Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

majority of cases the fame acquired by a person scarcely survives a generation, and
passes away together with the very memory of the deceased?
Could it have escaped the attention of the Hávamál skald and his hearers that the
number of mortals is so large and increases so immensely with the lapse of centuries that
the capacity of the survivors to remember them is utterly insufficient?
Was it not a well-established fact, especially among the Germans, before they got
a written literature, that the skaldic art waged, so to speak, a desperate conflict with the
power of oblivion, in order to rescue at least the names of the most distinguished heroes
and kings, but that nevertheless thousands of chiefs and warriors were after the lapse of a
few generations entirely forgotten?
Did not Hávamál's author know that millions of men have, in the course of
thousands of years, left this world without leaving so deep footprints in the sands of time
that they could last even through one generation?
Every person of some age and experience has known this, and Hávamál's author
too. The lofty strains above quoted do not seem to be written by a person wholly destitute
of worldly experience.
The assumption that Hávamál with that judgment on each one dead, which is said
to be imperishable, had reference to the opinion of the survivors in regard to the deceased
attains its climax of absurdity when we consider that the poem expressly states that it
means the judgment on every dead person - "dómur um dauðan hvern." In the cottage
lying far, far in the deep forest dies a child, hardly known by others than by its parents,
who, too, are soon to be harvested by death. But the judgment of the survivors in regard
to this child's character and deeds is to be imperishable, and the good fame it acquired
during its brief life is to live for ever on the lips of posterity! Perhaps it is the sense of the
absurdity to which the current assumption leads on this point that has induced some of
the translators to conceal the word hvern (every) and led them to translate the words
dómur um dauðan hvern in an arbitrary manner with "judgment on the dead man." 2
If we now add that the judgment of posterity on one deceased, particularly if he
was a person of great influence, very seldom is so unanimous, reliable, well-considered,
and free from prejudice that in these respects it ought to be entitled to permanent validity,
then we find that the words of the Hávamál strophes attributed to Odin's lips, when
interpreted as heretofore, are not words of wisdom, but the most stupid twaddle ever
heard declaimed in a solemn manner.
There are two reasons for the misunderstanding - the one is formal, and is found
in the word orðs-tírr (str. 76); the other reason is that Gylfaginning, which too long has
had the reputation of being a reliable and exhaustive codification of the scattered
statements of the mythic sources, has nothing to say about a court for the dead. It knows
that, according to the doctrine of the heathen fathers, good people come to regions of
bliss, the wicked to Niflhel; but who he or they were who determined how far a dead
person was worthy of the one fate or the other, on this point Gylfaginning has not a word
to say. From the silence of this authority, the conclusion has been drawn that a court
summoning the dead within its forum was not to be found in Germanic mythology,
although other Indo-European and non-Indo-European mythologies have presented such
2 As in Vigfusson's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), "I know one thing that never dies, a dead man's
name."