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Poetic Edda
Win he shall who well can see,And wedge-like forms his men for the fray.
24.[1] "Foul is the sign if thy foot shall stumble As thou goest forth to fight;Goddesses baneful at both thy sides Will that wounds thou shalt get.
25.[2] "Combed and washed shall the wise man go, And a meal at morn shall take;For unknown it is where at eve he may be; It is ill thy luck to lose."
[3]Sigurth had a great battle with Lyngvi[4], the son of
- ↑ Goddesses: Norse mythology included an almost limitless number of minor deities, the female ones, both kind and unkind, being generally classed among the lesser Norns.
- ↑ This stanza almost certainly had nothing originally to do with the others in this passage; it may have been taken from a longer version of the Hovamol itself.
- ↑ Prose.
- ↑ Lyngvi: the son of Hunding who killed Sigmund in jealousy of his marriage with Hjordis; cf. Fra Dautha Sinfjotla and note.
- ↑ The Volsungasaga names one brother who was with Lyngvi in the battle, Hjorvarth, and Sigurth kills him as readily as if he had not already been killed long before by Helgi. But, as has been seen, it was nothing for a man to be killed in two or three different ways.
common-sense advice, as distinct from omens, given in the last lines of stanza 22. Moon's sister: the sun; cf. Vafthruthnismol, 23 and note. Wedge-like: the wedge formation (prescribed anew in 1920 for the United States Army under certain circumstances) was said to have been invented by Othin himself, and taught by him only to the most favored warriors.
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