How Odin calls us dumb (and why it matters)

Indiziert: 2026-05-22

[00:00:03]Hi, I'm old specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford. A few more words for you today about all or in modern Icelandic pronunciation alamole.

[00:00:13]I have been thinking about reading, translating, teaching this poem for a quarter century. And I do not believe that any modern scholars accept the notion that this poem is originally composed as one unity from stanza 1 to stanza 164. Everyone agrees that this is stitched together out of earlier pieces.

[00:00:36]The exact details of what those pieces are, when they were originally composed, how and by who they were stitched together, etc. Plenty of disagreement there, but I don't think anyone accepts the notion that this is originally composed as one single thing.

[00:00:54]All right, that's the first thought.

[00:00:57]I was thinking I I've been teaching a class reminds me a lot of the classes I used to teach at universities on Zoom to a wonderful group of students and we've been reading Volis and Haval in the original languages and I thought to myself at some point early in Haval you know it really is striking how often the poet talks about not what a wise person does but what an unwise person does. And I said, you know, I bet that Haval mentions unwise people more than wise people. And so I set out to count this. And as I was counting the words for wise and unwise, I came to a thought that I thought was actually much more interesting than the count of wise versus unwise, which is the part of all them that is most clearly separate from the rest of it.

[00:01:51]The part called Lord Faltus Maul. This is stanzas 111 to 137. The part where Oin is addressing someone named Lord Falner near them. We have no idea who that is.

[00:02:02]In that part, he abruptly completely stops talking about wise and unwise. The rest of the poem is chock full of it.

[00:02:12]There are tons of words that are used for wise in this poem. Let me show you what some of those are uh in an easy way while I'm sitting here at the computer.

[00:02:25]We have words like horser which survives uh for example actually as a interestingly as a borrowing into Finnish an archaic finish horsas is is wise in the same way it means something different is used typically in Finnish today there's there's frother there's which is related to gothic swenthos or swints um strong there's snowtor there's ultimately related to German schnel fast words for strong fast things like that often become words for smart right he's quick on the uptake or whatever these words are absolutely they're just all over every part of Hal except load fal and I was just kind of astonished for this right you can't throw a stick and guest filter the first part of hamal This, by the way, talking about the parts.

[00:03:26]I'm not necessarily making a claim about those being original unities either or not being unities with other parts.

[00:03:32]These labels for for regions of the Hamal text are kind of agreed upon by scholars regardless of those opinions about it. You can't throw a stick in gestal without hit hitting something about somebody who's smelter, spinner, or horser, right? Then there's the part right after that called often called Jimmy Oin's the uh part about uh love advice about how men shouldn't trust women and women shouldn't trust men and about them trying to seduce one woman and failing to seduce another also just chalk full of um of horseker and frother and smelter and then you get to run and lel. So the part about runes and the part about Odin's magic spells toward the end. And once again, even though the content of that section isn't really about wisdom, right? It's not proverbial advice like like Gestto is, we actually see those words quite a bit. Load fault and small stands absolutely alone and using none of these words and not using any other adjective for wise or stupid or unwise either. I think that that just about nails in the coffin that Lord Falmis Mall is not part of it and not associated with the other parts of Halimal originally. Now there's other good evidence that Lord Falm stands alone uh with respect to the rest of Hal. One of those lines of evidence is actually from linguistic dating. Now not all not everybody thinks a lot about linguistic dating of texts uh but I'm very interested in it. I've done a lot of independent research on this and if you don't want to listen to a has been on YouTube, there is also a tenure or tenure track faculty member at the University of Indiana who's published a whole book about this. Now, academic publishers being what they are, I think this book is like $350. Um, the ebook is is less and that's what I've got. But Christopher Sap also agrees. Lulus Mall is much later than the rest of them. The rest of Haval he and I agree and and I I believe Lelay Olsson's u work from the University of Bergen agrees most of Haval looks like it's composed in the 900s orally. Of course the text that we have written down is from the 1200s.

[00:05:48]That's a different matter. Lord Hulism looks at least a century after that. It is linguistically later. It is not obsessed with words about wisdom and unwisom the same way. So maybe this point has been made before elsewhere.

[00:06:03]But I think that the fact that low folk and small lacks archaic markers like the Olivan particle uh which I sometimes call the the Germanic augment not to be confused with the Greek augment uh which replaces the ga prefix that we see in in in the closely related language Gothic. Loismal lacks that which is abundant in the rest of homal and lacks words for wise and unwise which are abundant in the rest of homal. So, in looking for the ways that Oin uh calls us stupid in this poem, I realized that uh there was also a flashing red signal that part of this poem does not originally belong with the rest of it. Now, that is not me condemning Lord Falnus Mall. Sometimes people hear that as as a condemnation.

[00:06:49]The fact that it looks like this section was composed by, you know, someone after the Christian conversion. It's not me throwing it in the waistbin. I have a lot of interest in this text regardless of exactly when uh the parts of it were composed. But I think that it's important for knowledge to move forward for us to acknowledge when we recognize that uh something that's been presented as a uh integral whole isn't. And that itself is pretty fascinating. And uh one might think exactly the kind of wisdom OAN would hang on a tree for.

[00:07:26]Bad segway toward the end there. All right folks, if you are interested in reading Haval, let me tell you two places you can do that.

[00:07:36]I have translated it and it is in um the second edition of my translation of the poetic. If you've seen the first edition, the one that's green with the Aurora on it, this one is massively revised and expanded does not include the Old Norse text. If you want the Old Norse text that is in the Wanderers Haval together with uh my updated translation, basically in the second edition of the poetic, all the other poems are updated like the Wanderers Haval is updated. Uh the translation relative to the first edition poetic.

[00:08:12]uh the introduction in the second edition of the poetic edeta is probably a little bit better. I you know have six years more experience relative to the wander of them all in terms of um research on dating poems research on meter that kind of thing. Um, but but again, if you want the uh the old Norse text and the commentary on it, that's in the waters of them all. And just to dispel a rumor for anybody else out there still listening to this, the cowboy is not the only translation I ever made that is an incomplete translation of all of Hal. That's only the first part guess of because it's the only part that made sense in a, you know, cowboy grandfather's voice, cowboy minor grandfather's voice. Uh I do have an entire translation of all them all uh which is in both of those books and uh which reflects again a quarter century of working with this text with great interest and fascination and affection for it. All right, thanks to those out there buying the books. Thanks to those out there supporting the channel on Patreon.