kynvið

Dear ravensymposium,I’m going to dump a bunch of information. Hopefully it will be coherent, but if you have any further questions, feel free to ask. Warning for extremely long and information-dense reading.Heimdall is an extremely interesting God that often gets glossed over or ignored, most likely because he’s often in the background or because a lot of what was known about him has been lost. Snorri states there was a whole poem about Heimdall, Heimdalargaldr, of which no surviving copy has been found. His home is Himinbjörg (Heaven’s Castle/Mountain), which Gylfaginning 27 mentions as being situated where Bifröst meets the heavens. He’s described as being the “whitest of the Gods” which, if you’ve been paying attention to the previous conversations about color , you would know that this most likely has absolutely nothing to do with skin color and might reflect hair or eye color, disposition and demeanor, or an aspect of his rank/job among the Aesir.Heimdall is associated with rams, to the point that heimdali is used as a poetic synonym for a ram. This is furthered by two of his other names, Hallinskíði and Gullintanni - or “bent sticks” (like ram horns) and “gold-toothed” (which has also been proposed to parallel how rams’ teeth become yellow with age. There’s surviving evidence that rams had sacred cultic significance: Turville-Petre notes in Myth and Religion of the North that the Gothic word sauþs, sacrifice, resembles the norse word sauðr for sheep, that Ljósvetninga Saga specifically lists a ram as the animal to be slaughtered according to ancient sacrificial custom, and that Hrútr, ram, appears as a personal name much like bear, raven, wolf, and boar appear as personal names of religious significance). Snorri also tells us (in Skáldskaparmál 15 ) that the sword (in general) is called Heimdall’s Head, which some scholars have compared to how a ram charges and uses its horns (although there’s a different take on this which we’ll examine in a moment), and that the head is therefore also termed Heimdall’s Measure. (This is referencing events in Heimdall’s lost poem. It may tie him to Mimir in terms of severed head imagery, or reference his connection to wisdom and foresight.) Snorri also mentions that Heimdall is known to have shapeshifted into a seal form to battle with Loki (briefly mentioned in Húsdrápa ) and that he’s a “son of Odin”, although this doesn’t have anything to do with genealogy and probably has more to do with Odin’s titular position and where Heimdall falls under his rule.Rudolf Simek proposes that Heimdall’s name means “one who illuminates” based on guesswork with Proto-Indo-European dhal-/dhel- “to light; shining” (Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch), and given that his other by-name is Vindhlér(translated as “protection against the wind” or “wind-sea”), attempts have been made to try to link the dallr part of his name with the second half of Freyjas by-name Mardöll and to suggest that both are associated with the sea. This idea seems to be furthered by the usual interpretation of the information that Heimdall has nine mothers, which are assumed to be Aegir’s daughters, and the odd parallels with sheep/ram and ocean wave imagery that occur in Welsh myth (mentioned by Dumezil who fround it from a Welsh historian) that might indicate, when combined with the Irish influences in Rígsþula, that ideas about Heimdall may have been influenced by contact with Celtic peoples.We’re going to look at a different interpretation now, drawn primarily from Ursula Dronke’s notes in The Poetic Edda Vol II and “From the Scope of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale” as well as pieces of the primary texts - specifically Völuspá, Rígsþula, Lokasenna, Þrymskviða, and Hyndluljóð. (Heimdall also features in Hrafnagaldr Óðins , but given that this is probably a 17th century work and doesn’t accurately reflect Old Norse thoughts about Heimdall, I’m not going to include it. His mention in Grímnismál covers information I’ve already stated.) Hyndluljóð 37-38 (which is really part of Völuspá hin skamma, if you cannot find it otherwise)is one source that talks about Heimdall’s nine mothers and gives a list of names. Interestingly, these names don’t match the common assertion (and theory of John Lindow and Carolyne Larrington) that Heimdall’s mothers are the daughters of Aegir and Rán, all of whom are listed in Skáldskaparmál. Járnsaxa in the Hyndluljóð list is, of course, recognizeable for her associations with Thor as his lover and the mother of Magni, and she’s not associated with the sea at all. Moreover, the idea that Heimdall was born of undine mothers makes little sense when compared with stanzas in the beginning of Völuspá: Hyndluljóð 37 states that Heimdall was born við jarðar þröm (at the edge of the earth) by nine jötna meyjar (general jotnar maidens), while Völuspá, immediately after mentioning Heimdall and his descendants, goes on to describe in the second stanza níu íviðjur, mjötvið mæran fyr mold neðan. This roughly translates as “nine wood-giantesses, the famous Measure-Tree, beneath the earth.” Some background context here is important - besides the fact that this is giving the impressions of nine tree roots, specifically the World Tree’s roots, people and pregnancy/childbirth were associated with trees. “Tree” is often used as a kenning for “human/person”, further reinforced in Völuspá 17-20 with Askr and Embla, and trees growing from women’s wombs shows up in several places in surviving texts, including in Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar 16, where Atli curses the giantess Hrimderðr to “sink nine miles down (beneath the earth)” and for a tree to grow out of her, and in Egils Saga Skallagrimssonar 78 when Egil references his son askvánar minnar, “the tree of the sex/womanhood of my wife”. This supplies an extremely interesting image: the notion of Heimdall as, quite possibly, a personification of the World Tree itself, with his nine wood-giantess mothers being the nine roots of the tree.This image pops up in references in other places.Heimdallar hljóð, Heimdall’s sound/hearing, is hidden away under Yggdrasil (Völuspá 27), which is interesting because it suggests both Heimdall hearing from this location (which is where Mimir’s well of wisdom is, which has led some to suggest that Heimdall sacrificed an ear into the well to gain his incredible senses in a parallel to the sacrifice of Odin’s eye) and that his “sound”, which would be Gjallarhorn, is hidden in the well. Sigrdrifumál 13 speaks of a drinking horn dripping thought-runes (hugrúnar) and Snorri states in Gylfaginning 15 that Mimir drinks from the well of wisdom with Gjallarhorn (suggesting that it is a double-purpose horn that can be used for sounding and drinking) , while sounds travel faster through solids and water (usually) than in air due to how it propagates. The idea here is that noise of trouble would travel along the ground, and through the well water, and reach Heimdall’s hearing (through a sacrificed ear, or the roots of the tree) faster than traveling a direct route through the air. Heimdall is also supposedly gifted with prophetic sense in Þrymskviða 15 (vissi hann vel framsem vanir aðrir, “like the Vanir he knows the future well”), which would make sense if he’s associated with Mimir’s well of wisdom and the act of drinking from it.Which brings up another strange connection. Mimir is also associated with the World Tree itself, which is called “Hoard-Mimir’s Wood” in Vafþrúðnismál 45 and “Mimi’s Tree” in Fjölsvinnsmál 20. Both Mimir and Heimdall are associated with severed heads (as I mentioned at the beginning, and which has an interesting similarity in the story of Rúad son of Rígdonn in the Irish Rennes Dindshenchas (poem 5), particularly in that Rígsþula, which purportedly follows Heimdall-as-Rig through his siring of humankind, has marked Irish influences. Rí(g) is based on the Old Irish word for king, and the Old Norse word konungr appears as the name of one of his offspring later in the poem (stanza 43, as Konr ungr). Old Norse rígr has to do with stiffness, which could either be a phallic pun considering what Rig spends his time in the poem doing, or another tree-figure reference to Heimdall’s nature. It should be noted that our understanding that Rig is Heimdall is due to a note in the margin of the only surviving (and incomplete) copy, which is in the Codex Wormianus , and from the first stanza of Völuspá, which refers to all listening beings as helgar kindir (holy/hallowed kin/progeny/races, referring here to humankind) and mögu Heimdallar (boys/sons/kindred of Heimdall). They are hallowed by virtue of all being descended from not just a God, but the hvitastr áss, the “whitest”/brightest of the aesir. Meiri ok minni, of greater and lesser importance, shows that status seems to have no bearing on any human’s holiness.Recall previously that I stated the meaning of Heimdall’s name is rather sketchy? There’s some surviving evidence that dallr was an archaic word for “tree”. Per Ursula Dronke’s notes in The Poetic Edda vol II, Sigfús Blöndal’s Islansk-Dansk Ordbod lists dallr/dallur as a wooden bowl, which is echoed by Biørn Haldorsen’s Lexicon. (This same sort of bowl was called askr/askur elsewhere, but wasn’t necessarily made out of ash wood.) Haldorsen’s Lexicon also has an entry for dallr as “tree”, and dalr shows up in the þulur right next to almr (elm-wood bow) and yr (yew-wood bow) as another type of wooden bow. If this holds true, Heimdallr literally parses as world-tree (heimr + dallr).In Lokasenna 48 we see an interesting comment from Loki regarding Heimdall: aurgo baki þú munt æ vera ok vaka vörðr goða, or “with muck on your backside you’ll always be and keep awake as watch for the gods”. This has sometimes been interpreted as Heimdall having a muddy rump because he’s sitting down on the ground where he’s stationed, but what’s notable is that this same “muck” (aurgo) is used in Völuspá 27 to describe the same substance (aurogr fors) springing up and washing the foot of the World Tree where Heimdall’s hearing/sound is hidden. (An alternative spelling could be interpreted as ǫrgo, which is from argr and, thus, have Loki accusing Heimdall of homosexuality and effeminacy, which is again interesting based upon the variant reading of the color hvitr .) The “muck” is also referenced in Völuspá 19 as ausinn hvitaauri, “shining loam” or a sort of water rich with white clay mud, which plastered onto the lower portions of the World Tree. If Heimdall is an embodiment of Yggdrasil, this gives us another connection with both hvitr and the reference of him having a muddy backside. (Plastering this fertile mud to the tree also parallels known offering habits throughout Scandinavian and Germany, where “guardian trees” were given offerings of milk, beer, and honey to preserve their life and strength.)In terms of Yggdrasil itself, it’s interesting that Völuspá describes it as mjötviðr, which is a calculated sort of “measured”. Hávamál uses the same word, mjöt, in stanza 60 when describing the careful measurements a man is making for what is needed for survival. The name Yggdrasil is usually translated as “horse of the terrible one”, with drasill being a poetic term for a horse and Ygg, “terrible one”, being a recorded heiti of Odin. This makes poetic sense giving how Odin would have “ridden” the tree - sacrifices are recorded as being hung up in the trees of temple groves, which according to Adam of Bremen consisted of the bodies of men, dogs, and horses, which is a neat parallel of Odin’s sacrifice of “himself to himself” and his heavy association with the gallows. Equally interesting, drasill (horse) may be etymologically related to Old High German drason/drasjan (to snort, puff and blow, breathe heavily) - and the Old Norse word for breath, ǫnd, is also associated with life-essence and the soul/spirit.Yggdrasil’s species is debated. The tree is sometimes mentioned in the lore to be an ash tree, while in other places it’s mentioned as being an evergreen (most likely a yew tree, Taxus baccata, as is speculated to have stood outside the temple at Uppsala according to the writings of Adam of Bremen. Ash trees are deciduous). Some have suggested that it is an oak tree based on Donar’s oak . I don’t have the space to cover all of the entities that live in, on, and around Yggdrasil, but I touch on the four stags in my post on the dvergar Matthias Egeler - Celtic Influences in Germanic Religion: A Survey (preview only)In terms of other Heimdall devotees, the only two I can reference are torchandhailstone here on Tumblr and Salena of Temple of the Flea I leave you with this gorgeous image of Idris Elba as Heimdall, with a prominent tree design on his breastplate