Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Havamal Snippets 130: How to 'take pleasure with a woman'

This stanza is one of the many in Havamal that explains how to, ahem, ‘get your end away’ with a woman.  Notice the emphasis on ‘pleasure’ rather than ‘love’ in this verse.  According to THIS website (which is unfortunately experiencing a network error; a cached version is HERE), this is a common occurrence throughout the Havamal, stressing that carnal love (like someone who engages in a one night stand might experience) is different to platonic love (like someone who get’s married might experience).  There is a good page on the topic of different types of relationships between humans in Viking society, and how they honor them which can be found HERE in a cached version.  (If you ever come across a page that is inaccessible or ‘down’, then enter the website address into Bing or Google and simply view the cached version).
 
 
130
Ráðumk þér Loddfáfnir
en þú ráð nemir
njóta mundu ef þú nemr
þér munu góð ef þú getr
ef þú vilt þér góða konu
kveðja at gamanrúnum
ok fá fögnuð af
fögru skaltu heita
ok láta fast vera
leiðisk manngi gott ef getr       
 
I advise you, Loddfafnir,
to take advice;
you would benefit, it you took it,
good will come to you, if you accept it:
if you want [6] to attract
[5] a good woman to you [6] with pleasant talk
and take pleasure with her,
you must make a fair promise
and stick fast to it
-- no one loathes the good, if he gets it.
 
 
[End.]

1 comment:

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