''Hyndluljóð'' (

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

: 'The Lay of Hyndla') is an Old Norse poem often considered a part of the ''

Poetic Edda The ''Poetic Edda'' is the modern name for an untitled collection of Old Norse anonymous narrative poems in alliterative verse. It is distinct from the closely related ''Prose Edda'', although both works are seminal to the study of Old Norse ...

''. It is preserved in its entirety only in ''

Flateyjarbók ''Flateyjarbók'' (; "Book of Flatey, Breiðafjörður, Flatey") is an important medieval Iceland, Icelandic manuscript. It is also known as GkS 1005 fol. and by the Latin name ''Codex Flateyensis''. It was commissioned by Jón Hákonarson and p ...

'', but some stanzas are also quoted in the ''

Prose Edda The ''Prose Edda'', also known as the ''Younger Edda'', ''Snorri's Edda'' () or, historically, simply as ''Edda'', is an Old Norse textbook written in Iceland during the early 13th century. The work is often considered to have been to some exten ...

'', where they are said to come from '' Völuspá hin skamma''. __NOTOC__ ''Hyndluljóð'' is believed to be a relatively late Eddic poem, dating to the second half of the 12th century or later, although including much older traditions, such as that of the 4th c. Gothic king

Ermanaric Ermanaric (died 376) was a Greuthungian king who before the Hunnic invasion evidently ruled a sizable portion of Oium, the part of Scythia inhabited by the Goths at the time. He is mentioned in two Roman sources: the contemporary writings of ...

. In the poem, the goddess

Freyja In Norse mythology, Freyja (Old Norse "(the) Lady") is a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (magic for seeing and influencing the future). Freyja is the owner of the necklace Brísingamen, rides a char ...

meets the

völva In Germanic paganism, a seeress is a woman said to have the ability to foretell future events and perform sorcery. They are also referred to with many other names meaning "prophetess", "staff bearer" and "sorceress", and they are frequently calle ...

Hyndla and they ride together towards

Valhalla In Norse mythology, Valhalla ( , ; , )Orchard (1997:171–172) is described as a majestic hall located in Asgard and presided over by the god Odin. There were five possible realms the soul could travel to after death. The first was Fólkvang ...

. Freyja rides on her boar Hildisvíni and Hyndla on a wolf. Their mission is to find out the pedigree of Óttarr so that he can touch his inheritance, and the lay consists mostly of Hyndla reciting a number of names from Óttarr's ancestry. Because of the reference in the ''Prose Edda'' to ''Völuspá hin skamma'', since Sophus Bugge's first edition of the Eddic poems, stanzas 29–44 of ''Hyndluljóð'' as it appears in the manuscript have usually been excerpted as a separate poem under that title. Refrains have led to the suggestion that they were alternative names for the same poem. (citing R. C. Boer and Gro Steinsland)

References

Notes

Bibliography

English translations

Hyndluljóð
English translation by

Benjamin Thorpe Benjamin Thorpe (1782 – 19 July 1870) was an English scholar of Old English language, Anglo-Saxon literature. Biography In the early 1820s he worked as a banker in the House of Rothschild, in Paris. There he met Thomas Hodgkin, who treated hi ...

Hyndluljoth
Translation and commentary by Henry Adams Bellows
Hyndluljóð
Translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor

Old Norse editions

Hyndluljóð
Sophus Bugge's edition of the manuscript text
Hyndluljóð
Guðni Jónsson's edition with normalized spelling

External links

*
MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository)
Illustrations of Hyndluljóð from manuscripts and early print books. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hyndluljod 12th-century poems Eddic poetry Freyja Flateyjarbók