CALIDAD CONTABLE

The poems give us several examples of the calling up of the dead, and it is interesting to see whether there is any agreement as to the purpose for which they are summoned. Here the whole matter is taken out of the familiar world, and is represented as taking place within the realm of the gods. The supernatural beings themselves are depicted as eager to establish communication with another realm, the realm of the dead, into which, even for them, there is no immediate and simple entry.

The most experienced practitioner of the art is Othin. In Baldrs Draumar he is represented as riding down the road to He!, and finally summoning a dead seeress from her grave on the east side of Hel’s hail. He chants what are described as ‘corpse-spells’

(val galdrar) over the grave ‘until perforce she arose, and words came from the corpse’

(V. 4). Her first words are of reproach; in thus summoning her he has, she says, ‘rendered harder my path of suffering’. She goes on to describe in what, to a modern mind, are the most vivid lines of the poem, how long she has lain dead:

Snowed on with snow, beaten with rain, Drenched with the dew....

But nevertheless she can give to Othin the knowledge he craves, and foretell to him the death of Balder, for whose coming the halls of Hel are decked with gold and stocked with mead. Then at one question which he asks, which to us is practically incomprehensible, as to the identity of a certain weeping maiden or maidens, she realises the true identity of her questioner, and the poem ends on a note of mutual enmity and with a grim prophecy from the völva (seeress) of the ultimate fate of Othin at Ragnarrökr.

The poem as it stands is a series of problems; why, for instance, is the völva’s grave placed inside Hel, the realm of the dead? There is no indication that we are to view this as a second death, and that the seeress has, in the words of Vafþrúðnismál, ‘died out of Hel’.

One would hardly expect it to be necessary both for Othin to take the road to the realm of the dead and for the inhabitant of the grave to be roused up to meet him, unless the place where they meet is to be regarded as a kind of half-way station between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living. Presumably here we are to forget Othin’s position as god of the dead, and regard him rather as the representative of the living world of the gods, in contrast to the realm of death to

which Balder journeyed, and where Hermóðr followed him for a little while.

Othin’s purpose in consulting the dead is clear; she alone possesses that information about the future which can explain the threatening dreams that have troubled Balder, and tell Othin the nature of the fate that will befall his son, and whether revenge for his death will be permitted. This precious information is wrung reluctantly from the völva’s lips.

She declares at intervals:

I have spoken unwilling (lit. nauðig—’of necessity’, ‘by compulsion’), Now must I be silent,

and only the command of Othin—’be not silent, völva’, followed by renewed questioning, drags more information from her.

Two other poems in the Edda are presented as the prophetic utterances of a völva; these are the Völuspá and Völuspá bin Skamma. In the first of these the speaker declares that she is bidden by Othin (Valfóðr) to tell what she knows of the past. Here we find the two-fold aspect of mantic wisdom—knowledge of the past being as important and as secret as the knowledge of the future, and both being revealed by one with special wisdom beyond the normal reach of gods and men alike; for the vö!va, having traced the history of the worlds, proceeds to outline their ultimate destiny. She too, like the völva of Baldrs Draumar, will not continue without repeated questioning, for again we have a refrain which punctuates the poem, after it has advanced a certain way: Vituð ér enn eða hvat?—

which maybe roughly translated: ‘Would you know yet more, and what?” The other poem, the Völuspá bin Skamma, contains no reference to the reason why the völva has been summoned. As we have it, it begins at once with the narrative of events, and ends as suddenly with a reference to the fall of Othin before the wolf, reminiscent of the ending of Baldrs Draumar. Here too, however, we have the familiar refrain:

Much have I told you, and much more can tell, Needs must I learn it so; will you know further?

1 It has been suggested that the last line of the poem should run in the form given in one MS.— Now she must sink’, referring to the disappearance of the völva into the grave, as in the other poem. F. Jónsson however (Edda, p. 20) disagrees, and argues that there are no grounds for supposing that the völva in this case has been summoned from the grave. He advocates the reading ‘Nú mun harm sökkvask’.

There is evidently a close connection between these three poems, and even if there is no reason to suggest that the vö!va in either of the two poems last mentioned has been roused from the dead, the fact that this is the background given in Baldrs Draumar is in itself of great interest, because it establishes a link between the prophetic utterances of the völva and the wisdom of the dead.

The attitude of the dead roused from the grave is not necessarily a hostile one. In Grógaldr we have an episode where Svipdagr, before going out on a perilous quest, consults his dead mother and begs her to teach him certain charms to guard him against danger. The poem opens with his summons to the dead, with no indication whether, as in the case of Othin, a journey was first needed to bring him to the grave:

Awake, Gróa! Awake, good woman!

Awake at the door of the dead!

If you remember bidding your son Come to your grave cairn.

The reply, like that of the völva, emphasises the actual resting place in the grave, and gives no hint of a realm of the dead elsewhere, from which her spirit is recalled:

What has my only son now at heart?

What misfortune has come to you

That you call on your mother, passed into the earth, And gone from the world of men?

…Here again the reason for calling up the dead is to gain knowledge. Svipdagr protests he has not the necessary wisdom and experience to travel the path ‘where none go’ to Menglöð. For this journey he needs certain magic spells, and these she teaches him.

There are spells for the loosening of burdens, for protection against wandering, joyless, far from the path, and against overwhelming rivers of Hel; spells against lurking foes and against fetters on the limbs; spells which will guard against stormy seas, bitter cold, and ghosts of malignant Christian women wandering in the night; and finally a spell to give the necessary wisdom for the contest with a terrible giant. It seems clear that such spells are intended for no ordinary journey, but for entrance into supernatural realms; this is a question which will need to be discussed further in the next chapter.

It would seem as if in the HyndluIjóð we have another consultation

of the dead, though this is not as evident as in Grógaldr. It begins with an invocation by Freyja to awaken Hyndla, the giantess who ‘dwells in a cavern’. She begs her to ride with her to Valhöll, and the scene is set in valsinni, the ‘road of the slain’ (VV. 6 and 7).

While Freyja sits on her boar, in reality the disguised Ottarr, and Hyndla upon her wolf, the giantess is persuaded to recite the full list of the ancestors of Ottarr, Freyja’s human lover. When the full list is told Hyndla discovers the trick that has been played on her and is furious; she parts from Freyja with bitter words and retires to sleep again. Thus the rousing of the unwilling sleeper, the gaining of the necessary information, the discovery of disguised identity at the end, and the parting with abuse on both sides are very similar to the situation in Baldrs Draumar.

Certain resemblances to the theme of the awakened sleeper can be seen too in Sigrdrífumál.¹ The poem opens with an inquiry from the woman, whose identity is only given us in the prose, as to who has broken her slumber. Sigurðr replies by telling who he is, and then after a kind of salutation to day and night and the gods and goddesses, she continues:

Long have I slept, Long have I slumbered, Long are the woes of men,

a note very reminiscent of the völva raised from the sleep of death. The rest of the poem deals with the wisdom which she imparts to Sigurðr is again closely connected with spells, this time runic ones, the origin of which she attributes to Othin.

Together with the Edda poems which we have examined, we may also notice a story from Saxo. Harthgrepa, the mysterious foster-mother of Hadingus, is on one occasion anxious to learn their future fortunes. They chanced, says Saxo, to pass the night in a house where a funeral was in progress:

…Here, desiring to pry into the purposes of heaven by the help of a magic espial, she graved on wood some very dreadful spells, and caused Hadingus to put them under the dead man’s tongue; thus forcing him to utter, with the voice so given, a strain terrible to hear

(I. XXIV, p. 27, Elton’s translation).

In this strain, as given by Saxo, the dead rebukes the woman who has caused him to speak: Contrary to my will and purpose, I must

1 For a discussion of the problems connected with the identity of the sleeper in this poem, see p. 181 below.

declare some bitter tidings.’ This has a striking resemblance to the words of the völva roused by Othin. As Saxo expresses it, the deed is a recall of the spirit back from Tartarus. However a closer examination renders it doubtful whether such an idea was ever present in Saxo’s source; the expression, in particular, ‘whoso hath called me, who am lifeless and dead, back from the abode below, and hath brought me into the upper air’

rather appears to resemble the words of the völva, whose emphasis is on the extreme deadness of her condition, and who gives no hint of a returning soul as something separate from the body. It is noticeable that the dead man foretells the death of her who has roused him, just as the völva looks forward with apparent relish to the fate of her tormentor, Othin.

In these poems and the Saxo passage which we have studied, it is clear that there is a certain amount of agreement. The sleeper is aroused from a sleep which may or may not be specified as the sleep of death in order to impart special knowledge to the inquirer.

Usually at the end we are told that the sleeper returns to sleep; sometimes, though not always, great indignation is shown because the slumber has been broken, and the concluding words uttered are a prophecy of ill-fortune to come upon the rash intruder.

The wisdom which is imparted is of two kinds. Either it consists of a revelation from the future or the past of what is normally hidden—the doom of the world, the fate of the individual or the line of dead ancestors behind a man of noble rank—or else it consists of spells which give power to the possessor, which can guard him against the baleful magic of others, or give him the power to overcome certain perils in his journeyings.