Review of The Wanderers Havamal by Jackson Crawford
By: Michael A. Arnold

The Viking era – we think we understand it, but we might not. In the entirety of the Poetic Edda, or Elder Edda, the book of mythological poems preserved in the 13th century manuscript the 'Codex Regius', the poem 'Havamal' stands alone. All the other poems are stories about the gods or heroes fighting with one another or explaining their mythology. Havamal, by contrast, is largely a poem of advice. This is the poem translated by Jackson Crawford in his 2019 book The Wanderers Havamal, published by Hackett publishing.

Jackson Crawford is a well-known name these days, among fans of the medieval period, because of his successful YouTube channel. It is dedicated to all things Old Norse, and in his own words is dedicated to trying to get good information about the Viking age out to the wider world. Good information can be 'locked up' in the 'ivy tower' of higher education while a lot of people have invented popular myths about periods of history not backed up by archaeology or other sciences. For example, the idea Vikings had horns on their helmets was invented by Richard Wagner in the 1800s. Before publication, Crawford put out a number of videos specifically referencing this book and some of the choices he made while writing it, and watching these videos after reading this book will be very interesting. Also, this is not the first time Crawford has translated Havamal. His first published translation of it appeared in his 2015 version of the whole Poetic Edda, but Havamal is obviously important to him, so he has returned to it with the benefit of more time researching, teaching and thinking about it.

There is an old reviewer's cliché, 'there's something memorable on every page'. I would change that here to 'there is something worth remembering on almost every page'. Jackson Crawford's direct yet elegant translation has many gems of wisdom, but it is a wisdom that has been hammered sharp by hard experience. In Havamal the speaker is Odin, the chief of the gods – but Odin was never like Zeus or Jupiter, he was not quite the proud lord of the gods too powerful to ever be shaken. In many poems Odin is far more mysterious, but here we have Odin speaking to us directly – and his advice is world-weary, grounded and cynical, as Jackson is quick to point out in his introduction.

In fact, throughout the poem, in either the Old Norse (which is included) or Crawford's translation, the name 'Odin' (or more accurately 'Othin') is basically not used. In a strange way, this makes Odin more human than divine somehow. It is also noticeable that this poem is, for most of its length, entirely secular. It is far more secular than any of the other poems in the Poetic Edda. Death is the end and there is no afterlife for us to hope for, and (almost) everything in the poem relates to the realities of our mortal life.

It is a good idea to show some stanzas from this poem:

Stanza 11:

A traveller cannot bring
A better burden on the road
Than plenty of wisdom,
And he can bring
No worse burden
Than too much alcohol

Stanza 55:

You should be
Only a little wise,
Never too wise.
A wise man's heart
Is seldom glad
If he's truly wise.

Both of these stanzas show a very common theme throughout the advice in Havamal: the best life is one ruled by moderation and never by excess. There are also stanzas such as this one, which advise trying to be happy and never ashamed of your lot in life, and never worry about the things beyond your control:

Stanza 23:

A fool
Stays awake all night
Worrying about everything.
He's fatigued
When the morning comes,
And his problems remain unsolved

It might be noticed in these three examples that the audience is male, and some stanzas might come across as misogynistic. A few things should be kept in mind about this: first that this is a poem from a medieval people whose culture was more patriarchal, and we should not expect literature from a time like this to reflect modern values, they will not. Also, there are stanzas in which Odin himself describes how has been humiliated by smarter women because his desire had led him to act inappropriately such as stanza 102. Stanzas 91 and 92 also show some complex sexual politics without judgement, which sound very familiar to modern ears. Questions around sexual politics in Viking literature are very complicated, and so it would not be wise or fair to judge a book like this through a reader's personal lens and biases. It must also be remembered that this is a translation that will never be completely and faultlessly accurate. This is what happens when something is translated, especially from a language and culture so distant from our own as medieval Nordic culture. Translating a single word perfectly without an extensive footnote is essentially impossible, especially in poetry. Also, most people would probably find pages covered in footnotes explaining the use of single words quite boring. After reading this translation I checked another, and the difference in wording, feel, and meaning was stark.

For example, here is a random stanza from Crawford's translation:

A torch is lit by another
And burns till it's burnt out;
A fire is kindled by another fire.
A man becomes wise
By speaking with other men,
But foolish by keeping himself to himself.

This is stanza 57. Here Andy Orchard's translation, from The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore, a translation of the whole Poetic Edda published by Penguin:

Fire-brand from firebrand takes flame till it's burnt out,
Blaze is kindled from blaze;
Man from man becomes skilled of speech
But dumb from lack of words.

I am not qualified to compare and comment on the accuracy of these two translations, only on the resulting English text. These two translations feel very different and use very different words, 'fire-brand' and 'torch', to translate the Old Norse word 'brandr'. The use of 'wise' in one and 'skilled of speech' in another also have very different connotations in English, even though they are translating the same idea.

A student of Norse literature will no doubt take more from this book than a layperson. Not only because this book contains the Old Norse text, based on Dr. Crawford's reading of the Codex Regius, but also because any changes he has made or possible other lingustic interpretations of the text are detailed in his commentary of the text placed after the poem, and in the introduction. There are also interpretations of the structure of the poem. Havamal is, as Jackson details, a sort of Franken-poem, one made up of shorter poems that have been combined together, and there are scholarly disagreements over where the original poems begin and end and why they were put together. Personally, I found that the poem is split into three parts: from stanza 1 to 95 which is mostly advice – a bit like the first book of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, then the poem's focus changes sharply from stanzas 95 to 142 where it changes again to talk about rune magic. In his introduction, Crawford divides the poem into the following stanzas: 1–81, 82–110, 138-145 and then 145-164. Given his expertise I obviously must defer to his judgement, but there are mysteries here a student or scholar might see that others will not. This also means that the poem is never sitting still. It is bursting with energy, making it a very fun and quick read.

But it does not deserve to be read quickly. This is a poem with a lot of wisdom and some surprising mentions of magic and rune lore toward the end which people interested in Viking mythology will probably like. There is a lot here to savour and chew on, and its advice is often still relevant no matter how successful you might be in life. There are still mysteries in this poem too, mysteries that even academics simply do not understand. In stanza 138 Odin says he hung himself on a 'wind-battered tree' sacrificing himself to himself, possibly (just from the rest of this part of the poem) to learn the secrets of magic, but in reality no one really knows what this means. This is an ancient poem from an extinct culture in a dead language, mysteries and uncertainties will abound.

There are also very nice appendices to this book, including other poems related to Havamal that are interesting in their own right. With one of them the connection is not quite clear, but it is still good to have. And there's also a 'Cowboy's Havamal' which Crawford explains in his preface to it is a condensation of Havamal's wisdom in a sort of Midwest American slang. It is a very fun extra, and a touching tribute to his late grandfather whose dialect Crawford is imitating. There is a lot of love, care and attention in this book, and it only seems right to end this review quoting a stanza from the 'Cowboy's Havamal', because no matter which walk of life we come from we can find truth, and possibly some comfort in it:

You're a damn fool
If you think you can just figure out
A way out of any problem.
It's good to think ahead,
But sometimes things go wrong.

And that's ok, that is just life. Some things will just go wrong, but it is your reaction to life's challenges that define you. This sort of attitude, from a voice who has lived a hard but honest life, is enthused throughout the pages of this book.

This is a book to be strongly recommended.