Hávamál
No sickness like discontent
Only a person’s own mind knows what is nearest their heart. To the wise no illness is as sore as being unable to find contentment in anything.
Reference: stanza 93 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems)
The text, stanza 93
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.
- Olive Bray (editor and translator), The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems (opens in a new tab) (1908), stanza 93 (Bray’s numbering) Rights: Public domain. Published in 1908, so in the public domain in the United States. Text as edited online by D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh.
In plain English
Only the mind knows what is nearest the heart, and it sees where the soul is turned. To the wise no sickness seems so sore as to find no content in anything.
- Olive Bray (editor and translator), The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems (opens in a new tab) (1908), stanza 93 (Bray’s numbering) Rights: Public domain. Published in 1908, so in the public domain in the United States. Text as edited online by D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh.
In the manuscripts and scholarship
This stanza sit in the long stretch of the poem about love and women. The whole poem survives in the Codex Regius, written in Iceland around 1270. Bellows, whose edition numbers these stanzas two higher than this page, treats stanzas 81 to 95 as an introductory passage on women’s faithlessness and thinks it probably entered the poem first, drawing in the story of Billing’s daughter as an illustration.
Bellows also notes that from stanza 81 the verse form changes, and he reads the stretch up to 102 as a sign of how the poem grew by piecemeal additions. Wikipedia’s summary likewise calls 81 to 102 an ad hoc insertion. Neither claims to know who joined the pieces or when.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936)
- Wikipedia, Hávamál (opens in a new tab)
Modern interpretation
Today this is often read as a statement about restlessness and dissatisfaction as a suffering of its own. That is a modern reading.
Questions to sit with
- Where in your life can you not find “content”? What would “enough” be there?