"Cattle die, and kinsmen die": Hávamál makes a reputation the only survivor
Nine stanzas from the medieval Icelandic Hávamál walk from a rich man's funeral pyre to the poem's famous refrain and the one thing it says never dies, in Henry Adams Bellows' 1923 translation.
A single medieval manuscript, the Codex Regius, carries the poem that follows the Völuspá: a gathering of counsels spoken by the High One. Hávamál means the words of that figure, and the figure is Odin, credited with the sayings the way the biblical proverbs are credited to Solomon. No second manuscript preserves the poem 1.
The first eighty stanzas are proverbs and counsels for the conduct of life. The translator's introduction describes how the rest accumulated: a catalogue of runes, a set of charms, a love story, and odds and ends of narrative attached themselves to the collection over generations, so that the whole reads less like one argument than like a household's accumulated advice 2.
The nine stanzas below come from that first block. They open with a corpse and a rich man's funeral pyre, pass through fortune that turns inside a month, and end on four lines that arrive twice, identical on first hearing and changed at the close.
Passage
Gloss
- Cattle: The refrain's first word translates Icelandic fé, and the Icelandic editions print the line alongside the English as Deyr fé, deyja frændr 3. Fé names a man's livestock and, by extension, his movable property and money 4. The line therefore takes a man's holdings first, then his family, then the man himself, and the English "cattle" narrows that first loss to the herd.
- Memory-stones: The stones raised for the dead, the one monument stanza 72 allows an ordinary man. The line measures an afterlife by them — the son born late, the stone set by the road by a kinsman who remembers. Most men, in this accounting, leave neither.
- The fame of a dead man's deeds: The last line of the passage. The Icelandic reads dómr of dauðan hvern, and dómr is the ancestor of the English word "doom": a judgment, the sentence a court pronounces 4. What the poem sets against death is a sentence about a man, pronounced by others once he has finished acting.
Close read
The device is a refrain whose ending is replaced.
Stanzas 77 and 78 begin with the same three clauses in the same order: cattle die, kinsmen die, one dies one's self. Each clause takes away a support — property, family, the body — and the third leaves the sentence with no subject that can outlive it. Then the endings separate. The first version offers a condition: "But a noble name will never die, / If good renown one gets." Survival there is a prize awarded to whoever earns it. The second version drops the condition and substitutes a claim of knowledge: "One thing I know that never dies, / The fame of a dead man's deeds." Underneath that shift the Icelandic changes words as well. The first stanza has orðstírr, fame at large; the second has dómr, a verdict about one particular man 3. The two stanzas stand side by side in the manuscript, with the stanza about Fitjung's sons after them rather than before, as editors have since arranged it 2.
By the time the poem makes its claim, the eight preceding stanzas have done the subtraction. A live man outranks a rich man's pyre (70). A horseman, a herdsman and a bold deaf man outrank a corpse (71). A son and a boundary stone are what a man leaves if he is lucky (72). Fortune turns inside a month, and the weather with it (74–75). Fitjung's sons — the translator's note identifies Fitjung as the Earth — had full folds and now carry a beggar's staff (76). Every visible thing in the passage has been shown to move: herds, houses, wealth, sons. What the refrain needs is something that leaves no stone behind, and the poem finds it in speech.
That is what makes the claim strange rather than merely solemn. The survivor is a report. A dead man's deeds can be celebrated only in the mouths of the living, which means the poem hands a person's entire afterlife to other people's accuracy and other people's generosity. The man who dies has no further part in it.
Why it still matters
The bargain Hávamál proposes is easy to state and hard to live with: your name lasts exactly as long as someone keeps saying it. The farm, the kin and the body all have an owner who can hold them, guard them, hand them on. The verdict has no owner. It lives in other people, and they may be careless with it.
A farmer in the tenth century left few traces — a stone by the road if a kinsman paid for one, and whatever the neighbours kept saying. A reader now leaves thousands: photographs, messages, an account that remembers what was bought and where. None of that settles what the watching meant. A verdict takes people who saw what you did and then decided what it was worth, and that step still happens at the speed of a conversation.
The stanzas order the question in a way worth borrowing. Property, kin, body: subtract each one in turn and notice what remains on the page. What remains is a sentence other people will write about you. The lever left in your hand is the deed the sentence is about, which is small and unglamorous and the only part of the arrangement you get to touch.
Reflection
If the only part of you that lasted were the account other people gave of your deeds, what would you want that account to say — and whose voice would you want saying it?
References
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