This document was produced as part of the Text Encoding and Semantic Representation examination, which required creating an XML/TEI-encoded version of a chosen text. To conceptually link ten selected items—more specifically a recording of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries—a literary reference to Valhalla and the Valkyries was deliberately sought. The Poetic Edda was identified as the ideal source, being the most significant collection of mythological and heroic poetry in Old Norse tradition.
The Poetic Edda is the modern designation for a collection of anonymous Old Norse narrative poems written in alliterative verse. Separate from the related Prose Edda, it remains a cornerstone for the study of Old Norse literature. Among its various versions, the most significant is the medieval Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, which preserves 31 poems. These poems mainly adopt the fornyrðislag (“old story metre”), alongside the málaháttr (“speech form”), with about a quarter composed in ljóðaháttr (“song form”). Their language tends to be direct and unembellished, making use of kennings that are generally simpler and less intricate than those in skaldic poetry. Originally transmitted orally by poets and minstrels across generations, the poems lack named authors, though many reveal distinct stylistic traits that hint at individual creative voices. Despite scholarly efforts to identify possible authors, no definitive attribution has ever been established — leaving the Poetic Edda as a powerful testament to the shared and anonymous artistry of medieval Nordic tradition.
The chosen text specifically focuses on Grímnismál (“The Sayings of Grimnir”), a poem remarkable for its dense catalogue of names—of deities, beings, and places, both real and mythical—and its explicit references to Valhalla and the Valkyries Preserved in the Codex Regius and the fragmentary AM 748 I 4to manuscript, it is spoken in the voice of Grímnir, one of Odin’s many guises—a name itself meaning “hooded” or “masked.” The narrative recounts how King Geirröth, by mistake, tortured Odin in this disguise, ultimately bringing about his own death. Composed mostly in ljóðaháttr, Grímnismál is characteristic of wisdom poetry.
The text presented here is an excerpt from the English translation by Henry Adam Bellows—a newspaper editor and early commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission—published as part of the “Scandinavian Classics” series for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, an institution dedicated to cultural exchange between the United States and Northern Europe. This translation was later transcribed and released as an eBook by Project Gutenberg, which served as the primary source for this work.
The XML transcription aimed to be as faithful as possible, retaining special characters, text structure, page layout, and the original use of italics. All words and letters were transcribed verbatim without normalization, since the text had already been modernized from Old Norse to an archaizing form of English by the translator. Spacing was standardized to single spaces. Entities physically present in the narrative were annotated, while others merely mentioned were generally excluded—except for references essential to the project’s RDF graph construction, specifically Valhalla and the Valkyries.
Within the poem, orthographic segmentation was applied, marking individual lines and stanzas, each sequentially numbered. All punctuation from the source text has been preserved. Hyphenation at line breaks was not altered.
Only annotations directly relevant to Valhalla and the Valkyries were included, as they aligned with the conceptual aims of the project. Additional editorial notes, largely redundant, were omitted. The translator provided little commentary on manuscript variation; consequently, no witness list was included, as there were no significant variants to document.
Names and epithets of the characters on stage (except where they referred to the Valkyries) — especially those connected to Odin, who alone is attributed with around fifty epithets, many of which appear in stanza 48 — were encoded through dedicated attributes. As the Valkyries are mentioned but never directly appear in the narrative, they were encoded collectively to highlight their symbolic role rather than as individual figures. Proper names were retained in HTML to remain clickable and linkable to dedicated pages, while the layout was generated with XSL and the XML-to-HTML transformation carried out in Python.
What is especially compelling about Bellows’ translation is his deliberate choice of archaic English: an attempt to echo the cadence and distant resonance of Old Norse, reviving its solemnity for modern readers. Through careful encoding and thoughtful interpretation, this edition seeks to preserve not only the text itself, but the spirit that still breathes through its ancient lines.
The Grimnismol follows theVafthruthnismol in the Codex Regius and is also found complete in
the Arnamagnæan Codex, where also it follows the Vafthruthnismol. Snorri quotes over twenty of
its stanzas.
Like the preceding poem, the Grimnismol is largely encyclopædic in nature, and consists chiefly
of proper names, the last forty-seven stanzas containing no less than two hundred and twenty-five
of these. It is not, however, in dialogue form. As Müllenhoff pointed out, there is underneath the
catalogue of mythological names a consecutive and thoroughly dramatic story. Othin, concealed
under the name of Grimnir, is through an error tortured by King Geirröth. Bound between two
blazing fires, he begins to display his wisdom for the benefit of the king’s little son, Agnar, who
has been kind to him. Gradually he works up to the great final moment, when he declares his true
name, or rather names, to the terrified Geirröth, and the latter falls on his sword and is killed.
For much of this story we do not have to depend on guesswork, for in both manuscripts the poem
itself is preceded by a prose narrative of considerable length, and concluded by a brief prose
statement of the manner of Geirröth’s death. These prose notes, of which there are many in the
Eddic manuscripts, are of considerable interest to the student of early literary forms. Presumably
they were written by the compiler to whom we owe the Eddic collection, who felt that the poems needed
such annotation in order to be clear. Linguistic evidence shows that they were written in
the twelfth or thirteenth century, for they preserve none of the older word-forms which help us to date
many of the poems two or three hundred years earlier.
Without discussing in detail the problems suggested by these prose passages, it is worth noting,
first, that the Eddic poems contain relatively few stanzas of truly narrative verse; and second, that
all of them are based on narratives which must have been more or less familiar to the hearers
of the poems. In other words, the poems seldom aimed to tell stories, although most of them
followed a narrative sequence of ideas. The stories themselves appear to have lived in oral prose
tradition, just as in the case of the sagas; and the prose notes of the manuscripts, in so far as they
contain material not simply drawn from the poems themselves, are relics of this tradition. The
early Norse poets rarely conceived verse as a suitable means for direct story-telling, and in some
of the poems even the simplest action is told in prose "links" between dialogue stanzas.
The applications of this fact, which has been too often overlooked, are almost limitless, for it
suggests a still unwritten chapter in the history of ballad poetry and the so-called "popular" epic.
It implies that narrative among early peoples may frequently have had a period of prose existence
before it was made into verse, and thus puts, for example, a long series of transitional stages
before such a poem as the Iliad. In any case, the prose notes accompanying the Eddic poems
prove that in addition to the poems themselves there existed in the twelfth century a considerable
amount of narrative tradition, presumably in prose form, on which these notes were based by the compiler.
Interpolations in such a poem as the Grimnismol could have been made easily enough, and many
stanzas have undoubtedly crept in from other poems, but the beginning and end of the poem are
clearly marked, and presumably it has come down to us with the same essential outline it had
when it was composed, probably in the first half of the tenth century.
Hrauthung had two sons: one was called Agnar, and the other Geirröth.
Agnar was ten winters old, and Geirröth eight. Once they both rowed in a boat
with their fishing-gear to catch little fish; and the wind drove them out into the
sea. In the darkness of the night they were wrecked on the shore; and going up,
they found a poor peasant, with whom they stayed through the winter. The
housewife took care of Agnar, and the peasant cared for Geirröth, and taught
him wisdom. In the spring the peasant gave him a boat; and when the couple
led them to the shore, the peasant spoke secretly with Geirröth. They had a fair
wind, and came to their father’s landing-place. Geirröth was forward in the
boat; he leaped up on land, but pushed out the boat and said, "Go thou now
where evil may have thee!" The boat drifted out to sea. Geirröth, however,
went up to the house, and was well received, but his father was dead. Then
Geirröth was made king, and became a renowned man.
Othin and Frigg sat in Hlithskjolf and looked over all the worlds. Othin said:
" Seest thou Agnar, thy fosterling, how he begets children with a giantess in the
cave? But Geirröth, my fosterling, is a king, and now rules over his land."
Frigg said: " He is so miserly that he tortures his guests if he thinks that too
many of them come to him." Othin replied that this was the greatest of lies; and
they made a wager about this matter. Frigg sent her maid-servant, Fulla, to
Geirröth. She bade the king beware lest a magician who was come thither to his
land should bewitch him, and told this sign concerning him, that no dog was so
fierce as to leap at him. Now it was a very great slander that King Geirröth was
not hospitable; but nevertheless he had them take the man whom the dogs would not attack. He wore a dark-blue mantle and called himself
Grimnir, but said no more about himself, though he was questioned. The king had him
tortured to make him speak, and set him between two fires, and he sat there
eight nights.King Geirröth had a son ten winters old, and called Agnar after his
father’s brother. Agnar went to Grimnir, and gave him a full horn to drink from,
and said that the king did ill in letting him be tormented without cause. Grimnir
drank from the horn; the fire had come so near that the mantle burned on
Grimnir’s back. He spake:
1. Hot art thou, fire! | too fierce by far;
Get ye now gone, ye flames!
The mantle is burnt, | though I bear it aloft,
And the fire scorches the fur.
2. ’Twixt the fires now | eight nights have I sat,
King Geirröth sat and had his sword on his knee, half drawn from its sheath. But when he heard that Othin was come thither, then he rose up and sought to take
Othin from the fire. The sword slipped from his hand, and fell with the hilt down. The king stumbled and fell forward, and
the sword pierced him through, and slew him. Then Othin vanished, but Agnar long ruled there as king.
Notes
The texts of the two manuscripts differ in many minor details.
Hrauthung: this mythical king is not mentioned elsewhere.
Geirröth: the manuscripts spell his name in various ways.
Frigg: Othin's wife. She and Othin nearly always disagreed in some such way as the one outlined in this story.
Hlithskjolf ("Gate-Shelf"): Othin's watch-tower in heaven, whence he can overlook all the nine worlds; cf. Skirnismol, introductory prose.
s2 - In the original lines 2 and 4 are both too long for the meter, and thus the true form of the stanza is doubtful.
For line 4 both manuscripts have "the land of the Goths" instead of simply "the Goths." The word "Goths" apparently was applied indiscriminately to any South-Germanic people, including the Burgundians as well as the actual Goths, and thus here has no specific application; cf. Gripisspo, 35 and note.
s3 -
Veratyr ("Lord of Men"): Othin. The "gift" which Agnar receives is Othin's mythological lore.
s4 -
Thruthheim ("the Place of Might"): the place where Thor, the strongest of the gods, has his hall, Bilskirnir, described in stanza 24.
s5 -
Ydalir ("Yew-Dales"): the home of Ull, the archer among the gods, a son of Thor’s wife, Sif, by another marriage. The wood of the yew-tree was used for bows in the North just as it was long afterwards in England.
Alfheim: the home of the elves.
Freyr: cf. Skirnismol, introductory prose and note.
Tooth-gift: the custom of making a present to a child when it cuts its first tooth is, according to Vigfusson, still in vogue in Iceland.
s6 -
Valaskjolf ("the Shelf of the Slain"): Othin’s home, in which is his watch-tower, Hlithskjolf. Gering identifies this with Valhall, and as that is mentioned in stanza 8, he believes stanza 6 to be an interpolation.
s8 -
Glathsheim ("the Place of Joy"): Othin’s home, the greatest and most beautiful hall in the world.
Valhall ("Hall of the Slain"): cf. Voluspo, 31 and note. Valhall is not only the hall whither the slain heroes are brought by the Valkyries, but also a favorite home of Othin.
s21 -
Thund ("The Swollen" or "The Roaring"): the river surrounding Valhall.
The last two lines refer to the attack on Valhall by the people of Hel; cf. Voluspo, 51.
s22 -
Valgrind ("The Death-Gate"): the outer gate of Valhall; cf. Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, 68 and note.
s23 -
This and the following stanza stand in reversed order in Regius. Snorri quotes stanza 23 as a proof of the vast size of Valhall.
s24 -
This stanza is almost certainly an interpolation, brought in through a confusion of the first two lines with those of stanza 23. Its description of Thor’s house, Bilskirnir (cf. stanza 4 and note) has nothing to do with that of Valhall. Snorri quotes the stanza in his account of Thor.
s25 -
Heithrun: the she-goat who lives on the twigs of the tree Lærath (presumably the ash Yggdrasil), and daily gives mead which, like the boar’s flesh, suffices for all the heroes in Valhall.
s36 -
Snorri quotes this list of the Valkyries, concerning whom cf. Voluspo, 31 and note, where a different list of names is given. The Valkyries who ride forth to choose the slain are servants of Othin.
The Grimnismol follows theVafthruthnismol in the Codex Regius and is also found complete in the Arnamagnæan Codex, where also it follows the Vafthruthnismol. Snorri quotes over twenty of its stanzas.
Like the preceding poem, the Grimnismol is largely encyclopædic in nature, and consists chiefly of proper names, the last forty-seven stanzas containing no less than two hundred and twenty-five of these. It is not, however, in dialogue form. As Müllenhoff pointed out, there is underneath the catalogue of mythological names a consecutive and thoroughly dramatic story. Othin, concealed under the name of Grimnir, is through an error tortured by King Geirröth. Bound between two blazing fires, he begins to display his wisdom for the benefit of the king’s little son, Agnar, who has been kind to him. Gradually he works up to the great final moment, when he declares his true name, or rather names, to the terrified Geirröth, and the latter falls on his sword and is killed.
For much of this story we do not have to depend on guesswork, for in both manuscripts the poem itself is preceded by a prose narrative of considerable length, and concluded by a brief prose statement of the manner of Geirröth’s death. These prose notes, of which there are many in the Eddic manuscripts, are of considerable interest to the student of early literary forms. Presumably they were written by the compiler to whom we owe the Eddic collection, who felt that the poems needed such annotation in order to be clear. Linguistic evidence shows that they were written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, for they preserve none of the older word-forms which help us to date many of the poems two or three hundred years earlier.
Without discussing in detail the problems suggested by these prose passages, it is worth noting, first, that the Eddic poems contain relatively few stanzas of truly narrative verse; and second, that all of them are based on narratives which must have been more or less familiar to the hearers of the poems. In other words, the poems seldom aimed to tell stories, although most of them followed a narrative sequence of ideas. The stories themselves appear to have lived in oral prose tradition, just as in the case of the sagas; and the prose notes of the manuscripts, in so far as they contain material not simply drawn from the poems themselves, are relics of this tradition. The early Norse poets rarely conceived verse as a suitable means for direct story-telling, and in some of the poems even the simplest action is told in prose "links" between dialogue stanzas.
The applications of this fact, which has been too often overlooked, are almost limitless, for it suggests a still unwritten chapter in the history of ballad poetry and the so-called "popular" epic. It implies that narrative among early peoples may frequently have had a period of prose existence before it was made into verse, and thus puts, for example, a long series of transitional stages before such a poem as the Iliad. In any case, the prose notes accompanying the Eddic poems prove that in addition to the poems themselves there existed in the twelfth century a considerable amount of narrative tradition, presumably in prose form, on which these notes were based by the compiler.
Interpolations in such a poem as the Grimnismol could have been made easily enough, and many stanzas have undoubtedly crept in from other poems, but the beginning and end of the poem are clearly marked, and presumably it has come down to us with the same essential outline it had when it was composed, probably in the first half of the tenth century.