Lævateinn and Sinmara

27. “Hævatein the twig is named, and Lopt plucked it, down by the gate of Death. In an iron chest it lies with Sinmoera, and is with nine strong locks secured.”

Fjölsvinnsmál is a question-and-answer poem at the gate of a hall ringed by flames. The watchman Fjölsviðr is asked what weapon can kill the cock Víðófnir, who sits in the branches of a tree. He names the wand Lævateinn, which Lopt (Loki) plucked at the gate of death, and says it lies in an iron chest with Sinmara, secured by nine locks. To win it, the questioner must give her a tail-feather of the cock.

In Bellows’s rendering of an earlier stanza, the cock’s watchfulness troubles both Surt and Sinmora. Thorpe’s translation of that stanza does not name them, so the two translations differ. The poem never calls Lævateinn a sword of Surtr and never says where the chest stands.

The names are read differently. Lævateinn can be taken as “wounding twig” or “wand”; Bellows noted that the manuscripts differ on its form and rejected the idea that it is the mistletoe that killed Baldr. Sinmara is often taken to be Surtr’s female companion, since Bellows read the earlier stanza as pairing them, and Lee Hollander tentatively calls her his wife, but this rests on a line that some editors emend.

The poem says nothing of Múspell, so this entry does not attach the wand to the fire world, and nothing in the text calls it Surtr’s weapon. For Surtr see his own entry.