Hyndluljóð

"Freyja awakes Hyndla" (1908) by W. G. Collingwood.

"The Ancestry of Ottar" (1908) by W. G. Collingwood.

Hyndluljóð or Lay of Hyndla is an Old Norse poem often considered a part of the Poetic Edda. It is preserved in its entirety only in Flateyjarbók but some stanzas are also quoted in the Prose Edda where they are said to come from Völuspá hin skamma.

In the poem, the goddess Freyja meets the völva Hyndla and they ride together towards Valhalla. Freyja rides on her boar Hildisvíni and Hyndla on a wolf. Their mission is to find out the pedigree of Óttarr so that he can touch his inheritance, and the lay consists mostly of Hyndla reciting a number of names from Óttarr's ancestry. The poem may be a twelfth-century work, through Bellows believed the material of which the poem was compounded must have been older.

References

English translations

• Hyndluljoth Translation and commentary by Henry Adams Bellows
• Hyndluljóð Translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor

Old Norse editions

• Hyndluljóð Sophus Bugge's edition of the manuscript text
• Hyndluljóð Guðni Jónsson's edition with normalized spelling