Hávamál
The guest at the door
A traveller is advised to look carefully at every doorway and hall before entering, because you cannot know in advance where an enemy may be sitting.
Reference: stanza 1 (Bray’s numbering) (The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund’s Edda, part I: The Mythological Poems); stanza 1 (Bellows numbering) (The Poetic Edda)
The text, stanza 1
1.
At every door-way,
ere one enters,
one should spy round,
one should pry round
for uncertain is the witting
that there be no foeman sitting,
within, before one on the floor
- 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 1 (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
The poem opens its advice to guests with a warning: before you step through a doorway, look all around you. You cannot be sure who is already inside or where they are sitting, so a careful guest watches first and enters second.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936), stanza 1 (Bellows numbering)
Context
This advice stands at the start of the part of the poem often called the Gestaþáttr, the “guest’s section”. It deals with how to behave as a guest and a traveller, and with hospitality and giving in return. Editions disagree about exactly where this part ends.
The Hávamál is a compilation of shorter pieces, kept in a single 13th-century manuscript. Scholars treat the dating of individual passages as very difficult.
- Wikipedia contributors, Hávamál (opens in a new tab)
In the manuscripts and scholarship
The Hávamál survives as a whole only in the Codex Regius, written in the 1270s. It is the second poem there, after the Völuspá. Stanza 1 is also known from Snorri’s Edda, which quotes it, though most Prose Edda manuscripts leave out its second line. That makes it one of the few stanzas of the poem with a witness outside the Codex Regius. It also opens the part that editors call the Gestaþáttr, “the guest’s section”, usually counted as stanzas 1 to 80 or so. Older scholars tended to treat this section as the oldest layer of the poem, but later writers warn that single lines could have been altered at any point before the 1270s, so firm dating of any one stanza is not possible.
- Henry Adams Bellows (translator), The Poetic Edda (1936)
- Wikipedia, Hávamál (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia, Codex Regius (opens in a new tab)
Modern interpretation
Read today, the passage is often taken as a reminder to look before entering an unfamiliar situation. That is a modern reading. The poem’s own setting is practical advice to a traveller.
Questions to sit with
- Think of a time you walked into a room, a conversation or a decision without looking first. What would a careful look from the doorway have shown you?