The Golden One - January 04, 2023


The Poetic Edda – The Poems. Our Lady Freya. Odin's Sacrifice


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

136.71135

Word count

1,394

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In honor of the new year, I decided to read the entire Poetic Edda for the first time, starting with the poem "The Lokesena" by the Goddess Freya. I also defend Lady Freya against accusations that she was "promiscuous."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Greetings, my esteemed subscribing taunts. Happy New Year!
00:00:12.680 Now, I haven't made any New Year's resolutions per se, but I have decided something of a similar nature,
00:00:20.920 and that is that I will make more book reviews in video format here on YouTube and Odyssey.
00:00:25.800 Of course, in accord with your wishes, I am but your humble servant.
00:00:30.960 I posted a poll to Telegram, and the majority of you would like to see more book reviews in video format.
00:00:36.940 So, here we go. Here we go.
00:00:39.020 And, of course, we do start with, as you can surmise from the title of the video, the Poetic Edda.
00:00:46.740 And we have a nice addition here.
00:00:48.880 I admire this absolute unit.
00:00:53.820 Thick boy. Big boy.
00:00:55.800 Now, it's actually not that much to read, because half of it, or half of the poetry, at least, is in Icelandic.
00:01:04.920 So, you can see there that one page in the original Icelandic, the other page in English.
00:01:11.000 Now, of course, this edition contains a lot of explanations, notes, introductions, that sort of stuff.
00:01:20.740 Also, as you can see, a foreword by our man, Survive the Jive.
00:01:24.820 Good stuff.
00:01:25.620 So, it's very much information in addition to the poetry itself.
00:01:30.260 So, the poetry section, half Icelandic, but the introduction and everything like that, it's in English.
00:01:37.780 So, yeah, great stuff. Great stuff, indeed.
00:01:41.240 Now, there are those who are much more knowledgeable when it comes to the Poetic Edda.
00:01:46.920 This is the first time I read it.
00:01:49.180 Now, of course, I've been familiar with the sacred Havamal for many years, so it was nice to finally get to the source material.
00:01:56.640 And I will say the following, this video, this is just my, you know, first impressions on the book, and maybe I'll make a video in a few years when I've read it a few more times, meditated upon the poetry, certain stanzas, etc.
00:02:12.420 Now, what I would say, though, with this fine book right here, is that it doesn't really give you any precise answers, because what it is, this is written by Icelandic men in the Middle Ages,
00:02:26.080 and they are, you know, the poetry, the epics, the myths, they are much older, and they have been transmitted orally, so I don't know how much has been lost in translation,
00:02:38.600 but what we can say, and this is only my view, this is only my first impression upon reading it, is that, you know, we can get a sense of the material, but can we pinpoint exactly everything?
00:02:51.440 No, perhaps not, and, you know, a lot of the extra information in the book is, you know, speculation, could this stanza have been misplaced,
00:03:04.800 or should this stanza belong somewhere else, or stuff like that, so it's not a precise thing we're talking about here,
00:03:13.180 but you can definitely read it if you want to get a good sense of the Germanic Weltanschauung, so the Germanic worldview,
00:03:22.300 and just reading it without understanding exactly everything, we can see that certain things are, you know, always coming back to the storyline,
00:03:34.620 no matter which poet or poem or story, so honor, war, love, vengeance, knowledge, the gods, stuff like that,
00:03:46.520 so we can get a good sense of what is important to our ancestors, so that is something you can view it as if you read it for the first time,
00:03:56.400 to get a nice sense, a nice feel for the overall vibe that comes to you.
00:04:04.600 Now, something else I thought to mention, I want to take our beloved Lady Freya in defense here, 0.98
00:04:11.520 it's quite common to hear heretics and Christians and people to claim that she was promiscuous, 0.97
00:04:19.980 and there are, of course, certain myths that would support this, but there is a particular poem, the Lokesena,
00:04:28.520 and in this particular poem, it basically consists of Loki insulting the gods and the goddesses,
00:04:35.840 and he says to Freya that, yeah, basically you are promiscuous,
00:04:39.940 but he also says to the male gods, he accuses them of cowardice and unmanly behavior,
00:04:47.360 and, of course, none of the gods, at least not as far as I know, were cowardly or unmanly,
00:04:54.580 so it would be Loki actively lying to provoke them, and the same thing would go for Freya,
00:05:02.320 he says that to provoke her, so we can see a few things by reading this particular poem,
00:05:07.020 that unmanly behavior, cowardice for men, very bad, that is something you can insult others,
00:05:14.160 so it's important to not be cowardly or unmanly, and for a woman, then, it's important to not be promiscuous, 0.55
00:05:21.780 so we can actually see Loki's lies and insults as, you know, the opposite of the ideal,
00:05:28.340 so that Freya would be promiscuous. 1.00
00:05:31.920 Doesn't really hold up if you interpret it in that way.
00:05:35.580 I know there are other myths, such as she's supposed to be, to have slept with four dwarves,
00:05:41.960 but this can also esoterically be interpreted as, you know, her imbuing a certain piece of jewelry
00:05:48.340 with the four elements, something like that, just top of my head, coming up with something there,
00:05:53.800 so it doesn't really mean that, but if you read it too literally,
00:05:58.460 you can construct a narrative to fit your agenda,
00:06:02.740 and of course this was very useful for the early Christians to try to portray a goddess as promiscuous,
00:06:08.500 and modern feminists could also do it, 1.00
00:06:11.600 but for a sincere, devoted pagan that honors Freya,
00:06:19.040 we should, of course, defend her in that regard.
00:06:22.840 But again, I'm not an expert, I'm just speculating,
00:06:25.460 I'm just sharing something I found in this fine tome of knowledge.
00:06:32.400 Now, that about how you can interpret the certain myths, at least,
00:06:37.440 and of course I need to defend our Lady Freya here.
00:06:41.440 Now something else, and probably you saw this on social media,
00:06:45.340 I posted one of my favorite stanzas, or two stanzas, rather,
00:06:51.040 and I will read it, and I will read them to you now as well,
00:06:54.280 so that you can admire the beautiful poetry.
00:06:57.120 Now, I didn't actually quote Bellows word for word,
00:07:00.240 because I replaced certain words to make it more epic,
00:07:03.360 and I will do so now as well, so here is my take on it.
00:07:06.680 How about that? Absolutely epic.
00:07:35.920 This is poetry at its very best.
00:07:40.240 I will make a separate video on how to appreciate poetry,
00:07:43.720 but basically my point is that you need to find these very epic moments
00:07:47.780 that conjures up a really nice image in your head
00:07:51.400 that you can just keep with you,
00:07:53.100 so I can't stop thinking about these two stanzas.
00:07:55.920 Very powerful indeed.
00:07:57.120 So Odin hung himself.
00:07:59.240 He offered himself to himself for nine nights
00:08:03.440 to gain the knowledge of the runes.
00:08:07.080 Now, anyway, I have rambled on enough about this.
00:08:10.160 I could, of course, talk a lot more about it.
00:08:12.800 Read it for yourself if you feel so inclined.
00:08:15.820 View it as a good source material if you want to get really deep into it.
00:08:19.680 Then, of course, if you are a beginner,
00:08:22.860 if you don't know where to start,
00:08:24.460 this might be a bit too heavy.
00:08:27.120 You can read or, you know, get familiar with myths in different ways
00:08:33.580 if you feel that's an easier step to begin with.
00:08:38.320 Now, also, I would like to say that this is an edition by Imperium Press.
00:08:42.560 This video is not sponsored in any way,
00:08:44.700 but it's a good publisher and I'm comfortable in promoting them
00:08:48.500 because they do great work with our great classics.
00:08:52.720 And, of course, speaking of which,
00:08:55.300 you have a rather controversial poem,
00:08:58.660 The Riggstula, where Heimdall goes around 0.99
00:09:01.560 and he creates the different casts.
00:09:05.300 I will not say more about it here
00:09:07.140 since this is on YouTube as well,
00:09:09.320 but, yeah, it's a bit controversial.
00:09:10.720 But it appears as it should here,
00:09:12.440 so they haven't done any funny alterations to the story,
00:09:18.340 which perhaps you could find in different publishers
00:09:21.780 because of political reasons.
00:09:23.820 No, anyway, that being said,
00:09:25.800 I have a Wild Hunt Challenge video incoming in a week or so.
00:09:29.360 Stay tuned for that.
00:09:30.760 Thank you for watching.
00:09:31.700 Thank you for being with me.
00:09:33.000 Full steam ahead this year.
00:09:34.300 Good times.
00:09:35.140 Good stuff.
00:09:36.540 No, thank you for watching.
00:09:37.800 XXO.
00:09:38.780 Boom! 0.99
00:09:39.180 Boom! 0.99
00:09:42.440 Boom! 0.99
00:09:55.500 Boom! 0.99
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00:10:07.140 Boom! 0.99
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