On Balder the Beautiful
In
theory, the primordial wellsprings of literature should be simple. During the greatest part of our existence as
a species, human beings have lived in tribes.
Closely knit, xenophobic tribes roamed the African savannah in the dawn
of mankind; tribes still control human affairs in places like Libya, Afghanistan,
and Iraq. Tribal life admits two basic narratives. (There is a third schematic for literature
that is occult and revealed later by this essay). The first narrative is the blood feud:
someone outside of the tribal group has killed, either by raiding or sorcery,
someone within the tribe. Vengeance must
be taken. The second fundamental tribal
narrative is related to marriage.
Members of the tribe may be prohibited from marrying one another – at
least, when the man and woman belong to same clan or moiety. This means that, even within the tribe, many
eligible mates are forbidden. But,
often, lovelorn youth ventures outside the confines of the tribe, seeking a
wife from among the women of an enemy tribe.
Forbidden love or rapine of the women of adversary tribes affords a
theme for the second great narrative impulse animating literature. Stories about a young man seeking a mate
among alien women signify the need for exogamous marriage. From an anthropological perspective, these
narratives are exogamy allegories.
Types
of these two narratives may be readily identified. A thousand fairy tales begin with the motif of a warrior princess who murders
unsuccessful suitors for her hand. How
many Oriental kings zealously protected their daughters by establishing
impossible impediments to marriage with execution by fire or axe as the penalty
for the suitors’ failure? These folk
tales embody the essential centrifugal impulses of the exogamous marriage
narrative – a bold suitor, an exotic, beautiful and nubile princess, and the
deadly peril that comes from consorting with the people of an enemy tribe. Icelandic sagas, at their simplest, embody
the blood feud narrative: someone is killed and, therefore, others must die in
recompense – an eye for an eye and a life for a life.
The
two epics that lie at the origins of Western literature represent these two
archetypal narratives. The Iliad is an account of a blood feud
between the two tribes: the Greeks and the Trojans. The exogamous marriage motif, signified by Helen’s rape, triggers the blood feud but, when
Homer brings us to the windy plains of Troy
in media res, the narrative has been
simplified to a revenge story: ultimately, Hector must die in compensation for
the death of Patroclus. By contrast, the
Odyssey reverses this structure: the Iliad is a revenge story triggered by
marriage outside the tribe; the Odyssey
is a marriage story triggered by a tribal war for revenge. In the Odyssey,
the titular hero wanders the world, engaging in liaisons with the women of
various exotic and menacing tribes – his centrifugal motion outward into sexual
encounters with aliens ultimately collapses back into the centripetal tribal
hearth. Odysseus returns to Ithaka,
tainted, perhaps, by intercourse with strange women, and, as an outsider,
purifies his own tribe by slaughtering the suitors importuning his wife.
Literary
epics struggle to cast away these archetypes, but the ancient narrative forms
are persistent. Virgil wants to write a
founding epic for his patron, Augustus Caesar – but early in the Aenied, epic paradigms divert the poet
into an account of Aeneas dalliance’ with Dido, portrayed like the alien women
in the Odyssey as a seductress,
witch, and sorcerer. And, when Aeneas
reaches Italy,
the poem draws its power from the paradigms of the blood feud narrative, as
tribal warriors battle one another, smiting blow for blow. In the Divine
Comedy, Virgil seeks his paradisal bride, Beatrice, in the most foreign of
all foreign lands, the afterlife. In the
Inferno and Purgatorio, God takes revenge, pursuing his own blood-feud against
sinful mankind. Religion in large part
defines itself as an ideological mechanism for transcending the twin paradigms
of the blood feud and the marriage narrative.
The Old Testament Bible is a vast tribal epic, primarily motivated by
vicious feuding between rival clans interrupted by peace-time idylls that turn
nightmarish when the Chosen People marry exogamously outside their tribal
groups thereby inducing God’s wrath. The
New Testament’s primary agenda is to refute these two archetypal narratives:
Jesus renounces blood feuding and declares all tribes to part of one family –
he is shown consorting with foreign and strange women, for instance the
Samaritan woman, at the typical Middle Eastern trysting place and exchange
between enemy tribes, an oasis well.
Literature
complicates and richens narrative paradigms without disregarding them. A classic example of this tendency is the old
German Nibelungenlied. King Gunther of Burgundy ventures outside his tribe to woo
and win Bruennhilde, the warrior Queen of Iceland. Gunther’s sojourn in Iceland is
characterized by fairy-tale motifs –
Bruennhilde slaughters unsuccessful suitors lacking the martial strength and
skill required to seduce her.
Unfortunately, Gunther doesn’t have the valor necessary to wrestle his
future bride to submission – he has to covertly rely upon another outsider,
Siegfried, the mighty prince of Xanten, to subdue Bruennhilde. This deceit triggers the entire epic which
narrates the destruction of the Burgundians.
The Burgundian princess, Kriemhilde, marries outside of her tribal
group, being espoused to Siegfried as a kind of reimbursement for that hero’s
services rendered subduing Bruennhilde in Iceland. Of course, Gunther marries Bruennhilde, a
sinister figure who represents the ultimate Dido- or Medea-like alien
woman. Hagen, one of King Gunther’s
feudal vassals, assassinates Siegfried.
Kriemhilde knows that her husband has been killed by Hagen but, at first, is powerless to effect
her revenge. Here, the exogamy narrative
finds itself in stark conflict with the obligations of blood-feud.
After all, Siegfried was an outsider to the Burgundians slaughtered by
an insider, one of King Gunther’s henchmen – in theory, he could be killed with
impunity. Gunther is Kriemhilde’s
brother. By the principle of agency,
Kriemhilde is obliged to take revenge against her own brother. Marriage establishes blood-feud obligations
that apparently trump the allegiance owed to members of the tribe. Here the two archetypal narrative strands
become tightly interwoven – marriage outside the tribe results in a blood-feud
which requires that vengeance be taken against other clan members. So what does Kriemhilde do? She remarries, selecting as her husband
Etzel, the King of the Huns, thus establishing an alliance with a ferocious,
powerful, and completely alien tribe.
Then, the Burgundians are invited to a feast at Etzel’s citadel where
they are ambushed and massacred. In
order to discharge her duty to revenge the outsider, Siegfried, Kriemhilde has
to invoke the assistance of a barbaric, Oriental despot to destroy her own tribe.
Sophisticated
narratives like the Nibelungenlied
entwine the two tribal narratives – blood feud and marriage to an outsider
yield a lethal paradox: what happens when the obligation to take revenge
triggers a duty to kill someone within the tribe – or, worse, someone within
the family? It is this dilemma that
yields a third more cryptic strand in literature.
A
paradigm for the tragedy of blood-revenge required within a family is found in Beowulf. Before descending into the marauding
dragon’s barrow, Beowulf, now an old man, recalls the events of his youth. At seven, he recalls, that he was fostered by
King Hrethel. Hrethel had two sons,
Herebeald and Haethcyn. One day, while
practicing with his bow and arrow, the younger son, Haethcyn accidentally
shot
wide and buried a shaft
In the flesh and blood of his own brother.
King Hrethel’s grief is
compounded by the fact that there is no mechanism for feud-revenge arising from
this killing. The death is profoundly
dishonorable because it can not be avenged:
The offense was beyond redress, a
wrongfooting
of the heart’s
affections; for who could avenge
the prince’s life or
pay his death price?
The Old English uses an oxymoron
to denote singular horror of this kind of death: (th)aet waes feo-leas gefeoht.
The word feo means assault and
signifies the event that must necessarily provoke a feud – feo and feud are etymologically related. The Old English kenning for this homicide is,
therefore, an assault-less assault (feoh-leas gefeoht) or a feud-less feud.
The Beowulf poet follows his account of
Herebeald’s killing with a celebrated simile: King Hrethel is like an old man
who has had the misfortune of living to see his only son “swing on the
gallows.” The misery of observing this
execution, surprisingly, is not primarily the shame that the old man feels at
his son’s crimes. Rather, the old man is
devastated by the fact that he can not revenge this homicide – there is no
compensation for a judicial killing: ond
he him helpe ne maeg (and there was
no help he could render). The
thought that judicial killing has replaced blood-feud, and that an execution on
the gallows can not be avenged, signifies the demise of an entire ancient way
of life:
He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling,
the banquet hall
bereft of all delight,
the windswept
hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,
the warriors under
ground; what was is no more.
No tunes from the
harp, no cheer raised in the yard...
In context, this elegy is a
dirge for the entire heroic world of the blood-feud, a world that the Christian
poet composing Beowulf views as
splendid, horrible, and inevitably displaced by Christianity. The first half of Beowulf, Grendel’s siege of Hrothgar’s banqueting hall can be
interpreted as an allegory for the vicious, inhuman power of blood-feuding as
well as the heroism and glory
concomitant to those feuds. Grendel, a
giant and the kin of Cain, hates Hrothgar’s bright and merry banqueting hall
and the human fellowship that it symbolizes.
He assaults the men in the hall and a blood-feud ensues. Only Beowulf has the strength and courage to
destroy the monster, ripping his arm from his socket, and hanging that huge
hideous claw – the talisman of the blood feud – over the threshold to the
banquet hall. But the feud does not end. Grendel has a mother and she assumes the
obligation to avenge her son. The cycle
of feud-violence can not be ended until Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother,
descending into the deepest and murkiest grotto-lake in the landscape to
accomplish that deed. The logic of the
blood-feud is simple: life for life until no lives remain. Grendel’s mother is the last of his kin and
her death concludes the cycle of violence.
The
blood-feud between Grendel and Hrothgar (and his vassals) is morally
unambiguous. There is no kinship between
the two tribal groups involved in the violence.
Grendel is of the race of giants, antediluvian and, with his mother, the
last of his kind – he is not even human and, therefore, no culpability arises
from his killing. Grendel signifies the
inhuman demands of the blood-feud system that defined the victims of
intertribal violence as something other than human, strangers outside of the
tribal family. But the unknown poet who
puts Beowulf into its form known to
us is a Christian, most likely a monk.
He recognizes that Jesus and his Gospel have changed the paradigm. Enmity between tribes is abolished by Jesus’
message of loving-kindness. In Christian
thought, all men are members of one extended family, all children of Adam and
Eve. Accordingly, Christians are
constrained to interpret any killing as a murder within the family.
In
general terms, Beowulf traces the
passage from murder as a legitimate tool of blood-feud to a polity in which
violence is vested in the State and judicial in character. The Grendel tale gives way to the parable of
the dragon. The dragon seems to
represent the power vested in a centralized monarchy, regal authority that
claims the sole right to the use of violence as a means of social control. The dragon emerges from his barrow and
breathes fire onto the village in the shire due to an offense of lese-majestie – someone has snatched one
of the royal goblets accumulated as capital in the dragon’s barrow. The dragon, glistening with scales of many
colors and winged, is more beautiful than Grendel, but also more
destructive. At the pivot between the
Grendel story and the parable of the dragon, the Beowulf poet inserts the story about Herebeard’s accidental
slaughter by his brother. This homicide
occurs within the family and so the principles of blood feud can not be used to
resolve the killing. In the
pre-Christian world, all killings, even accidental, are culpable – indeed, in
many tribal societies the notion of accident doesn’t exist: even a death by
disease is thought to be the result of malign sorcery committed by a witch in
an enemy tribe. Accordingly, the power
of the state must be invoked to avenge the killing since kin are barred from
revenge -killing within the family group
Hence, the simile insisted upon by the Beowulf poet in describing King Hrethel’s grief – he is like an old
man who has lived to see his son judicially executed and can do nothing about it.
Christianity insists that all men are brothers. Therefore, a Christian world must regard all
murders as fratricide – justice requires that recompense for a death within the
family (or the extended family which is now the world) be reposed in a royal
majesty, a dragon-like figure of arbitrary violence. Kings, of course, are wont to war against
other kings – hence, Beowulf like the
Nibelungenlied moves inexorably from
small scale feuding to pitched battles between armies.
Scholars
observe a strong connection between the digression involving Herebaerd’s
killing in Beowulf and the core of
mythological legends surrounding the Norse god, Balder the Beautiful. Balder was Odin’s second son, Thor’s younger
brother. Unlike the brawny warriors
surrounding him, Balder seems to have been delicate and pretty. His complexion is very pale – it is said that
his brow is as white as the flowers that blossom in springtime in the high
mountain meadows overhanging the fjords.
He lives in heaven “where nothing is impure.”
Such
a splendid and delicate being was, of course, his mother’s special
favorite. Frigg, Balder’s mother, is
worried for his well-being. The world is
full of violence and monsters from which even the gods are not immune. Further, Balder has told Frigg that he has
been troubled by dreams suggesting that something will hurt him or that he might
even die. Frigg, whose name probably
means “love,” lies claim to all created things.
She summons them to council and makes every ounce of matter in the
universe swear an oath to her that it will not harm her beloved son. The stones and the trees, the birds and the
gushing water, insects and meteors, all promise Frigg, the all-mother, that
they will refrain from injuring her delicate, pale wraith of a son,
Balder. A fundamental theme in Norse
mythology is the mortality of all things and, of course, Frigg’s scheme to
protect her son goes awry. In fact, it
might be argued that Norse fatality requires that Frigg’s very efforts to
preserve Balder from harm become the agency of his destruction. Apparently, a Viking oath requires
testamentary capacity – that is, that the oath-taker be compos mentis and adult.
Exactly how such testamentary or contractual capacity is measured in
things like waterfalls and boulders is unclear, but Frigg observes that
“mistletoe is too young to take an oath.”
In mythological thought, the exception to the rule, of course, is
fatal.
Nothing
if not rambunctious, the various gods and their vassals take turns hurling
stones and weapons at Balder the Beautiful.
This is the envious homage that power pays to beauty. But beauty turns aside all missiles. Balder, pale and indecisive, stands in the
center of a barrage of arrows and spears.
Nothing can harm him and great hilarity ensues in heaven. Loki, a trickster god, participates in the
harmless attack on Balder and may be jealous of the beautiful youth’s
invulnerability. Plotting harm, Loki
masquerades as an old woman, endears himself to Frigg and, then, disingenuously
asks her why the gods are hurling things at Balder. Frigg tells him about the oath that she
extracted from all created things – and, fatally, mentions that the mistletoe
was “too young” to make a promise to her.
Loki steals away and fashions a spear out of mistletoe. It is not clear how mistletoe – a parasitic
vine that grows in spiral balls in trees – could possibly be made into a
weapon. A lance made from mistletoe is
like “hen’s teeth” – it is an oxymoron, something that can’t possibly
exist. Loki’s powers are great, however,
and somehow he makes the mistletoe into a pointed weapon.
Standing
aside from the circle of gods hurling arrows and spears at Balder is Hoed,
Balder’s half-brother. Hoed is blind and
can’t throw anything at Balder because he doesn’t know where he is. Loki hands Hoed a lance of mistletoe and
tells him to pitch it at Balder. Hoed
hurls the mistletoe spear, turning his blind face, one supposes, generally in
the direction of the missiles clattering off Balder and falling to the
ground. The spear arcs into Balder,
piercing him, and the most beautiful of the Aesir,
the Scandinavian gods, dies. Thus was
accomplished, Snorri Sturlason says, “the greatest misfortune among gods and
men that can be done.”
Balder’s
death triggers a complicated cycle of tales.
Hermoed, Odin’s servant, descends into hell to try to retrieve Balder
from the underworld. This heroic effort
fails. Trouble ensues at Balder’s
funeral. One of the mourners, an ogress,
arrives riding a giant wolf with snakes for reins. Four berserks are deputized to hold the
ogress’ mount. Berserks are not the best
liverymen and a melee occurs – a
hapless dwarf gets kicked into Balder’s funeral pyre and is burned alive. Balder’s consort, a Valkyrie named Nanna,
hurls herself into the flames. As with
Bruennhilde’s immolation, Balder’s horse, Dreipnir, also perishes in the
fire.
The
gods pursue Loki to punish him for his crime.
Loki changes shape and escapes every effort to capture him. Finally, Thor corners Loki near a river. Just as Thor’s huge fist is closing around
him, Loki becomes a salmon and slips through the god’s fingers. With the help of other Aesir, Thor forges a magic net.
After three attempts, Loki is ensnared in the net. Thor drags Loki into a cave and fetters him
to a boulder. The gods are thorough in
their revenge. Loki’s eldest son is
turned into a wolf and, then, unleashed on the trickster god’s younger sons –
they are torn to pieces and devoured. A
writhing serpent is suspended over Loki.
The serpent’s fangs drip poisonous venom into Loki’s eyes and
mouth. Loki’s wife attends the miserable
god, collecting the poisonous venom in a bowl.
But, when the bowl is full and must be emptied, she departs the cave
and, then, Loki is seared by the venom’s slow drizzle, writhing in his bonds so
that the earth quakes with tremors.
Enacting
vengeance on Hoed is more problematic.
Hoed is a Odin’s son and blood-kin.
Accordingly, Odin can not kill Hoed, although the rules of the
blood-feud require that a life be exchanged for a life. The dilemma is that faced by Kriemhilde in
the Nibelungenlied and involves the
same grief that shattered Beowulf’s King
Hrethel – honor requires a slaying that family and tribal ties precludes. But Odin is resourceful: if he can’t take
revenge for his beautiful, slain son, he will beget an avenger. So Odin rapes a giantess named Rind. She bears a son, Vali. Vali doesn’t procrastinate in achieving
Odin’s intentions. On the eve of his
first day, not 24 hours free from the womb, Vali, a precocious lad, murders poor,
blind Hoed.
In
Norse myth, there are further ramifications flowing from Balder’s death. Ultimately, the catastrophe ripples to the
edges of the universe and brings about the twilight of the gods. Paradoxically, Scandinavian mythology insists
that both Hoed and Balder somehow survive the Goetterdaemmerung – I suppose their survival is somehow based on
the fact that they are already dead when all of the other Aesir meet their fate.
Freud
famously observed that dream imagery is overdetermined – this means an image or
a narrative condenses several causal agents.
Mythology conjures with reality like dreams – the processes of thought
embodied by mythology are kin to those that we experience in dreaming. The tale of Balder’s death is densely
overdetermined. We might surmise that it
has something to do with beauty – and, on the metaphysical level, with
appearances. Balder’s killer is the one
that can not see him and, therefore, may be immune to his beauty. Frigg’s mother-love imparts to Balder characteristics
that achieve the unintended consequences of his death. Freud tells us that every son who is
confident of his mother’s love will grow up to be a conqueror of men – but
conquerors, of course, are uniquely exposed to murderous envy and, usually,
assassinated. No doubt exists that the
narrative exposes tensions in tribal society inevitably resulting from a moral
code that required death to be compensated by death on the basis of
blood-feuding. The story certainly
exposes the tragic consequences of applying the ideology of the blood-feud
within a family. But, most importantly,
I think, the story, like its cognate in Beowulf,
exposes a third fundamental theme in human affairs – the notion of casualty,
that is, the fortuitous, sudden accidental event.
Both
the Beowulf account of Herebeald’s
death and the slaying of Balder raise a fundamental and puzzling issue – why is
blood-feud revenge necessary in the context of a killing that we would term
purely accidental? Isn’t the obvious
solution to the dilemma posed by a negligent killing in the family the notion
that the homicide should be excused because it is purely accidental and not
intentionally caused? Neither account
directly considers the fact that degrees of culpability are always considered
in assessing manslaughter. Mythological
thinking is a zero-sum game: someone is killed, and so, someone else must die
-- death must be given for death regardless of the degree of moral culpability
involved in the initial homicide.
Negligence resulting in homicide is equivalent to murder. But, of course, no one really believes this –
nor did anyone ever believe it. The
human imagination always has possessed a murky grey zone between intentional
act and act of God occupied by the concept of negligence. It’s my thesis that one significant element
of the Beowulf digression about Herebeald’s
slaying, which seems to derive from the quasi-religious story about Balder (the
names may be derived from one another – some scholars hear an echo of Balder in
Herebeald) is that the narrative is
“good to think with.” And one of the
things we are supposed to think is unsaid, but, nevertheless, powerfully
implicit: our primordial ancestors were like children; they faced a dilemma
that we can avoid by simply invoking the concept of reduced moral culpabililty
for negligence. Indeed, Balder’s story
is contrived to offer Hoed every possible excuse for killing his brother: Hoed
is blind and can’t aim his missile, the fatal spear is made of mistletoe which
can’t possibly injury anyone, and the victim is supposedly immune to injury. To use the language of the law, the injury to
Balder is wholly unforeseeable and, therefore, no actionable duty arises with
respect to Hoed’s act. Thus, I believe
that Balder’s story (and the tale of Herebeald’s death) provides a way of
thinking about ethics which the narratives posit as new, sophisticated, a
thought-tool for modern people – in mythology, the time in which events occur
is always lost immemorially in the past, although somehow always in the
present. Hoed’s accidental slaying of
Balder is a way of forcing contemplation of the notion of negligence, casualty,
accident, and moral fault.
Exogamous
marriage provides the framework for one set of archetypal narratives. The revenge-feud represents another narrative
fundamental to human consciousness. And,
I would argue that the third great narrative structure may be described as
casualty, or, as sometimes called: fate
(or destiny). In large part, accident
rules the affairs of men. The role of
accident or casualty in triggering narratives is an occult element in the
stories we tell one another. The reason
that the notion of casualty is concealed in Beowulf
and the Balder story is that men wish to imagine themselves the captains of
their fate, agents vested with free will making their own destinies. But, of course, there is a secret doubt in
even the most aggressive of warriors and rulers – to what extent are we really
entitled to praise for our good fortune?
And to what extent are we really culpable for our bad acts? Aren’t both good and bad fortune the result
of accidental forces that may well be predestined? The idea is similar to Martin Luther’s remark
that predestination, although theologically indisputable, was a dismal subject
and one that should not considered too diligently. (On predestination: “Do not seek to know what
is above you...accept predestination and do not inquire too closely about the
secret counsels of God... Luther’s commentary on Genesis 29:9).
Accident
shows us two faces. We are dismayed and
horrified when casualty intervenes arbitrarily in our lives to inflict
apparently meaningless suffering and chaos.
But accident may be beautiful as well: the entire lyric impulse in
poetry derives from accidental encounters that somehow strike us a revelatory and
numinous. Wordsworth’s clouds and daffodils,
Goethe’s mountain sunset with birds crying to one another in the treetops,
Robert Frost’s pastures and brooks – this poetry represents an impulse derived
from the accidental encounter by a solitary wanderer with some aspect of the
natural (or human) world that was previously unappreciated. Fortuity may guide the encounter, or may
produce a surge of emotion that for some reason was previously unavailable – a
momentary, casual “spot in time” becomes drenched with the emotion arising
between the collision between the imagination and something that, suddenly, and
inexplicably arouses the imagination from its characteristic slumber. Balder’s beauty is said to rival the white
blossoms that adorn the sub-arctic pastures of the far north in the bright and
ephemeral spring sunlight. Thus, Balder
embodies both the danger of the fortuitous and its importance in reviving the
slumbering imagination – we can’t say, often, what moves us about a certain
vista or combination of words, but there is something that speaks to us
powerfully precisely because it is accidental, and, therefore, beyond our
conscious control.
Balder’s
beauty represents the accidental. As
such there is something hazy, indistinct, and unexpected about him. Handsome and strong, Snorri Sturlason in John
Lindow’s translation (Norse Mythology, Oxford
2001) tells us:
he is the wisest of the aesir and the most
eloquent and the most merciful, but that nature
accompanies him, that none of his judgments
stands.
In medieval Iceland, “judgement”
was fundamental to a chieftain’s power and status. Iceland, which models the old Scandinavian
tribal system, was without central authority.
Law was administered by the great chieftains who settled disputes,
usually about real property, by pronouncing judgment and upholding those
decrees through their own strength and steadfastness. Judgment of this kind, representing a kind of
arbitrated settlement, was fundamental to northern European tribal politics. The centrality of this kind of judgement to
these cultures is reflected in the 12th century Domesday Book, a cataster or assessment roll containing judgements
(dome) as to land ownership – this is
one of the first books in British political history and remains one of the most
important. The great Icelandic saga, Njal’s Saga (sometimes called Burnt Njal) is, among other things, a
compendium of cases involving judgment.
This theme is announced in the book’s first lines when Mord Fiddle, one
of the central protagonists, is called “a mighty chieftain and a great taker up
of lawsuits and so great a lawyer that no judgments were thought lawful unless
he had a hand in them...” Balder,
however, seems a figure antipodal to Mord Fiddle. His judgments, clouded, perhaps, by the aura
of casualty surrounding him, are indefinably tainted so that “none of (them)
stands.
Here
is a final point that intrigues me. The
fog of beauty and indecision haloing Balder is so great that there isn’t even a
clear judgment about whether his judgments are valid and enforceable. Wikipedia translates Snorri Sturlason’s
description of Balder with these words:
He is the wisest of the Aesir and the
fairest spoken and most gracious and that quality attends him that none may
gainsay his judgment.
So do Balder’s judgments stand
or not? Even this is unclear.
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