Hrafnagaldr Óðins

Hrafnagaldr Óðins ("Odin's raven-galdr") or Forspjallsljóð ("prelude poem") is an Icelandic poem in the style of the Poetic Edda. It is preserved only in late paper manuscripts. In his influential 1867 edition of the Poetic Edda, Sophus Bugge reasoned that the poem was a 17th-century work, composed as an introduction to Baldrs draumar. Since then it has not been included in editions of the Poetic Edda and not been extensively studied. But prior to Bugge's work the poem was considered a part of the Poetic Edda and included, for example, in the English translations of A. S. Cottle (1797) and Benjamin Thorpe (1866) as well as Karl Simrock's influential German translation (1851). In 1852, William and Mary Howitt characterized it as "amongst the most deeply poetical and singular hymns of the Edda".

In 2002, Jónas Kristjánsson in the Icelandic daily Morgunblaðið argued in favor of an earlier dating than Bugge, perhaps to the 14th century, based on linguistic evidence and the seemingly corrupt state of the text. Linguist Kristján Árnason disagreed and argued on the basis of a metrical analysis that the poem as it has come down to us can hardly be older than from the 16th century.

Annette Lassen, in her preliminary assessment (2006) had stated conservatively that this poem should not be subject to greater skepticism than e.g. Fjölsvinnsmál and Sólarljóð (other Eddic poems thought to be of later authorship and exist only in paper manuscripts). But in her 2011 critical edition with accompanying translation (rendered into English by Anthony Faulkes), she states unequivocally that the poem "is a postmedieval poem" probably composed soon after "the rediscovery of the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda in 1643". Elsewhere she assigns a terminus post quem to when the Icelanders were familiarized with Erasmus's Adagia (1500), which she says must have been the conduit through which the poet learned the adage in nocte consilium which is adapted into the poem in st. 22. Another dating clue is the occurrence of the word máltíd st. 20, a Middle Low German loanword, used in Iceland after the middle of the 14th century, though the poem can "hardly be as old as that."

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