Thirty Viking Haikus

Marijane Osborn mjosborn@ucdavis.edu Published in STAND (U.K.) Vol. 13/2 (2015), 65-70. Thirty Viking Haikus (A Sampling of the Original Havamal) Introduction: T HE Havamal (‘Sayings of the High One’) is a poem containing a series of adages or pithy sayings in Old Icelandic verse, usually attributed to Odin. A hitherto unknown manuscript of this poem was recently unearthed in an ancient amphora in Turkey, and this manuscript clearly antedates the form of the text found in the Codex Regius. 1 Interestingly, the Amphora Codex, as it has now been designated, presents these short poems in the form of haikus, the Japanese three- line verse form having five syllables, then seven syllables, then five. These are also the earliest haikus known, it having been formerly believed that the form was invented in the fifteenth century – but the extreme age of the parchment and its ink is indisputable. How is such a cultural synthesis possible? It is clear that Odin and his fellow AEsir (the tribe to which he belonged) came from Asia. The identity of the two names AEsir/Asia demonstrates this provenance, but in any case the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (AD 1178- 1241) says so in the prologue to his Prose Edda, arguing that these so-called gods, the AEsir, were really men. 2 Snorri says further that “they spread throughout Saxland and from there throughout the northern regions, so that their language – that of the men of Asia – became the native tongue in all these lands” (Snorri, trans. Byock 8). Who are we to dispute the word of the wise Icelander Snorri? We must presume that the poetry-writing ruler Odin, before leading his people to the northern part of the world, learned the haiku verse form from a visiting Japanese poet. Perhaps that poet was traversing the famous “Silk Road” as a wandering holy man. The following translation attempts to recreate in modern English the original syllabic form of these ancient, usually sensible, adages. The numbering of items in parentheses refers to the corrupt but well-known editions of the Havamal based on the Codex Regius text, but it should be noted that this more genuine earlier text, most likely by Odin himself and possibly even an autograph manuscript, is considerably shorter than the awkwardly expanded and much-distorted version in the later codex. 3 That there are precisely thirty items here, a number associated in the cultures of the early Middle East with wisdom, serves further to authenticate the text. If many of these brief texts seem trite, it should be remembered that an aphorism by definition is a familiar saying. That is why it is comforting, like an old pair of slippers. Some of these sayings, of course, would seem more familiar to a Viking than to people now: how often these days do most of us who will read these pages wish for a cow or venture to cross ice? 1 The manuscript of this name, compiled in the mid-thirteenth century, is housed in the Arnamagnaean Institute in Reykjavik, Iceland. For an aesthetically pleasing English translation of Havamal, see that by W. H. Auden and P.B. Taylor, available online. Interestingly, many of these more ancient haikus appear closer to the meaning of the verses recorded in the Codex Regius text than does the Auden-Taylor translation. 2 Jesse Byock, translator, The Prose Edda (Penguin, 2005), 6-7. (Other translations are available.) 3 A good example of distortion is the reversed order of the final two items, 29 and 30, in the later text of the Havamal, appearing in the Codex Regius as items 84 and 79. The “cattle die” haiku is clearly intended to conclude the series. A similar statement is found at lines 108-09 of the Old English poem The Wanderer, at the end of a section of the poem.