00:00:21.000The Hinluljoth, the poem of Hindla. The Hinluljoth is found in neither of the great manuscripts of the Poetic Edda, but it is included in the so-called Fletterj枚rbach, Book of the Flatland, an enormous compilation made somewhere about 1400.
00:00:37.840The lightness of this manuscript would of itself be enough to cast a doubt upon the condition in which the poem has been preserved, and there can be no question that what we have is in very poor shape.
00:00:50.540It is, in fact, two separate poems, or parts of them, clumsily put together.
00:00:55.700The longer one, the poem of Hindla, proper, is chiefly a collection of names, not strictly mythological, but belonging to the semi-historical hero sagas of Norse tradition.
00:01:05.720The wise woman, Hindla, being asked by Freyja to trace the ancestry of her favorite, Otan, for the purpose of deciding a wager, gives a complex genealogy including many of the heroes who appear in the popular sagas handed down from days long before the Atlantic settlements.
00:01:23.020The poet was learned, but without enthusiasm. It is not likely that he composed the Hindla Lyoth much before the 12th century.
00:01:32.480Though the material of which it is compounded must have been very much older.
00:01:37.780Although the genealogies are centrally continental, the poem seems rather like a product of the archaeological period of Iceland.
00:01:47.060Inserted bodily in the Hindleria proper is a fragment of 51 lines, taken from a poem of which, by a curious chance, we know the name.
00:01:56.160Snorri quotes one stanza of it, calling it the Short Veruspo.
00:02:00.260The fragment preserved gives, of course, no indication of the length of the original poem,
00:02:04.740but it shows that it was a late and very inferior imitation of the great Veloospo.
00:02:09.860Like the Henlelioth proper, it apparently comes from the 12th century,
00:02:14.200but there is nothing whatsoever to indicate that the two poems were the work of the same man,
00:02:19.460or were ever connected in any way until some bludgering copyist mixed them up.
00:02:24.420Certainly the connection did not exist in the middle of the 13th century