Step 11 of 12 · Home, Kin and Belonging
The pine on the hill
Why this step
Stanza 50 shows what it is to be outside every circle. A pine on a hill, with neither bark nor needles to shelter it, wastes away, and the poem says the same of a man whom nobody loves. The entry reads it today as a picture of loneliness, and of how much we depend on the people who shelter us. It is the bleakest step in the trail, and the shortest.
The text, stanza 50
50.
The pine tree wastes which is perched on the hill,
nor bark nor needles shelter it;
such is the man whom none doth love;
for what should he longer live?
- 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 50 (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.
From the Lorebook
A pine standing on a hill with no bark or needles to shelter it wastes away. The speaker compares it to a man whom nobody loves.