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Völuspá
Völuspá reading group: verses 1-6
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There are some things in verse 2 that I don't really understand:Ek man jötnaWhat are the "íviðjur"? The most common translation is "troll-women" or "ogresses", but if so, who are they? I see several other translations and wonder if anyone really knows.
I remember giants
ár um borna,
early born
þá er forðum mik
they who once me
fædda höfðu;
fostered have;
níu man ek heima,
nine remember I worlds,
níu íviðjur,
nine ???
mjötvið mæran
ash-tree great
fyr mold neðan.
for ground beneath
And what does the last line mean? Is Yggdrasil, the World-Ash, under our ground, or is it a reference to the ground under Yggdrasil?
As so often with poetry, you don't need to know the answers to appreciate the verse, which Ingibjörg reads beautifully, but I'm still curious!
Manny wrote: "What are the "íviðjur"? The most common translation is "troll-women" or "ogresses", but if so, who are they? I see several other translations and wonder if anyone really knows."Karl Simrock (the one who also translated the Nibelungenlied into High German) offers this translation of the 2nd verse:
Riesen acht ichSo "íviðjur" could mean something between a "troll-woman" and a "branch".
die Urgebornen,
Die mich vor Zeiten
erzogen haben.
Neun Welten kenn ich,
neun Äste weiß ich
An dem starken Stamm
im Staub der Erde.
Matt wrote: "Karl Simrock (the one who also translated the Nibelungenlied into High German) offers this translation of the 2nd verse:Riesen acht ich
die Urgebornen,
Die mich vor Zeiten
erzogen haben.
Neun Welten kenn ich,
neun Äste weiß ich
An dem starken Stamm
im Staub der Erde.
So "íviðjur" could mean something between a "troll-woman" and a "branch"."
Good find!
"Äste" makes a whole lot more sense than "troll-women". All the nine worlds are in the Tree, so it would be logical to talk about them being on nine branches. I wonder if he had some textual reason though?
I just noticed this page, where they give you a lot of evidence, including X-ray analysis of the manuscript (!) to support "troll-wife", "ogress". They also add "This has been interpreted in various ways, but there is little hope of it ever being fully explained". Damn.
Depending on the tree and its branches, they may well look like ogresses; for instance from Greek mythology when Heracles is killing Hydra: It came forth hissing, its nine(!) heads raised and swaying like the branches of a tree in a storm.
Maybe Simrock had a picture like that in his mind.
Manny wrote: "IMHO, the opening section of the Völuspá is some of the most extraordinary poetry ever written. Describing the creation of the world according to traditional Norse mythology, I would say it's as good as the KJV version of Genesis 1."I have to agree with you. It has the mighty ring of ancientry despite rather new gods displacing & replacing members of an older pantheon (a prime example being Odin & the sky-god Tyr). And the idea of a seer, even a female one, that 'remembers' the first beginnings of the world before things were put in place is reminiscent of a mythical neighbor, the Kalevala. It always makes me wonder how well the North Germanic peoples knew the myths of the other Baltic peeps. The idea of viking who could communicate with a Finn or vice versa... brings a tear to mine eyne.
Manny wrote: "What are the "íviðjur"? The most common translation is "troll-women" or "ogresses", but if so, who are they?"
I can't get my head around any 'giantess' reading, but that's only because, to me, it is a perfectly regular Germanic 'poetic apposition' (is there a technical term, anyone?), the likes of which Beowulf has out the wazoo:
bugon þa to bence [byrnan hringdon
guðsearo gumena]
'bowed they then to the bench: [their cuirasses rang,
war-gear of men]'
Where 'war-gear' and 'cuirasses' are one and the same thing, just as I propose are 'heima' and 'íviðjur'. I also understood 'fyr mold neðan' to refer to Yggdrasil's roots, somehow.
What do we think of the insertion of 'helgar' to fix the length & alliteration of the first line (which is the idea our public-domain translator follows)? That is:
Hljóðs bið ek allar, helgar kindir
Is it conceivable the scribe made a mistake, again, on the first line of the thing? It seems unlikely; it also seems poor form to insert a useful word willy nilly, whereas making an emendation like 'íviðjur' is not so extravagant.
Incidentally, the word 'um' in ON poetry has always been evocative because it's exactly what I utter to myself when trying to translate it.
Matt wrote: "Depending on the tree and its branches, they may well look like ogresses; for instance from Greek mythology when Heracles is killing Hydra: It came forth hissing, its nine(!) heads raised and swaying like the branches of a tree in a storm.
Maybe Simrock had a picture like that in his mind."
Max wrote: "Manny wrote: "What are the "íviðjur"? The most common translation is "troll-women" or "ogresses", but if so, who are they?"
I can't get my head around any 'giantess' reading, but that's only because, to me, it is a perfectly regular Germanic 'poetic apposition' (is there a technical term, anyone?), the likes of which Beowulf has out the wazoo:"
Yes, it also seems to me that "íviðjur" must somehow be referring to "heima", and you can see that many of the translators are making this explicit... though it's still unclear to me how the reference actually works. The "branches" idea is clever but I still have trouble believing it, I just don't see enough textual evidence. I can see why this has been discussed so much!
Max wrote: "What do we think of the insertion of 'helgar' to fix the length & alliteration of the first line (which is the idea our public-domain translator follows)? That is:
Hljóðs bið ek allar, helgar kindir
Is it conceivable the scribe made a mistake, again, on the first line of the thing? It seems unlikely"
If you compare Version 1 and Version 2, you'll see that we changed our minds about where the line-break was supposed to go. Haraldur, who's an expert on the Edda, convinced us that the text in Version 2 was correct. He doesn't like the insertion of "helgar", and indeed it's not in the original manuscript (right-hand column). But I don't know the details.
I have also been wondering about "um" :) Does it have any grammatical function, or is it purely euphonic?
It's impossible to read the Völuspá without frequently thinking of Tolkien (the names of the Dwarves, if nothing else), and I wonder if the Völva narrating the poem didn't to some extent inspire the character of Galadriel. Like the Völva, she was a first-hand witness to many events which in the hobbits' world are now only vaguely remembered myths. I also think there is some implication that she can foretell the future, as the Völva can. When she meets Frodo and Sam, it seems to me that she hints that she can see what is going to happen, though she is not allowed to tell them anything straight out. Her gifts turn out to be extraordinarily apposite.If you identify the Lord of the Rings with the Völuspá, the events of the book can be read as roughly paralleling the events of Ragnarök. The old gods confront the forces of evil and destroy them, but at a terrible price.
Manny wrote: "I have also been wondering about "um" :) Does it have any grammatical function, or is it purely euphonic?"I looked it up in Vigfusson-Cleasby, and while it states what is more or less obvious, that um is an 'enclytic [sic] particle', it doesn't offer any meaning (useful, huh?). But given that it's used primarily with participles, I am willing to bet it expresses 'perfectivity' (or 'perfective aspect'), much in the way of Old English ge-, which it effectively replaces (ON doesn't have this form). In other words, it's a bit of nuance our simple English minds won't easily grasp. Best leave it alone.
Manny wrote: "Like the Völva, she was a first-hand witness to many events which in the hobbits' world are now only vaguely remembered myths."
Aha, that's true! I like that quite a bit, old boy.
And her 'mirror' is rather a reflective pool of water, which she influences with the power of the White Ring (called Nenya). Isn't there a myth about Odin acquiring wisdom by throwing his eye in a well? Sort of similar, I s'pose.
Matt wrote:It came forth hissing, its nine(!) heads raised and swaying like the branches of a tree in a storm.
Nine certainly is the magic number. One of many noteworthy enneads is the months of human gestation. Maybe the 'nine abodes that are in the wood' are first nourished in the bole & then pushed out in the form of branches?
Max wrote: "I looked it up in Vigfusson-Cleasby, and while it states what is more or less obvious, that um is an 'enclytic [sic] particle', it doesn't offer any meaning (useful, huh?). But given that it's used primarily with participles, I am willing to bet it expresses 'perfectivity' (or 'perfective aspect'), much in the way of Old English ge-, which it effectively replaces (ON doesn't have this form). In other words, it's a bit of nuance our simple English minds won't easily grasp. Best leave it alone."Hm... if you go to the LARA version and click on an occurrence of um, you get a list of contexts on the right... many are not obviously associated with participles or perfectivity. But maybe there are two different words here, one just being an ordinary preposition cognate to modern Swedish om? E.g. in the recurrent passage
Þá gengu regin öllit seems to me that um means something like "about" or "of", consistent with identifying it with om. Similarly in the passage from verse 36,
Then went the-gods all
á rökstóla,
to the-thrones
ginnheilög goð,
(the) all-holy gods
ok um það gættuz
and (um) that held-council
Á fellr austan"um" seems to mean something like "through" or "around", again similar to modern Swedish om.
On flows from-the-east
um eitrdala
(um) poisoned-dales
söxum ok sverðum:
with-daggers and with-swords
Slíðr heitir sú.
Slíðr is-called she.
This reminded me of the sequence where Frodo and Sam pass through Morgul Vale in LOTR 2. I like your identification of Galadriel's mirror with Odin's/Mimir's well, hadn't thought of that!
Found another reference of the untranslatability of íviðjur in the bookTopographien der eddischen Mythen: Eine Untersuchung zu den Raumnarrativen und den narrativen Räumen in der Lieder-Edda und der Prosa-Edda
A philological analysis of the Edda that will most likely go well over my head.
Anyway, you can read parts of it on Google Books (page 62f, and especially footnote 90 in page 63).
https://books.google.de/books?id=Zk94...
Manny wrote: ""um" seems to mean something like "through" or "around", again similar to modern Swedish om." All that you have here is right. It's a preposition, cognate with German 'um' and Swedish 'om', when used with a noun like 'eitrdala' or pronoun like 'þat', but we'll see it often used without, as in 'ár um borna' and 'bjöðum um yppðu'. In both cases, you could leave the 'um' out entirely and still make sense of what's happening, or wind up with goofy stuff like 'born around yore'.
Max wrote: "Nine certainly is the magic number.
Manny wrote: "This reminded me of the sequence where Frodo and Sam pass through Morgul Vale in LOTR 2."
Speaking of, how could we forget the number of members in the Fellowship? And the number of Ringwraiths? Oho! Nine worlds-in-the-wood, nine rings for 'mortal men doomed to die'.
Matt wrote: "Found another reference of the untranslatability of íviðjur in the bookTopographien der eddischen Mythen: Eine Untersuchung zu den Raumnarrativen und den narrativen Räumen in der Lieder-Edda und ..."
Thank you Matt, I feel I am confused at a higher level! I particularly like this passage from footnote 90:
But the phrase is too obscure to be interpreted. We can suppose there were listeners in thirteenth-century Iceland who were just as mystified as we are. The phrase is supposed to be unclear.
Max wrote: All that you have here is right. It's a preposition, cognate with German 'um' and Swedish 'om', when used with a noun like 'eitrdala' or pronoun like 'þat', but we'll see it often used without, as in 'ár um borna' and 'bjöðum um yppðu'. In both cases, you could leave the 'um' out entirely and still make sense of what's happening, or wind up with goofy stuff like 'born around yore'."Certainly looks like it. So there's preposition-'um' and enclytic-'um' (I like this spelling!) Definitely starting to make more sense...
Speaking of, how could we forget the number of members in the Fellowship? And the number of Ringwraiths? Oho! Nine worlds-in-the-wood, nine rings for 'mortal men doomed to die'.
You get the impression that Tolkien had this poem in the back of his mind the whole time while he was writing The Hobbit and LOTR.
I wonder if there is any continuity with Dante's nine heavens and nine hells?
Verse 5 is very beautiful (if you haven't already listened to Ingibjörg's reading, you should do that!), but I don't completely understand what it means:Sól varp sunnan,What exactly are sali in line 6 and megins in line 10? Sali is a form of salr, which is usually translated as "earth", but here I suppose it means something like "place". Megins is more obscure: nearly everyone translates it as something like "power", but I don't understand what this would mean. What is this power of the moon? Haraldur and Branislav have translated it as "side (of the Earth)", which makes more sense, but I can't help feeling nervous that they are going against all the other translators.
The-sun shone from the South,
sinni mána,
(with) her moon,
hendi inni hægri
hand in right
um himinjódýr;
over the-rim-of-heaven
sól það né vissi
the-sun that didn't know
hvar hon sali átti,
where her ??? was
stjörnur það né vissu
the-stars that didn't know
hvar þær staði áttu,
where their place was,
máni það né vissi
the-moon that didn't know
hvað hann megins átti.
what her ??? was
sali is the accusative of salr, a word common to Germanic meaning 'abode, hall' (makes it into English as 'salon'). And átti is the past (3rd p sg) of eiga, so:hvar hon sali átti = 'where she had (her) abode'
On the other hand, megins is the genitive of megin 'power, dominion', and it's dependent on hvað. We may rightly translate 'what of-power' as 'what sort of dominion he had'. That is, to what extent his dominion reached.
Remember that the Moon is male & the Sun female in Germanic (and Baltic) myth/language. Tolkien follows this tradition, as I recall, but I can't think of a good example.
Max wrote: "sali is the accusative of salr, a word common to Germanic meaning 'abode, hall' (makes it into English as 'salon'). And átti is the past (3rd p sg) of eiga, so:hvar hon sali átti = 'where she had (her) abode'"Yes, that makes good sense. Sal is indeed alive and well in Swedish as the usual word for 'hall'. But in ON, it sometimes appears to mean 'earth', e.g. in the preceding verse, Vsp 4:
sól skein sunnan á salar steinaIn other cases, it clearly means 'hall', e.g. Vsp 42:
the-sun shone from-the-south on of-earth stones
sótrauðr hani, að sölum HeljarAnd in yet other cases, I'm not sure! Vsp 14,
the-soot-red cock, at the-halls of Hell
þeir er sóttu frá salar steiniVery tempting, with Tolkien in mind, to read this as "halls of stone", but is it actually what the words say?
they are gone from ??? of-stone
On the other hand, megins is the genitive of megin 'power, dominion', and it's dependent on hvað. We may rightly translate 'what of-power' as 'what sort of dominion he had'. That is, to what extent his dominion reached.
So you're with everyone else in reading megins as 'power'. I will ask if the Icelanders can explain their reasoning here in reading it as 'side'.
Remember that the Moon is male & the Sun female in Germanic (and Baltic) myth/language. Tolkien follows this tradition, as I recall, but I can't think of a good example.
"At the Sign of the Prancing Pony", the end of the nonsense song:
The round Moon rolled behind the hill,and there is indeed a footnote explaining that the Sun is 'she'.
as the Sun raised up her head.
Just asked an expert about verse 5. He suggested some adjustments:V.Vsp.5
Sól varp sunnan,
Sun cast from south
sinni mána,
from its moon´s
companion of the moon [the sun is regarded as the travel companion of the moon]
hendi inni hægri
hand into its right
with the right hand [dative in an instrumental sense)
um himinjódýr;
over heaven´s rim
[this is complicated; the last word is suspect and probably corrupt; often corrected to *himinjǫðurr based on the Hauksbók ms.; could be translated heaven’s rim]
sól það né vissi
sun that neither knew
[né is a plain negation here:]
the sun did not know that
hvar hon sali átti,
where her Earth was
where her place/home was [the sun didn’t know where she belonged]
stjörnur það né vissu
stars that neither knew
the stars did not know that
hvar þær staði áttu,
where their place was
máni það né vissi
moon that neither knew
the moon did not know that
hvað hann megins átti.
Which his side (of Earth) was
what (kind of) might he possessed
[BB is Branislav]So in fact megins does mean "might", it was just a misunderstanding. Nice to see that this discussion is improving the LARA resource :)
Manny wrote: "and there is indeed a footnote explaining that the Sun is 'she'."Ah, there it is. Good on you, man!
Manny wrote: "But in ON, it sometimes appears to mean 'earth',
Right, but it's not merely the case that sometimes it means 'this thing' & other times 'that thing'. There is a sequence of meaning. The word means 'hall' first and foremost, but is transferred (by metonymy, I guess?) to mean:
'a hall > [the big hall, generally speaking] = earth'.
This is why ON poetry, much like Vedic, is so frustrating (& rewarding); the goddamn Nords talk in riddles, saying always one thing when they mean something else. Tolkien had good reason for his hard-on whenever he read this stuff.
Does anyone suppose that, since Tolkien deemed fit to give ON names to the dwarves in LotR, that they spoke a gruff, northern dialect of Westron, the Mannish tongue, just in the way the speech of the Rohirrim is rendered in Old English?
Max wrote: "Manny wrote: "But in ON, it sometimes appears to mean 'earth',Right, but it's not merely the case that sometimes it means 'this thing' & other times 'that thing'. There is a sequence of meaning. The word means 'hall' first and foremost, but is transferred (by metonymy, I guess?) to mean:
'a hall > [the big hall, generally speaking] = earth'."
Hm, maybe it is metonymy. But that doesn't change the fact that in some cases salr is clearly referring to "earth" ('sól skein sunnan á salar steina'), and in other cases to "hall" ('Sal sá hon standa sólu fjarri'), and in yet other cases it's unclear ('þeir er sóttu frá salar steini').
I suppose that since 'salar steina' in verse 4 must mean 'the stones of earth', the simplest interpretation is that it means the same thing in verse 14. I guess I'm being too influenced by Tolkien in wanting it to mean 'halls of stone'. But I can't help wondering if he didn't get the phrase from here.
Does anyone suppose that, since Tolkien deemed fit to give ON names to the dwarves in LotR, that they spoke a gruff, northern dialect of Westron, the Mannish tongue, just in the way the speech of the Rohirrim is rendered in Old English?
Presumably. Though I think the language of the Dwarves is supposed to be only very distantly related to Westron, if I remember my Middle-Earth linguistics right?
Manny wrote: "But that doesn't change the fact that in some cases salr is clearly referring to "earth" ('sól skein sunnan á salar steina'), and in other cases to "hall" ('Sal sá hon standa sólu fjarri')"Yes, but the relationship is important, as in not arbitrary. Like it's not weird for the word for 'hall' also to mean 'earth', but it'd be exceedingly weird if the word for 'cat' also happened to mean 'earth' (unless the Nords considered the earth to be a giant cat, and as far as I know, they didn't).
Though I think the language of the Dwarves is supposed to be only very distantly related to Westron, if I remember my Middle-Earth linguistics right?
I'm pretty sure the dwarves' language was completely unrelated to both Elvish & Mannish, and that they didn't teach it to just anyone. And there was one bitchin' Elf in the Silmarillion who was on such good terms with them ('cause he loved to work with metal?) that they taught it to him.
Max wrote: "Yes, but the relationship is important, as in not arbitrary. Like it's not weird for the word for 'hall' also to mean 'earth', but it'd be exceedingly weird if the word for 'cat' also happened to mean 'earth' (unless the Nords considered the earth to be a giant cat, and as far as I know, they didn't)."Totally agree! But even though the different meanings are clearly related, it's equally clear that they have diverged considerably.
I'm pretty sure the dwarves' language was completely unrelated to both Elvish & Mannish, and that they didn't teach it to just anyone. And there was one bitchin' Elf in the Silmarillion who was on such good terms with them ('cause he loved to work with metal?) that they taught it to him.
Looking it up, I find that according to this page Tolkien had originally intended all the languages of Arda to be derived from Valarin - I saw an early version of this tree in Maker of Middle-Earth, which is what was confusing me. But later he changed his mind and made Primitive Quendian an independent language.
BTW, I was invited at short notice to give a talk today at an Iris Murdoch colloquium, and will have a few slides about the Völuspá (Murdoch was a huge Tolkien fan). I've posted the Powerpoint here if anyone is curious!
Manny wrote: "Looking it up, I find that according to this page Tolkien had originally intended all the languages of Arda to be derived from Valarin - I saw an early version of this tree in Maker of Middle-Earth, which is what was confusing me."Very cool! That macro-family would've been a linguistics course all in itself.
Manny wrote: "I've posted the Powerpoint here if anyone is curious!"
@ https://www.butterweck.de/misc/comic-...
I think Simon Evnine needs to know about this technological advance."Batman, how do you get that vertical stretch and roundness?"
"WHAM!"
Manny wrote: "There are some things in verse 2 that I don't really understand:Ek man jötna I remember giants
ár um borna,
early born
þá er forðum mik
they who once me
fædda höfðu;
fostered have;
níu man ..."
Isn't it just a reference to the root system of the tree?
Mark wrote: "Manny wrote: "Isn't it just a reference to the root system of the tree?"That's an ingenious suggestion! So, you're saying that the níu íviðjur are nine roots of the tree, or something connected to the roots?
That would certainly make a lot of sense, but what textual evidence is there? Unfortunately, everyone who's studied the details seems convinced that íviðjur means "troll-woman" or "witch", even if it's virtually impossible to see witches have to do with the rest of the verse.
First of all, listening to this was absolutely beautiful. Thank you, Ingibjörg! The rhythms of the verse are very soothing, almost hypnotic.It was interesting to me to see that verses 5 and 6, which at first glance appeared to be longer than the others, aren't really – the last four lines are just two half-lines spread over extra space, so that you still get the alliteration (as in stiornor / staði in v5 and mani / megins in v6). The half-lines suddenly get longer here, which gives these two verses something of a crescendo feel.
For reference, I first read the Völuspá about 20 years ago or more, in Carolyne Larrington's 1996 translation for OUP (‘Seeress's Prophecy’). I also have another version on my shelves, by Patricia Terry from 1990 (‘The Sibyl's Prophecy’). I couldn't remember much about the poem, so it's really nice to look at it in isolation.
Looking at the two translations together now, I was immediately struck – as you lot were too, from the looks of it – by the issue of iviði, because Larrington has this as ‘nine giant women’ where Terry has ‘nine roots’. This to me makes much more sense, for the reasons Max gave – it seems like a common Germanic piece of apposition.
A couple of other thoughts – compared to Genesis, or the Kalevala, or Hesiod, or most other creation myths, what makes this so moving is that it isn't being explained by an omniscient third-person narrator, but rather by a specific individual who actually remembers the events she is describing. This means it doesn't have the (as it were) scriptural authority of plain unmarked narrative ("This happened"), but rather a different sort of authority ("I remember when this happened") which comes loaded with a kind of subjective ambiguity. I find this very beautiful, and I totally agree with the connection to Galadriel in Tolkien. (Speaking of JRR, I couldn't help spotting the word glóin in here!)
The fact that the vala calls for attention at the beginning is kind of familiar from other Germanic poetry, but it did make me wonder about the audience she is supposedly talking to – allar kindir, can this include gods as well as men? It seems like it from some of the translations. I like the idea of her addressing men and gods.
(If anyone has read the ‘Balder's dreams’ section of the Edda, there is a weird bit where Odin goes down to Hel and wakes a vala from her grave to interrogate her. I wonder if this is the same vala? Or were there loads of them?)
Thank you Warwick, looks like you had the same experience as I did! allar kindir, can this include gods as well as men?
I have been searching, and I am not sure! She is addressing mögu Heimdalar, but who are they exactly? If you click on Heimdalar, you'll see that Branislav has glossed it as "the valley of home, place of all people". But there are three references, and the third is to verse 45, hátt blæss Heimdallr, "loud blows Heimdall". This is clearly the guardian of Bifrost, so is there both a god Heimdall and also a place? I am confused. My feeling is that we've got it wrong: on this page, it says that "The poem Rígsþula tells how Rígr (who is believed to be Heimdall) became the progenitor of the races of man, and other stories refer to men as "sons of Heimdall".
The same page says that Heimdall was the son of "Óðin and nine giantesses", which I hadn't previously known. Are these conceivably the níu íviðjur? If not, it's an odd coincidence. But no one seems to mention this possibility.
Searching around some more, I find the following passage on this page:Sophus Bugge gat þess til að hinar níu íviðjur Völuspár hafi verið mæður Heimdallarwhich if I understand correctly says that Sophus Bugge claims that the níu íviðjur of the Völuspá are the mothers of Heimdall.
Bugge was apparently a great 19th century expert on the Edda.
This is nothing to do with the Völuspá, but I don't know a better place to post the wonderful Old English translation of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Philip Craig Chapman-Bell which I just stumbled over:Incipit gestis Rudolphi rangifer tarandus
Hwæt, Hrodulf readnosa hrandeor –
Næfde þæt nieten unsciende næsðyrlas!
Glitenode and gladode godlice nosgrisele.
Ða hofberendas mid huscwordum hine gehefigodon;
Nolden þa geneatas Hrodulf næftig
To gomene hraniscum geador ætsomne.
Þa in Cristesmæsseæfne stormigum clommum,
Halga Claus þæt gemunde to him maðelode:
“Neahfreond nihteage nosubeorhtende!
Min hroden hrædwæn gelæd ðu, Hrodulf!”
Ða gelufodon hira laddeor þa lyftflogan –
Wæs glædnes and gliwdream; hornede sum gegieddode
“Hwæt, Hrodulf readnosa hrandeor,
Brad springð þin blæd: breme eart þu!”
Rendered literally into modern English:
Here begins the deeds of Rudolph, Tundra-Wanderer
Lo, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer –
That beast didn’t have unshiny nostrils!
The goodly nose-cartilage glittered and glowed.
The hoof-bearers taunted him with proud words;
The comrades wouldn’t allow wretched Hrodulf
To join the reindeer games.
Then, on Christmas Eve bound in storms
Santa Claus remembered that, spoke formally to him:
“Dear night-sighted friend, nose-bright one!
You, Hrodulf, shall lead my adorned rapid-wagon!”
Then the sky-flyers praised their lead-deer –
There was gladness and music; one of the horned ones sang
“Lo, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer,
Your fame spreads broadly, you are renowned!”
Sometimes literal is better. I love nose-bright one and rapid-wagon.And the double negative: That beast didn’t have unshiny nostrils!
But you lose all the alliterations! And I think I sense a kenning or two.
A relevant excerpt that I kept meaning to post from the the book I'm reading (Magoun's Kalevala):"As in the Old Icelandic and Serbo-Croatian singing traditions, Finno-Karelian makes some use of nonsense words to fill out the meter. The favorite is a pleonastic or expletive meter-filling on, formally identical with [the word for] 'is,' but without meaning and of course never to be translated; this suggests a similar use of um, formally 'around', and of 'from' by the Old Icelandic singers of verse of the Edda type."
Other Indo-European examples of 'oral poetry', such as Homer & the Vedas, also abound in these words that we commonly call 'particles'. It is somewhat interesting to note that the abovementioned Finnish on is a morphemic match of OI er (depending on whether one chooses to follow the derivation from the copula vera 'be'), which is used to make relative/concessive clauses & gnomic, matter-of-fact clauses like: 'That is (indeed!) a good king!'
Manny wrote: "This is nothing to do with the Völuspá, but I don't know a better place to post the wonderful Old English translation of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Philip Craig Chapman-Bell which I just s..."Þæt bið selost gewriten, ðætte funde ðu Mannig!
We have two versions of the LARA Völuspá available, both with audio from the talented Ingibjörg Þórisdóttir:
Version 1 has some minor glitches in the text, but I think Ingibjörg's reading is just fantastic.
Version 2 corrects the glitches, but Ingibjörg's reading is not quite as enjoyable to listen to and sometimes sounds a little rushed.
Unless you are very serious about Old Norse literature, I recommend Version 1.
You can view the pages in Chrome or Firefox. Hover over any word to hear it in isolation and see a popup translation. Hovering over a ᚠ rune displays the translation of a verse. We've used the 1936 public domain translation by Bellows.
You can find links to a whole lot more translations here. The English one I like best is Scudder 2001. If you know a Scandinavian language, Afzelius 1818 is remarkably close to the original.
IMHO, the opening section of the Völuspá is some of the most extraordinary poetry ever written. Describing the creation of the world according to traditional Norse mythology, I would say it's as good as the KJV version of Genesis 1.