Hávamál
Praise it when it has proved itself
Six things are praised only at the right moment: the day at evening, a weapon once tried, ice once crossed, ale once drunk. The list also includes a wife when dead and a maid when married.
Reference: stanza 80 (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 80
80.
Praise day at even, a wife when dead,
a weapon when tried, a maid when married,
ice when 'tis crossed, and ale when 'tis drunk.
- 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 80 (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
Praise the day at evening, a wife when she is dead, a weapon when it has been tried, a maid when she is married, ice when it has been crossed, and ale when it has been drunk.
- 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 80 (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
With this stanza the verse form changes. Bellows’s note says the metre shifts abruptly to málaháttr and offers his account of why: the stanza before it, on a fool’s pride in love, led some reciter, compiler or copyist to insert stanzas on the ways of women at this point. He treats the whole run from here to the story of Odin and Billing’s daughter as a block that grew by stages, with a confused order. Most of the Hávamál is in ljóðaháttr, so a change of metre is one of the signs scholars use to see where separate pieces were joined.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936), Notes to the Hovamol
Modern interpretation
Read today, the stanza is about waiting for the result before you praise anything. Two of its examples, praising a wife only when she is dead and a maid only when she is married, belong to the poem’s own world rather than ours. That is a modern reading.
Questions to sit with
- What have you praised too early? What has turned out better, or worse, than you could have said at the start?