Mythological Motivation in Eddic Heroic Poetry: Interpreting Grottasöngr (original) (raw)

2013, Revisiting the Poetic Edda. Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 159–182

In an article on Grottasöngr from 1990, Joseph Harris promoted the view of Eddic tradition as a form of intertextuality—each oral poem a kind of " concretation of tradition " —and advocated the exploration of, as he put it, " the principles of code coherence in the matrix form " revealed by each text (1990, 238–239). Some of Harris's ideas were taken up by Vésteinn Ólason, who, in his 2005 analysis of the poem, considered its evident artistry as well as its relationship to other Eddic mythological poems. In this chapter, I take up the challenge posed by Harris to articulate in detail the codes underlying the poem's composition by analyzing the way in which Grot-tasöngr switches between discursive modes and draws on conventions of Eddic staging, with particular attention to the degree to which mythological ideas are engaged in the work. The title of the poem, which like those of many other Eddic poems is a compound made up of a noun denoting the sound of human speech and the possessive form of a name (Quinn 1990), departs from the pattern in using the possessive form of the name of an inanimate object (the millstone Grotti) as the fi rst component of the compound , rather than the personal names of the speakers, Fenja and Menja, who identify themselves as giantesses during the course of the poem. In this defl ection from convention, we may perceive the principal conceit of the poem: the song of Grotti is the expression of supernatural power misap-prehended by Fróði, the unwise king who interprets the sound of milling as the fulfi llment of his greedy exploitation of the mill-workers to mint him wealth. Accordingly, the song that he is unable to tune into refers both to the sound of the milling and the words chanted by the giantesses, the latter making explicit his political misprision. Being voiced by giantesses, the millstone's song is invested with considerable mythological portent, and an encounter between a king and his slaves is transformed in the poem into a clash between giant-kind (who are represented as controlling the natural resources of the world) and a human leader exposed for his folly in believing he could exploit their power without having fi rst gained their favor. The mode of the poem, the dramatization of an encounter between speakers from diff erent mythological spheres, is one familiar from a number of Eddic poems, with Vafþrúðnismál (The Words of Vafþrúðnir)