Poems

Wrath of a Tiny Etin?

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In his book Runelore (on page 188), Edred Thorsson notes that etins don’t have to be of great size, although Ymir certainly is. Sometimes they can be small, and he notes that, “the name of a certain beetle in Old Norse is jötunuxi [etin-ox].” He also reckons them to be non-evolving beings. I found myself wondering if viruses can be seen as etins after a fashion, especially after I got stricken with one this past week. They certainly have no consciousness, at least not any that would be remotely familiar to humans, as they occupy a sort of borderland between life and non-life. Unfortunately for us, they do evolve somewhat to thwart efforts to wipe them out entirely. Nonetheless, they remain viruses despite the changes they undergo, and so in another sense, they don’t evolve.

The particular virus that struck me was a cold, or at least I thought so at first. It was rather nasty, as if it were in tryouts to be the flu. The worst of it for me has past, however. So for this update, I wrote a short verse about it. It is two stanzas of fornyrðislag.

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Audio for Building Asgard’s Wall

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Today I present an audio recording of another eddic tale that I’ve set in verse. This time, it is Building Asgard’s Wall, which was posted as text last March. In this spoken version, the words are different in a few places from what I posted, and the original post has not been edited.

Here is the downloadable file of me reciting the poem:
Eirik Westcoat – Building Asgard’s Wall

And here is the inline player:

Enjoy! Feel free to share the file. For details, see the Creative Commons link below.

This post is:
Copyright © 2014 Eirik Westcoat.
All rights reserved.

The linked audio file of Building Asgard’s Wall is:
Copyright © 2014 Eirik Westcoat.
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives License.

Wrath of Frost Giants?

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Continuing the trend of poems that are a bit different from what’s usually on this blog, I’ve written a poem about the extreme cold that much of the United States experienced at the time of this post. It is in four stanzas of ljóðaháttr. Its title is “Wrath of Frost Giants?”

The Cold has come
to our Commonwealth;
the Freeze is pouring forth.
Is it focused wrath
from frost giants?
Or something else thats seeps?

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The Duel, Part 2

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Concluding from last week, here are the final ten stanzas of “The Duel.”

Some of you may be wondering what Mokkurkalfi is doing in this tale. His presence probably strikes modern readers as a bit weird. Also peculiar is the emphasis that Snorri seems to put on the hearts of Hrungnir and Mokkurkalfi. There are perhaps some initiatory themes at work here, but whatever such strange details might mean, I prefer to keep them in rather than remove them out of a lack of understanding. The lore contains many mysteries, and we cannot learn from them if we start throwing them out simply because they don’t make sense at our current levels of understanding. But enough of the soapbox, here’s the rest of the poem.

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The Duel, Part 1

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I present another poetic rendering of a prose tale from the lore. It is the story of the first (and probably last) giant to challenge Thor to a formal duel, and it has several things in common with the last Thor story I posted three months ago about his visit to Geirrod (part 1 and part 2). Just like that tale, Snorri presents in it prose with many details, and he also quotes from a difficult skaldic poem that mentions the story as well. (The skaldic poem is Haustlöng by Þjóðólfr of Hvinir.)

Rather than a difficult skaldic meter, I have written my retelling in 20 stanzas of my usual and more accessible fornyrðislag. The spellings have been anglicized throughout. It is well known that Odin has many different names in the lore; less well known is that Thor also has many names, although not as many as Odin, of course. The reader will see quite a few of those names in this poem. Like the previous Thor tale, I present the first half here today, and the second half will follow next Wednesday. The poem’s title is simply “The Duel.”

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Gunnlaðarljóð

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Today’s poem is a lore poem, but one rather different from others posted here. It is a retelling of Odin’s winning of the poetic mead, but instead of following Odin’s point of view (as my poem The Mead Quest did), my poem today follows Gunnlod’s point of view. However, any such tale must necessarily be somewhat speculative. All that Snorri’s Edda tells us about Gunnlod is that her father Suttung put her in charge of guarding the mead (after he got it from the dwarves), and that: “Bolverk went to where Gunnlod was and lay with her for three nights and then she let him drink three draughts of the mead.” (The quote is from the Anthony Faulkes translation.) The Hávamál scarcely tells us more, but there seems to be some implication that Gunnlod helped Odin escape. (See stanzas 13-14 and 104-110 for the somewhat cryptic talk about it all.) The modern day poet must necessarily invent some motivation or other for Gunnlod in this story. We can probably assume she’s unhappy with her father. (A possibly similar father-daughter antagonism seems to be at work in the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen.) She may also have been spell-bound, figuratively or literally, by Odin. Probably other things must be invented as well to finish the story, but I won’t try to make an exhaustive list of it. Suffice it to say that my story here should *not* be thought of as authoritative or canonical. Other Asatruar will probably have different ideas about what Gunnlod’s motives were.

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Audio for The Binding of Fenrir

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Today I present an audio recording of another eddic tale that I’ve set in verse. This time, it is The Binding of Fenrir, which was posted as text back in May in part 1 and part 2. In this spoken version, the words are different in a few places from what I posted, and the original posts have not been edited.

Here is the downloadable file of me reciting the poem:

Eirik Westcoat – The Binding of Fenrir

And here is the inline player:

Enjoy! Feel free to share the file. For details, see the Creative Commons link below.

This post is:
Copyright © 2013 Eirik Westcoat.
All rights reserved.

The linked audio file of The Binding of Fenrir is:
Copyright © 2013 Eirik Westcoat.
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives License.

More Poetic Hallowings

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This week I have some more poetic hallowings share. It has been quite a while since I last posted some hallowings. Today I present a fire warding, a sword warding, and a three wells water warding. Like the previous set, they are designed for the hallowing of what is ordinarily profane space in preparation for Asatru ritual. They should be done with the tools mentioned. That is, if you’re reciting the sword warding to hallow your ritual space, it is best to actually carry a sword at the time. Also, if possible, one should walk the boundaries of the space to be hallowed when reciting them. These are all written in fornyrðislag.

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