Rígsþula

• 1. Introduction

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  Rígsþula, the Lay of Ríg, breaks off while a young man is out hunting. He is riding through a forest, snaring birds, when a crow speaks to him. That is the last event the poem records. The poem survives incomplete, written on the last surviving sheet of the 14th-century Codex Wormianus, right after Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. So the questions pile up. Who is this hunter, and why does he bear a title that belongs to a god? And how did a poet come to imagine that servants, farmers, warriors and kings all descend from a single wandering visitor?

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• 2. The Wandering God

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  Old, wise, mighty and strong: that is how the poem describes its hero, a god called Ríg or Rígr. A short prose introduction in the manuscript says Rígr is another name for Heimdall. In that telling, Heimdall walked along the seashore until he reached a farm, where he gave his name as Ríg.

  Support for the identification comes from Völuspá, another Eddic poem. It opens with the plea "I ask for a hearing of all the holy races, greater and lesser, kinsmen of Heimdall." Those words make Heimdall an ancestor of humankind.

  Not everyone accepts the link. The scholars Finnur Jónsson and Rudolf Simek have suggested that fathering mankind suits Óðinn better. On their view, the Eddic tradition moved the name Rígr from Óðinn onto Heimdall. The manuscript offers little help, since the poem is preserved in only one. It is also plausible that the compiler added the prose introduction to match the opening of Völuspá.

  The name itself carries a clue. Rígr appears to be the oblique case of Old Irish rí, ríg, meaning "king". That word is cognate with Latin rex, Sanskrit rajan and Gothic reiks. A god whose name means king is a fitting source for a title the poem will soon hand to a human son.

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• 3. Three Households

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  A farm-hut belonging to Ái and Edda is the first stop on Ríg's journey. Their names mean great-grandfather and great-grandmother. They offer the stranger shelter and a meal of poor, rough food. That night Ríg sleeps between the couple in their bed and then leaves. Nine months later Edda bears a swarthy, dark son, and the couple name him Þræll, meaning thrall, serf or slave. He grows up strong but ugly. He marries a woman called Thír, meaning slave girl or bondswoman, and they have twelve sons and nine daughters. Most of the children carry names that suggest ugliness and squatness. From them comes the race of serfs.

  Farther on, Ríg finds a pleasant house where Afi and Amma live, a farmer and craftsman and his wife. Their names mean grandfather and grandmother. This couple give him good food and also let him sleep between them. Nine months afterward a ruddy son is born, named Karl, meaning churl or freeman. Karl marries Snör, also written Snœr, a name meaning daughter-in-law. They have twelve sons and ten daughters. Their names mostly suggest a neat appearance or good quality, and one of them is smiðr, the word for smith. These children become the ancestors of free farmers, craftsmen and herdsmen.

  The third stop is a mansion occupied by Faðir and Móðir, Father and Mother. Here the food is excellent and splendidly served. Nine months later Móðir gives birth to a beautiful baby with blond hair, who is bleikr, a bright white in color. They name him Jarl, meaning earl or noble. As Jarl grows up he handles weapons and uses hawks, hounds and horses. Then Ríg returns, claims him as his son, gives him his own name and makes him his heir. He teaches Jarl runes and advises him to seek lordship.

  Jarl follows that advice through warfare and becomes lord of eighteen homesteads, with much wealth besides. He wins Erna, whose name means brisk and who is the daughter of a lord called Hersir. She bears him twelve sons and no daughters. Their names are high-sounding, mostly meaning "son", and from them descend the warrior nobility. The youngest of the twelve is the one the poem cares about most.

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• 4. Reading the Classes

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  Dark, short, stupid and gloomy: Þræll matches a stock figure of Old Norse writing about slaves. Scholars warn against taking the poem's descriptions literally, because it is a literary work and must be read allegorically and stereotypically. Slaves, freemen and aristocrats did not necessarily look different, whatever the poem says about complexions and builds. What the poem does reveal is how the classes lived. Þræll and his aged parents are tenants in a single farmhouse. His sons do menial work such as supplying firewood and cutting turf. Field work of that kind was typical of the services slaves rendered to a master. So the portrait may describe the lower class generally, whether enslaved or simply poor laborers.

  Karl is harder to place. The scholarly consensus holds that he represents "the class of free-born peasant proprietor called 'bondi' or 'bui'". Another description calls this group "a kind of hereditary aristocracy, self-governed, and absolutely independent". The poem shows him as fairly prosperous, a freeholder who owns the farm building on the land he works. Comfort shows in small details, such as the stylish shoulder ornaments worn by his mother Amma. Gold rings handed out freely to guests at his wedding point the same way.

  Jarl stands at the top of the ladder as "the idle aristocrat... whose sole occupations are raiding, hunting, and swimming". His parents live in even greater luxury than Karl's, and he has bright eyes and shining hair. He wins wealth by conquest and distributes the spoils to his dependents, very much in the style of ancient Viking heroes.

  The three households raise a harder question about how the poet saw the relationship between them. The couples form a ladder of generations, and scholars disagree about what the ladder means. One reading says the sharp contrasts in looks and work imply that the classes are essentially different species. A second reading looks at the names of the three couples, which "might seem to imply that the various classes of mankind share a common heritage". On that view the poem could suggest social progress over time, with a class able to aspire upward.

  Thomas Hill reports that most scholars find the second view too benevolent. In his reading, the Vikings saw the orders of mankind as "indeed fixed and unchangeable". He adds that "in the very beginning there was a certain kinship between the different orders of mankind". That kinship is "suggested by the fixed and yet linked sequence of the genealogical chain". Hill's analysis of the final stanzas, though, concerns a figure who fits none of the three households.

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• 5. The Youngest Son

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  Strength equal to eight men belongs to Konr the young, the youngest son of Jarl and, in the poet's judgment, the best of them. He alone learns rune-craft together with other magic. He can understand the speech of birds, put out fires and heal minds. His epithet, Konr ungr in Old Norse, is the origin the poem offers for konungr, the Norse word for king. Like his father, he also takes the name or title of Rígr.

  Thomas Hill saw in this figure an aristocratic idea of kingship rather than a royalist one. He observes that the emerging king "is not set apart by birth from the other sons of Jarl, and is in fact the youngest son". Konr gets his power directly from Ríg. Kingship here means a man blessed by the gods, though not necessarily descended from them in the strict father-to-son line typical of Western monarchies.

  A bird now becomes the turning point. While Konr rides through the forest hunting and snaring birds, a crow tells him he would win more by turning to battle against foemen. It points him to the halls of Dan and Danþír, who are wealthier than he is.

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• 6. Dan and the Danes

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  Arngrímur Jónsson's Latin epitome of the lost Skjöldungasaga gives one answer to where Konr's ambition led. It names the figure Rigus and calls him a man not the least among the great ones of his time. He married Dana, daughter of a certain Danp, lord of Danpsted. After winning the royal title for his province, he left as his heir a son by Dana, called Dan or Danum. All of that son's subjects were called Danes.

  Chapter 20 of the Ynglinga Saga, part of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, tells a related story about King Dygvi of Sweden. His mother Drótt was a daughter of King Danp, the son of Ríg, who was first called konungr in the Danish tongue. Dygvi was the first of his family to bear that title. His predecessors had been called dróttinn, meaning chieftain, their wives dróttning, and their court drótt, a war band. The whole race was known as the Ynglingar, and each member was called Yngvi or Ynguni. Queen Drótt was also the sister of King Dan Mikillati, from whom Denmark took its name.

  The two accounts disagree on genealogy. The problem can be evaded only by imagining more than one Danpr and more than one Danr. Even so, they relate a common tradition about the origin of the title konungr. That suggests the lost ending of the poem may have been a marriage by Konr the young into the family of Dan and Danþír. Konr's emphasis on magic is what drew the attention of the scholar Dumézil.

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• 7. Dumézil's Triad

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  Dumézil noticed that Konr alone embodies the supernatural function. In India that role belonged to the Brahmin caste, in Rome to the flamen, and in some Celtic cultures to the druids. In the three estates of medieval Europe it belonged to the clergy. Konr looks as much a magician as a warrior, perhaps even a sacred king.

  The usual scheme has priests, warriors and commoners, with serfs standing outside the system. Rígsþula presents something different. Its three estates fold the priestly class into the warrior class and identify both with royalty.

  Color tells a similar story. In Rome and India, white is assigned to the sacred and to priests, and red to warriors. Here the noble warrior is white, while red is given to the commoner. In other cultures associated with Proto-Indo-European society, the lower classes carry green, blue or yellow instead. Dumézil saw this reshuffling as a Germanic adaptation of the Indo-European heritage.

  Not every scholar traced the poem's roots to that shared heritage. Some looked west, to the Celtic world.

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• 8. Date and Home

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  Theories about when Rígsþula was composed stretch from the tenth century to the thirteenth. Early readers treated it as an ancient poem. Later research argued for the thirteenth century, though some modern scholars still place it as early as the Viking Age. Oral transmission complicates matters. A poem as long as this one tends to warp when it is recited many times. Where it was composed is just as contested. Proposals range from the Old Norse-Icelandic-speaking areas of the British Isles to Norway.

  Jean Young and Ursula Dronke, among others, have suggested that the story is Celtic in origin. They see the name Rígr as an indication of this. The modern consensus, however, ascribes the poem to Icelandic authorship.

  The stakes are high for anyone using the poem as evidence. Its historical significance changes with the point in history where the text is placed. Each answer to the dating question changes what Rígsþula can say about its slaves, farmers and lords. Even on the earliest proposed date, centuries of oral transmission would lie between the poem's composition and its single surviving manuscript.

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