Auden attempt to translate the names in this stanza. I shall give their translation with a few changes where I think they have missed the meaning:

Grm 47:

Truthful, Changeable, Truth-getter,
Battle-happy, Overthrower,
Death-worker, Many-shaped, One-Eyed, Fire-Eyed,
Lore-master, Masked, and Deceitful.

The contradictions and ambiguities are only too apparent: how can Odin be both ‘truthful’ and ‘deceiptful’? The list of names in this poem alone runs to about fifty, and someone has counted over 125 in all. Odin says of himself:

Grm 48/5-7:

By a single name I was never known
Since first I fared among men.

One does not have to search very far in the huge literature on Germanic mythology to find that this poem has been held to reflect a ritual from the cult of the Germanic peoples. One can imagine the scene in the Viking hall, with the fireplace down the middle of the high rafted room, the priest who represents the highest god torturing himself by heat and fasting until he is in an ecstatic condition that enables him to recite the strange names of Odin and tell men in the hall what they should know. One may actually suppose that there was no other way in which the average warrior at the king’s court could learn these stories and know about the gods he worshipped. The poem is like a scenario of a well-acted play, a monologue involving the disguised god, the discomfited king, and his kindly son.

End Excerpt

To read the article in its entirety, please see Edda: A Collection of Essays, pp. 3-24, Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason, ed.

1988 Einar Haugen, "The Edda as Ritual" in Edda: A Collection of Essays, pp. 3-24 Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason, ed. An excerpt HOME II.
	Let us turn now to the Eddic poems themselves, and see what they have to tell us about Odin. I shall take my starting point in one of the strangest and most confusing of the poems of the Elder Edda, one in which Odin is the main character as well as the sole narrator, the Lay of Grimnir (Grm). This monologue by the greatest and most powerful of all the gods takes place in a curious setting. Odin tells us that he is placed between two fires that are uncomfortably close to him: Grm 1: Hot art thou, fire! too fierce by far; Get ye gone, ye flames! The mantle’s burned, though I bear it aloft, And the fire is scorching its fur. He is not only exposed to heat; for eight nights he has had neither food nor drink, and he has not moved during all this time. But now he has been given a drink by one Agnar, the son of Geirrod, king of the Goths. As a reward, Odin grants Agnar not only his father’s throne, but also gives him a lecture on the eternal verities. At the end of the lecture, Odin turns to the aging father Geirrod, telling him that he is drunk and has not been listening, and then he reveals who he is: Grm 52: Small heed did you take to all that I told, And false were words of your friends; For now the sword of my friend I see, That waits all wet with blood. Grm 53: Your sword-pierced body shall Ygg have soon, For your life is ended at last; The fates are hostile; behold now Odin! Come near me, if you can! The poem is fifty-four stanzas long, but the setting and the narrative I have just reported occupy only the first three and the penultimate there stanzas, with possibly one more in the middle. The rest is all lecture, Odin dispensing wisdom to Agnar, or to anyone who will listen. The story part, in fact, is so skimpy that the compiler of the Edda felt it needed an explanation in prose. So he added a preface in which he explained how Odin got into this odd predicament: it was the result of a quarrel with his wife Frigg, which ended in a wager. Geirrod, king of the Goths, said Frigg, is so stingy that he even tortures his guests. Odin maintained that this was a damnable lie about his friend and favorite, and he set off to prove that she was wrong. But Frigg poisoned the king’s mind before Odin arrived, so that he was very suspicious of the stranger who came to his court disguised in a dark mantle and called himself Grimnir. Since he would not tell King Geirrod anything about himself, he was indeed tortured, by being placed between the fires for eight nights. At the end, the compiler adds a conclusion, telling us that Geirrod slipped and fell on his sword: after that his son Agnar, who had handed Odin a beaker of beer, became the ruler of the kingdom. So Odin’s prophecy came true, and Odin revealed his power, using it against the man who, according to the prose introduction, had been his favorite. Now it is clear that any attempt to interpret this story as history or reality must fail. there is no record of a Gothic king named either Geirrod or Agnar. Nor can one exactly interpret it as a moral tale invented to show men how to behave, except perhaps to teach them to be hospitable to strangers. Odin behaves in a morally reprehensible manner by putting his supporter and favorite to what can only be called an unfair test. He appears disguised, calls himself Grimnir, which means ‘the masked one,’ and still expects his host to receive him well and even listen to an hour’s tiresome lecture about the philosophical problems of the universe. But the poem does have an unmistakable quality of myth about it, since it presents an encounter of humanity with the divine, of mankind with the sacred. More than that, it involves men of high rank, the royal family of the Goths, and at a juncture in their lives of the greatest importance to them and all their followers: the accession to the throne of a new king after the death of the old. In spite of his divine power, Odin has submitted to the intense pain of fire and hunger, apparently for the sole purpose of conveying sacred knowledge to the new king. When he speaks to Agnarr, he says: Grm. 3: Hail to you, Agnar! For hailed you are By voice of the Lord-Men; For a single drink you will never receive A greater gift as reward. It is clear that the main gift is not just the kingship, which he would get anyway, but the insight into the workings of the universe that a king must have to fulfil his sacred fuction as ruler and high priest of his people. So Odin begins, rather prosily, by enumerating the mansions and the regions in which each of the gods dwell. He emphasizes above all his own Valhalla by devoting three stanzas to it, and later coming back to it in a fourth: Grm. 23: Five hundred doors and forty there are I know, in Valhall’s walls; Eight hundred fighters, through each door fare When to war with the Wolf they go. From there he goes on to tell about the great tree that holds the universe, in spite of all the evil forces that infest it, and this leads him back to the creation of the earth out of the flesh of the giant Ymir. At times it seems as if he loses his thread, but this may be due to eager copyists who put in extra stanzas they knew from other poems. Then he rises to the real climax, beginning with a stanza that is variously interpreted, but which I take to mean the following: Grm 45: Visions I have now given to the sons of the gods, From this will come a welcome blessing. To the gods it will come on Ægir’s benches, at Ægir’s ale-feast. We will hear more about the ale-feast in Ægir’s hall, but let us hurry on. Odin then begins his impressive recital of all the names by which he is known, the masks under which he has concealed himself at one time or another. In chant-like verses he recites these names, many of which we cannot interpret with certainty; but it makes a magnificently resounding chant. Let me quote one stanza in the original: Grm. 47: Saðr oc Svipall oc Sanngetall, Herteitr oc Hnicarr, Bileygr, Báleygr, Bolvercr, Fiölnir, Grímr oc Grímnir, Glapsviðr oc Fiölsviðr Taylor and Auden attempt to translate the names in this stanza. I shall give their translation with a few changes where I think they have missed the meaning: Grm 47: Truthful, Changeable, Truth-getter, Battle-happy, Overthrower, Death-worker, Many-shaped, One-Eyed, Fire-Eyed, Lore-master, Masked, and Deceitful. The contradictions and ambiguities are only too apparent: how can Odin be both ‘truthful’ and ‘deceiptful’? The list of names in this poem alone runs to about fifty, and someone has counted over 125 in all. Odin says of himself: Grm 48/5-7: By a single name I was never known Since first I fared among men. One does not have to search very far in the huge literature on Germanic mythology to find that this poem has been held to reflect a ritual from the cult of the Germanic peoples. One can imagine the scene in the Viking hall, with the fireplace down the middle of the high rafted room, the priest who represents the highest god torturing himself by heat and fasting until he is in an ecstatic condition that enables him to recite the strange names of Odin and tell men in the hall what they should know. One may actually suppose that there was no other way in which the average warrior at the king’s court could learn these stories and know about the gods he worshipped. The poem is like a scenario of a well-acted play, a monologue involving the disguised god, the discomfited king, and his kindly son. End Excerpt To read the article in its entirety, please see Edda: A Collection of Essays, pp. 3-24, Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason, ed.
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