[Poetic Edda Larrington Pdf Download
Eliora Shopbell
The juxtaposition of the nine worlds and nine women also implies some kind of connection. As no man could clearly be literally born of nine mothers, if these women are indeed the parents of Heimdallr, it is possible that they are meant to be taken not as literal people, but instead as personifications of those nine worlds. Furthermore, if they are also the mothers of the seeress, as the passage implies, it would mean that both she and Heimdallr are children of the world rather than children of specific figures. This would place each of them in a unique position of knowledge of each of the nine worlds, and indeed that is what we see when we read through the lore. The seeress has the ability to see through the entire cycle of time, and Heimdallr has an awareness of the world that matches no other.
The speaker than recounts a very brief synopsis of the creation of the world, but not the expanded, detailed version we get from Snorri. To me, this poem has always read much like someone in a trance seeing visions- where the visions jump around and are not always so detailed or chronological as one would hope, although they are roughly in the right order. This may just be my own interpretation however, and we must always allow room for translation distortion.
Voluspa is an incredibly dense and cryptic way to begin the poetic edda, and it is regarded by many as one of the most difficult to interpret. It does, however, do the reader the service of orienting them in the cosmological world they are entering when they read the rest of the stories. Opening a collection of stories with Voluspa seems to be a logical choice when one considers that the codex regius was compiled in the middle ages. At that time, standard procedure when writing was to open the text with a reminder that god created the world (and sometimes that it will end with the apocalypse.) You can see Snorri do this himself at the beginning of his own edda. It seems likely that a medieval editor would want to open his compilation with Voluspa in order to adhere to that written tradition.
The first section is the largest, most random section. It is a collection of random stanzas from what appears to be many different poems, pulled together into thematic groups. It opens up with a few stanzas about hosting and being a good guest (a theme which re-occurs several times in this section.)
This large section opens the poem with a stanza that feels out of place and reflects a great kind of paranoia, warning the reader to beware of their surroundings. It is a very strange and distrustful way to open a poem whose biggest section is about social graces.
The entire first section continues in this way, with groups of two to three stanzas at a time seeming to come from the same poems, thrown together in thematic sections. This is a very weird way to consolidate lore, and it seems like the original compiler was trying to preserve the most important parts of the wisdom poems in a single document- though why they would break it up into pieces and reorganize it, rather than making a long document that recorded all of them, is far less clear.
I attempted to determine how many poems are represented in this first section, but with the information available to me it is almost impossible to tell, and I do not have the knowledge to be able to parse out the original stanzas to try to detect poetic patterns that represent a unified section. I must rely on the translation. Grouping stanzas into those which obviously belong together (share repeated phases), I assumed the remaining filler in between each section attributed to a single poem, though likely it does not since they are extreme disjointed. None the less, using this method I separated out a minimum of 46 poems contributing to Havamal before the section with Loddfafnir.
I highly recommend this for people who are new to mythological study in general, and norse mythology in particular. It gives the history of the eddic corpus, answers basic questions about the sources, and attempts to prepare the reader to properly understand most of the scholarly sources regarding mythology.
It is called Fuck Yeah Norse Mythology because it is about Norse Mythology and the posts are about Norse Mythology and things related to Norse Mythology, so we put Norse Mythology in the name to make sure people who were interested in Norse Mythology could find posts about Norse Mythology.