Essays on Eddic Poetry (Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series (TONIS)) by McKinnell John

Author:McKinnell, John [McKinnell, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781442669277
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 2014-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

This reminiscence diminishes Óðinn somewhat in order to offer Loki a moderately honourable escape from the quarrel if he wants to take it.

But why is it Heimdallr who intervenes at this point? He has not been attacked, nor has anything just been said to give him a guilty conscience. It is true that he is Loki’s archetypal opponent, both at Ragnarǫk and in the early days of the gods,27 but that does not explain why he intervenes here rather than at any other moment, nor why his speech is relatively conciliatory. I have only a tentative suggestion to make about this. The end of the stanza before Heimdallr speaks is concerned with Byggvir’s cowardice when men are fighting in the hall; perhaps we should imagine Loki looking round for someone to attack in order to demonstrate his point. The only god against whom he ever fights physically is Heimdallr, so he is the obvious choice, and as Loki grabs Heimdallr we should imagine Byggvir diving for the straw just as Loki says he does. Heimdallr is then forced to respond in physical self-defence, but he knows what Loki is trying to achieve by provoking him, so he merely replies that Loki is fighting drunk. The drawback about this theory is that it would take quite a gifted performer to make it clear to the audience what is going on, though a light-hearted experiment with students at Durham has suggested that it might be quite possible if there were more than one performer.28 It could be that the reason why Heimdallr is brought in at this point is simply that the poet must consider him at some point and has not yet done so; but in view of the careful motivation of most of the other interventions in the poem, this does not seem likely.

The other problem in this section concerns the implication of Loki’s reply in st. 48. It is difficult to see why he should taunt Heimdallr with the mere fact of his role as watchman of the gods, though he could be suggesting that it is a demeaning life because it ties Heimdallr to one place. That would explain Skaði’s reference to Loki’s own impending loss of liberty in the next stanza, so it is probably part of the meaning. But it leaves unexplained the strange statement aurgo baki þú munt æ vera. Bugge (1867), 401 suggested that aurgo is equivalent to ǫrgu, ‘stiff’, in which case Loki would be taunting Heimdallr with the discomfort of his extreme physical (and moral) uprightness. But as all Loki’s other taunts are about what the gods themselves would consider their vices, this sneer against virtue seems unlikely. Magnus Olsen (1960), II, 44 tentatively suggests that aurgo may come from argr, ‘homosexual’ or ‘cowardly’, but it is difficult to make sense of that in this context, and an accusation that Heimdallr is argr would be out of keeping with every other tradition about him, and therefore not the sort of original invention that the poet makes elsewhere.

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