Stanza 53

Original Old Norse:

Lítilla sanda

lítilla sæva

lítil eru geð guma

því at allir menn

urðut jafnspakir

hálf er öld hvar

Auden & Taylor:

Little a sand-grain, little a dew drop, 

Little the minds of men:

All men are not equal in wisdom, 

The half-wise are everywhere

Bellows:

A little sand | has a little sea,

And small are the minds of men;

Though all men are not | equal in wisdom,

Yet half-wise only are all.

Bray:

Little the sand if little the seas, 

little are minds of men, 

for ne'er in the world were all equally wise, 

'tis shared by the fools and the sage.

Chisholm:

A small lake has a little sand.

The minds of men are small

and not all men are equally wise.

No man is whole.

Hollander:

A little lake hath but little sand:

but small the mind of man;

not all men are equally wise,

each wight wanteth somewhat.

Terry:

There are little shores and little seas

and men with little sense;

all are not equal in wisdom --

no lack of those lacking wit.

Thorpe:

Little are the sandgrains,

little the wits,

little the minds of (some) men;

for all men

are not wise alike:

men are everywhere by halves.

Jackson Crawford translates this stanza as "A small ocean has small beaches, and small brains have damned little to give. But the world takes all types."

To make the world work, we need all sorts of people with all different levels of intellegence. If we were populated by a world of idiots, humanity would be doomed. If we had a world of brilliant thinkers, our infrastructure would fall. We need the lower intellegence folks to do the menial work. I know this sounds bad, but really.. do you want to be the one flipping burgers or cleaning the toilets? We need the higher intellegence people to work the numbers, theories, abstracts. Do you want to be the one trying to decypher The ontinuum Hypothesis? It states that the set of real numbers has minimal possible cardinality which is greater than the cardinality of the set of integers.