Hávamál

Odin’s Love Quests

Stanzas 94–100 of the Hávamál, in Olive Bray’s 1908 translation.

Reference: stanzas 94–100 (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 94–100

94.
This once I felt when I sat without
in the reeds, and looked for my love;
body and soul of me was that sweet maiden
yet never I won her as wife.

95.
Billing's daughter I found on her bed,
fairer than sunlight sleeping,
and the sweets of lordship seemed to me nought,
save I lived with that lovely form.

96.
"Yet nearer evening come thou, Odin,
if thou wilt woo a maiden:
all were undone save two knew alone
such a secret deed of shame."

97.
So away I turned from my wise intent,
and deemed my joy assured,
for all her liking and all her love
I weened that I yet should win.

98.
When I came ere long the war troop bold
were watching and waking all:
with burning brands and torches borne
they showed me my sorrowful way.

99.
Yet nearer morning I went, once more, --
the housefolk slept in the hall,
but soon I found a barking dog
tied fast to that fair maid's couch.

100.
Many a sweet maid when one knows her mind
is fickle found towards men:
I proved it well when that prudent lass
I sought to lead astray:
shrewd maid, she sought me with every insult
and I won therewith no wife.

Historical evidence

In the manuscripts and scholarship

This section holds the story of Odin’s failed attempt on the daughter of Billing. Bellows places it at his stanzas 96 to 102, preceded by the discourse on women, which he thought probably entered the poem first. Bray’s numbering is about one lower.

Here the poem briefly turns from proverbs to narrative, with Odin speaking of his own experience, a pattern the Hávamál repeats in its passages on the mead of poetry and on winning the runes. Some scholars see this story, together with the passage before it, as a later insertion. The Codex Regius is the only manuscript that preserves it. Bellows treats the Hávamál as a gathering of originally separate pieces, so talk of “interpolations” is better understood as describing the joins between different poems.

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