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XXVI. Leipzig & Halle.
Goddesses Unknown III: On the Identity of the Old Norse Goddess Hlín
Joseph S. Hopkins, Seattle
Abstract: Like previous entries in the Goddesses Unknown series, the present article focuses on heretofore little-studied
goddesses in the Germanic corpus, in this case the obscure Old Norse goddess Hlín and her association with the widely
attested Germanic goddess Frigg.
The Old Norse corpus provides no information
about the fate of goddesses during the
destruction, bloodshed, and rebirth that make
up the events of Ragnarǫk. While goddess-
names compose the majority of the theonyms
of the Germanic corpus (including the North
Germanic corpus), female-gendered deities all
but disappear from view whenever Ragnarǫk is
mentioned. One exception occurs in stanza 53
of the eddic poem
Vǫluspá, where two
apparently separate goddesses, Hlín and Frigg,
are mentioned in relation to the event.
The stanza reads as follows (
Hlín and
Frigg
underlined for emphasis):
Þá kømr Hlínar
harmr annarr fram,
er Óðinn ferr
við úlf vega,
enn
bani Belia,
biartr, at Surti;
þá
mun Friggiar
falla angan.
(Neckel & Kuhn 1962: 12.)
Then comes Hlín’s second grief,
when Óðinn fares forth to fight the wolf,
and Beli’s shining slayer against Surtr.
Then will Frigg’s beloved fall.
(Hopkins trans.)
Over the course of four lines, the stanza
predicts that Óðinn will fight the monstrous
wolf Fenrir and that the god Freyr (the slayer
of the
jǫtunn Beli) will fight the fiery entity
Surtr. Scholars generally accept that the
‘second grief’ mentioned in the stanza predicts
that Óðinn, Frigg’s husband, will die during
the encounter. (The implied ‘first grief’ is all
but universally read as a reference to the tragic
death of Frigg’s son, Baldr, a prominent event
in the Old Norse corpus.)
At first glance, one may read this stanza two
very different ways:
a.
Hlín and
Frigg are two
names for the same
figure.
b. Hlín and
Frigg are distinct entities, both
somehow connected by a ‘second grief’.
However, the
Prose Edda twice explicitly
informs readers that
Hlín and
Frigg refer to
two separate entities. The distinction is first
made in
Gylfaginning, in which Hlín is listed
among sixteen goddesses (
Hlín and
hleina
underlined here):
Tólfta Hlín: hon er sett til gæzlu yfir þleim
mǫnnum er Frigg vill forða við háska
nokkvorum. Þiaðan af er þat orðtak at sá er
forðask hleinir. (Faulkes 2005: 30)
31
Twelfth, Hlín: she is given the task to
protect
those that Frigg wants saved from danger.
(Hopkins trans.)
The sentence
Þiaðan af er þat orðtak at sá er
forðask hleinir has proven an awkward hurdle
for translators, no doubt due to the obscurity of
the verb
hleina (discussed below). For
example,
Rasmus
Anderson
cautiously
provides the rendering “Hence is the saying
that he hlins who is forewarned” (1897 [1879]:
98), Anthony Gilchrist Brodeur produces “[…]
thence comes the saying that he who escapes
‘leans’” (1916: 47), Jean Young gives us the
very similar “[…] hence the proverb that ‘he
who is protected “leans”’” (1964: 60),
Anthony Faulkes more cautiously produces
“From this comes the saying that someone who
escapes finds refuge (
hleinir)” (1995 [1987]:
30), and Jesse Byock offers “From her name
comes the expression that he who escapes finds
hleinir [peace and quiet]” (2005: 43).
A distinction between Frigg and Hlín occurs
a second time in
Skáldskaparmál, where Hlín
appears in a list among 27 different goddesses
(
Ásynjur), including Frigg (Faulkes 1998:
114–115). These lists (Old Norse
þulur) may
have been added by an unknown author (or
authors) after the compositon of much of
Skáldskaparmál (see discussion in, for
example, Faulkes 1998: xv–xviii). Beyond
these sources, the name
Hlín appears
frequently in skaldic poetry in kennings
referring to women (see further Olsen 1996:
270–271) and
continues into rímur poetry (see
Finnur Jónsson 1926–1928: 175 & 245). Like
many other Old Norse goddess names,
Hlín
today serves as a female given name in Iceland
and, like many other obscure deities from the
Germanic corpus, plays no notable role in
modern popular culture beyond her veneration
in Germanic Neopaganism.
From Goddesses to Goddess
Although the corpus distinctly describes Hlín
and Frigg as separate entities, English
language translators have identified
Hlín and
Frigg as one and the same in nearly every
published translation of
Vǫluspá to date,
whether by outright rendering
Hlín as
Frigg or
by notifying readers that the two theonyms
should be read as synonyms in a note or in the
work’s index. This practice extends into nearly
all scholarly works that mention Hlín.
For example, Finnur Jönsson writes that
Hlín appears as a name for Frigg in
Vǫluspá
and yet elsewhere appears as an independent
goddess (Finnur Jónsson 1931: 263). John
Lindow produces a similar survey of the
situation (Lindow 2001: 176–177) and
Anthony Faulkes says, “Hlín is thought to have
been another name for Frigg, in spite of [the
Prose Edda]. Her first grief would have been
the death of her son Baldr” (Faulkes 2005: 70).
According to Rudolf Simek, “presumably Hlín
is really only another name for Frigg and
Snorri misunderstood her to be a goddess in
her own right in his reading of the
Vǫluspá
stanza” (Simek 2007 [1997]: 153).
In her long-running series of
Poetic Edda
translations, Ursula Dronke makes a similar
observation while proposing that the
Vǫluspá
poet employed the name for more than
alliteration:
Hlínar: a name for Frigg found only here in
poetic texts, but frequent in kennings for
‘woman’. […] Hlín is presented as a minor
goddess who is appointed by Frigg to watch
over men she wishes to guard from danger
(this relies upon an etymological link
between
Hlín and
hlein ‘peaceful refuge’)
[…] There is probably a tragic irony implied
in the use here of
Hlín for Frigg, in that she
was unable to protect either son or husband.
(Dronke 1997: 149, cf. 21.)
Most translators leave the name Hlín unchanged
in the stanza but provide some level of commen-
tary. For example, Benjamin Thorpe explains
to readers that
Hlín is “apparently a name of
Frigg” (1866: 138), Henry Adams Bellows notes
that the theonym is “apparently another name
for Frigg” (1923: 22, cf. 569), Lee M. Hollander
echoes that
Hlín here refers to “Óthin’s wife,
Frigg” (1990 [1962]: 11, cf. 335), and so does
Andy Orchard (2011: 12, 271–272).
1
However, some translators – particularly
recent translators – of the
Poetic Edda are so
certain that
Hlín is another name for Frigg that
they simply render
Hlín as
Frigg without so
much as a note explaining to readers that their
translation conflicts with the
Prose Edda’s
description of the figure. Translators who
render
Hlín as
Frigg include Olive Bray (1908:
53, but cf. 309), Carolyne Larrington (1999