Hávamál

Lessons for Lovers

Stanzas 89–93 of the Hávamál, in Olive Bray’s 1908 translation.

Reference: stanzas 89–93 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems); Introduction (The Poetic Edda)

Myth and literature · Quotation

The text, stanzas 89–93

89.
Now plainly I speak, since both I have seen;
unfaithful is man to maid;
we speak them fairest when thoughts are falsest
and wile the wisest of hearts.

90.
-- Let him speak soft words and offer wealth
who longs for a woman's love,
praise the shape of the shining maid --
he wins who thus doth woo.

91.
-- Never a whit should one blame another
whom love hath brought into bonds:
oft a witching form will fetch the wise
which holds not the heart of fools.

92.
Never a whit should one blame another
for a folly which many befalls;
the might of love makes sons of men
into fools who once were wise.

93.
The mind knows alone what is nearest the heart
and sees where the soul is turned:
no sickness seems to the wise so sore
as in nought to know content.

Historical evidence

In the manuscripts and scholarship

These stanzas continue the discussion of love and women that begins just before them. In Bellows’s plan the run from his stanzas 81 to 95 is a single discourse on women’s unreliability and on how to win them, and he thought it probably came into the poem before the stories of Odin’s love adventures that follow. Bray’s numbering sits about one stanza earlier than Bellows’s here.

Some scholars see this block, together with the adventures after it, as perhaps an ad hoc insertion into the Hávamál. Like the rest of the poem it is preserved in the Codex Regius alone. Bellows’s general view is that the Hávamál was built by joining separate pieces of wisdom poetry credited to Odin, so the boundaries between sections show where one piece ends and another begins.

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