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Post by Shannon on Mar 3, 2010 22:32:20 GMT -5
So, I've been getting acquainted with Norse paganism and noticed that, while women weren't necessarily treated unfairly or as inferiors, that they were seen as having different strengths and attributes. Seidr, for example, was much more of a woman's craft, since it dealt more with subtleties and manipulations.
Now I'm reading the Havamal and I'm wondering if this code of conduct even really applies to women. I'm not wondering if it's worth following, definitely it's good advice and what would be the problem in that, but just mainly wondering if culturally there might have been a different code of conduct for women. Anyone have any ideas or thoughts?
And on another note, does anyone have a preference on which translation of the Havamal is the best?
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Post by Denethor on Mar 18, 2010 20:03:23 GMT -5
This one is my fave (translator is Carolyn Larrington): www.amazon.com/Poetic-Edda-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199538387/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268958848&sr=1-3It's very poetic, the way she translates the stuff. I really doubt any orally transmitted body of lore was as dry and academic-sounding as some of the translations out there are. They had to be remembered, after all. And her academic credentials are sound. She doesn't get her "poetry" from some kind of New Agey reinterpretation. I've never really thought about the code of conduct being different somehow for women. My take on it was that each code of conduct pertained to an area of activity; if a woman were to go to war, for instance (which was unusual but did happen among the Norse; the Romans noted it with great shock), the same code of coduct would apply to her in that situation as would apply to a man. Were a man to have a baby (I suspect much rarer, but I wasn't there so don't ask me ), there'd be a code of conduct for that too, which would apply to him. If codes of conduct for women-only or primarily-women activities did not survive into modern times as well as the ones for men-only or primarily-men activities, well look who did all the writing it down. Seidr specifically was indeed enough a woman's craft that some other Gods (notably Loki) mocked Odin/Woden for having learned it. Woden being kind of a Renaissance Man, he didn't shy away from learning skills that were considered "feminine". Maybe today He'd be an unusually flamboyant male figure skater; maybe "feminine" at that time didn't imply what "effeminate" does today. I doubt it went as far as "men are from Mars and women from Venus", that being largely a modern reaction against feminism. But, in a time when people didn't live as long as they do today, and couldn't afford to spend twenty-five years getting a double education, skills were split by gender. Men got the upper-body strength stuff whether they wanted to or not, and women got the things you could do while pregnant or nursing whether they wanted to or not. Seidr became a female skill because you couldn't do it while sailing or marching in an army. (It is said that medieval alchemists recommended working in male-female pairs because the skills matched up better that way; you had a male to stoke up the furnace and a female who had learned her herbs at Momma's knee. This developed into that insane notion of totally separate "energies" that modern people so often fall for, the one that doesn't allow for the fact that real people are well-rounded and have many skills from many areas, that they apply to life in all sorts of ways.) It is also a common belief world over that because women's bodies bring about birth, they also have a greater insight into the complementary mystery, death. Thus, they were often looked upon as the natural people to turn to when wishing to contact ancestors and the like. The results of this belief have of course been both good and bad for women. (And often enough, it's flipped around; the male is seen as "stronger" in the face of "hostile enitities from the beyond" because his body isn't involved in birth. So nothing is quite universal). Whether this reasoning applies to the Norse in particular, I'm not sure. But, they clearly agreed with modern pop culture (which is somewhat Norse- and Saxon-derived, so that's no surprise) that scrying and other sorts of divination mysticism (other than the Runes, which were unisex) and trance work were very female; female seers of this type outnumber male ones considerably in the stories. Seidr's modern descendant, unfortunately, is likely the Hollywood trance medium. Sorry for the late reply.
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