ABSTRACT
The story in this part of Hávamál works on its own terms as an analogue for that of Geat and Mæthild in Deor 14-16. The setting is heroic, with an earl on one side and a lady, probably a married woman, with her retinue of armed men in a riverside hall on the other. Hávamál has no other footing for this adventure in the ‘heroic age’, but the early modern ballads of Gaute and Magnild in Norway, and of Gauti and Magnildur in Iceland, tell us that Geat and Mæthild had their story in Scandinavia probably from medieval times (Malone 1961: 8-9), but the story in each ballad, that of a harpist who sings his wife back from the dead, is clearly different. If we take it to have been supplanted by the myth of Orpheus, it is possible that the earlier story was in line with that of Geat and Mæthild. Óðinn is elsewhere known as ‘Gautr’, which is the Norse form of ‘Geat’, and in this section of Hávamál, at any rate, he is likewise involved with a woman who tricks him into a night of frustrated desire. Of the two possibilities with the ‘Billings mær’ construction, that mær ‘girl’ plus a male name means ‘daughter’ or ‘wife’, the young woman’s role as Billingr’s wife is the more likely (Nordal 1936). In Hávamál, the coveted wife is named only in her relation to a certain ‘Billingr’. The fact that Billingr is elsewhere twice as a dwarf ’s name should not infl uence a reading of the story in Hávamál, which seems to be drawn from a non-mythological tradition. This narrative and its sequel in the tale of Óðinn and Gunnllð (stanzas 104-110; see The Mead of Poetry, Gods of the Vikings, Custom Version) could have been composed in the later twelfth century as a sequence with which to improve an existing bridge between the standard and mystical gnomic parts of Hávamál, in stanzas 1-77 and 111-64 respectively (North 1991: 136-8). John McKinnell has also proposed that ‘Hávamál B’, as he calls this pair of love stories, was composed at this time in emulation of Ovid’s adulterous Ars amatoria or other love poetry of the kind that is known to have been read in monasteries in Iceland (2005: 107). These suggestions fi t the earlier theory that Óðinn’s phrase hold ok hjarta ‘fl esh and blood’ in stanza 96 is derived from an expression in French and German romances from the twelfth century (von See 1978).
