Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Stanza 14


Dr. Jackson Crawford's translation:
14.   I was drunk,
I was too drunk,
at wise Fjalar’s house.
The best kind of feast
is the one you go home from
with all your wits about you.

Ǫlr ek varð,
varð ofrǫlvi,
at ins fróða Fjalars.
Því er ǫlðr bazt
at aptr of heimtir
hverr sitt geð gumi.

The name Fjalarr is known from three other places in the Eddas. In the Poetic Edda, it is the name of the rooster who crows at Ragnarok in Jotunheim according to Voluspá stanza 41 (another rooster, named Gullinkambi, will crow in Valhalla, and another, unnamed, will crow in Hel), and it is the name of a being Óđin mentions in Hárbarđsljóđ stanza 26 who may well be identical to the Prose Edda’s gigantic magician Útgarđa-Loki. In the Prose Edda, Fjalarr is the name of one of the dwarves who kills Kvasir and mixes his blood with honey in order to make the mead known as Óđrerir. Because of Óđin’s connection to the Óđrerir myth (see for instance Hávamál st. 104–10 and 141), the latter is the most intriguing possibility, but there is no record in any version of that myth of a visit that Óđin makes to Fjalar, though Fjalar’s name might originally have belonged to someone else in the Óđrerir narrative and only later become attached to one of the dwarves. It is also possible that “the wise Fjalar” is in fact the rooster and that the house or place (the noun is not specified in the Old Norse text) where Óđin got drunk was simply Jotunheim more broadly. And if this Fjalar is the same as the Útgarđa-Loki encountered by Thór in the Prose Edda, it is possible that Óđin also visited his hall and drank heavily there in a lost myth just as his son did in the surviving myth. There could also be yet a fourth Fjalar whose identity and exploits are not preserved in the surviving myths, or this stanza may refer to no specific myth at all, with the name chosen for metrical reasons.

The Wanderer's Havamal . Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

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