Page:Poeticedda00belluoft.djvu/183

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Hymiskvitha

36.[1] Not long had they fared,  ere backwards lookedThe son of Othin,  once more to see;From their caves in the east  beheld he comingWith Hymir the throng  of the many-headed.
37.[2] He stood and cast  from his back the kettle,And Mjollnir, the lover  of murder, he wielded;................So all the whales  of the waste he slew.
38.[3] Not long had they fared  ere one there layOf Hlorrithi's goats  half-dead on the ground;In his leg the pole-horse  there was lame;The deed the evil  Loki had done.
  1. ↑ The many-headed: The giants, although rarely designated as a race in this way, sometimes had two or more heads; cf. stanza 8, Skirnismol, 31 and Vafthruthnismol, 33. Hymir's mother is, however, the only many-headed giant actually to appear in the action of the poems, and it is safe to assume that the tradition as a whole belongs to the period of Norse folk-tales of the märchen order.
  2. ↑ No gap is indicated in the manuscripts. Some editors put the missing line as 2, some as 3, and some, leaving the present three lines together, add a fourth, and metrically incorrect, one from late paper manuscripts: "Who with Hymir  followed after." Whales of waste: giants.
  3. ↑ According to Snorri, when Thor set out with Loki (not Tyr) for the giants' land, he stopped first at a peasant's house (cf. stanza 7 and note). There he proceeded to cook his own goats for supper. The peasant's son, Thjalfi, eager to get at the marrow, split one of the leg-bones with his knife. The next morning, when Thor was ready to proceed with his journey, he called the goats to life again, but one of them proved irretrievably lame. His wrath led the peasant to give him both his children as

[149]

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.