Hávamál
A maiden’s words
The speaker says nobody should trust a maiden’s speech or a woman’s words, because their hearts were shaped on a whirling wheel with falsehood fixed in their breasts.
Reference: stanza 83 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems); Notes to the Hovamol (The Poetic Edda)
The text, stanza 83
83.
The speech of a maiden should no man trust
nor the words which a woman says;
for their hearts were shaped on a whirling wheel
and falsehood fixed in their breasts.
- 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 83 (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
No man should trust the speech of a maiden, or the words of a woman, because their hearts were shaped on a whirling wheel and falsehood was fixed in their breasts.
- 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 83 (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.
Where it sits
Stanza 83 is the first of several lines in this part that generalise about women; see also “woman’s bed-talk” in stanza 85 and the comparison in stanza 88. A few stanzas later, in “Lessons for Lovers”, stanza 89 says that “unfaithful is man to maid”, so the poem as it stands in this translation holds both views.
- 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 83 (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
Lines of this stanza, the ones about hearts fashioned on a whirling wheel and fickle breasts, are quoted in Fóstbræðra saga, a saga of the thirteenth century. Together with the first stanza, which Snorri quotes, this is one of only two short passages of the Hávamál known outside the Codex Regius. Bellows says two lines are quoted; Wikipedia says three, so accounts differ on how much.
Bellows counts the stanza as 84 and says it picks up the theme of women’s fickleness from the stanzas before it. It is followed in the manuscript by a list of other untrustworthy things in a different metre.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936), Notes to the Hovamol
- Wikipedia, Hávamál (opens in a new tab)
Modern interpretation
This is a sweeping claim about women that most readers today do not accept. It is usually read as showing the attitudes of the poem’s world, not as advice to follow. That is a modern reading.
Questions to sit with
- When have you trusted or distrusted someone because of the group they belong to, rather than because of what they have done?