''Hyndluljóð'' (

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...

: 'The Lay of Hyndla') is an Old Norse poem often considered a part of the '' Poetic Edda''. It is preserved in its entirety only in '' Flateyjarbók'', but some stanzas are also quoted in the ''

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

'', 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. In the poem, the goddess Freyja meets the völva Hyndla and they ride together towards Valhalla. Freyja rides on her boar Hildisvíni and Hyndla on a wolf. Their mission is to find out the

pedigree Pedigree may refer to: Breeding * Pedigree chart, a document to record ancestry, used by genealogists in study of human family lines, and in selective breeding of other animals ** Pedigree, a human genealogy (ancestry chart) ** Pedigree (anim ...

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 Elseus Sophus Bugge (5 January 1833 – 8 July 1907) was a Norwegian philologist and linguist. His scholarly work was directed to the study of runic inscriptions and Norse philology. Bugge is best known for his theories and his work on the runi ...

'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 Gro Steinsland (born 1945) is a Norwegian scholar of medieval studies and history of religion and since August 2009 has been the Scientific Director of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Steinsland has m ...

)

References

Notes

Bibliography

English translations

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

Old Norse editions

Hyndluljóð

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

External links

*
MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image repository)
illustrations from Victorian and Edwardian retellings of Hyndluljóð. Clicking on the thumbnail will give you the full image and information concerning it. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hyndluljod 12th-century poems Eddic poetry Freyja Sources of Norse mythology Flateyjarbók