Poetry
Baldr's Dreams
Baldrs draumar
Anonymous · 950
Opening lines
Senn váru æsir
allir á þingi
ok ásynjur
allar á máli,
Together the Æsir
were all at the assembly
and the goddesses
all in council,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from heimskringla.no
Synopsis
The god Baldr has bad dreams, and the Æsir hold counsel. Odin saddles Sleipnir and rides down to the realm of Hel; a bloodied dog comes to meet him. Near the eastern gate he finds the grave of a seeress and wakes her with his charms. He introduces himself under a false name, Vegtamr, son of Valtamr, and presses her with questions about those who are awaited among the dead and about the fate of his son; she answers only reluctantly, and each time asks to be silent.
Context
The poem, one of the shortest in the Edda, has fourteen stanzas in fornyrðislag in its only vellum witness, a manuscript from around 1300 that Árni Magnússon acquired in 1691; it does not appear in the Codex Regius. Paper copies, from 1680, add a few stanzas to it, judged much more recent, and title it Vegtamskviða, after the false name Odin takes. Bellows dated it to the middle of the tenth century; one of its stanzas recalls the Völuspá, and the first is found almost identically in the Þrymskviða. Wagner remembered it in the dialogue of Wotan and Erda, in the third act of Siegfried.
Who it is for
Fourteen stanzas, to be read in one sitting; the poem assumes the myth of Baldr is known and does not set it out.
Prizes and reception
The first Eddic poem rendered into English: Thomas Gray produced a version in 1761, based on Bartholin's edition.