Óttarr and Hyndla: Asking a Goddess for Ancestry

8. False are thou, Freyia! who temptest me: by thy eyes thou showest it, so fixed upon us; while thou thy man hast on the dead-road, the young Ottar, Innstein’s son.

11. An offer-stead to me he raised, with stones constructed; now is that stone as glass become. With the blood of oxen he newly sprinkled it. Ottar ever trusted in the Asyniur.

43. Bear thou the memory-cup to my guest, so that he may all the words repeat of this, discourse, on the third morn, when he and Angantyr reckon up races.

Hyndluljóð opens with Freyja waking the giantess Hyndla and proposing that they ride together. Her purpose is to learn the ancestry of Óttarr, son of Innsteinn, who is disputing an inheritance with Angantýr. Hyndla scoffs that Freyja has a man with her; Freyja answers that the boar she rides, Hildisvíni, was made by the dwarfs Dáinn and Nabbi. Editors read Óttarr as that boar, in Freyja’s telling.

Freyja says Óttarr raised her a stone altar and reddened it with the blood of oxen. Hyndla resists with insults, then names his forebears at length. Freyja asks for the memory-drink so he can repeat it all; Hyndla is unwilling, Freyja threatens her with fire, and the giantess gives the drink with a curse that Freyja turns into a blessing.

Óttarr is not Ohthere (Ottar), the ninth-century traveller from Hálogaland who has his own entry on this site, Ohthere of Hálogaland. The shared name is all they have in common here.

The entry is listed under Vanaheim because Freyja is a goddess of the Vanir. The poem itself never places the ride, the cave or the altar in Vanaheimr, and nothing quoted here does. Hyndla is called a giantess in the poem, and Thorpe’s headnote calls her a vala.

The boar identification and the assigning of each stanza to Freyja or Hyndla come from editors, since the poem is not marked with speakers.