On the Soot-of-the-Sea

On the Soot-of-the-Sea




Kennings are word-formations common in Skaldic or Old Norse poetry.  This rhetorical device substitutes attributes of a thing for its name.  Thus, “blood” becomes “sword-sweat”.  “Battle” is “spear-din”.  Kennings serve several purposes: first, they allow alliteration, a characteristic element in poetry of this kind; second, kennings are difficult to decipher and, often, occult – they emphasize the incantatory nature of this kind of verse.  Skaldic poetry is intentionally daunting – it uses code known only to those who have studied not only the verse form, but, also, the mythological underpinnings to the poems.  Kennings, like runes, are a kind of word-magic.

Here is a famous group of kennings in which descriptive phrases migrate toward proper names.  The context for the verse is this: Odin, the King of the Norse Gods, learns that a ruler, Geirrod is behaving tyrannically.  Geirrod, with Agnar, are royal brothers lost at sea.  Each has been rescued by a different fisherman and “fostered” or raised in a peasant family.  Upon being returned to their homeland in Norway, Geirrod betrays Agnar, who is the oldest son, by pushing him out to sea, so that he can seize the throne.  Odin is upset by this misconduct and takes on the disguise of Grimnir (this means “masked”).  Grimnir goes to Geirrod’s court where he is mistreated by Geirrod.  In fact, Geirrod sensing that the stranger is a repository of occult wisdom tries to wrest those truths from the traveler by torturing him.  He roasts the God between two fires.  Agnar, who has returned to the kingdom, is present and he offers the tortured stranger a drink of water.  In exchange, Grimnir tells his wisdom to Agnar. (Later, Geirrod trips and falls on his own sword, skewering himself and the true heir to the throne, Agnar is restored.)  The majority of the poem consists of Odin disguised as Grimnir telling the secrets of the Norse gods.  This text is called the Grimnismal.

At stanza 18 of Grimnismal, these words appear:

Andhrimnir in Elhrimnir / Has Saehrimnir boiled / Best of pork, yet few knew / on what the einherjar are nourished.

The text solves the puzzle of how Odin nourishes his retainers, the einherjar (“lone warriors”)  at Valhalla.  800 of the best fighters, selected by the Valkyries from those slain in battle, live in Valhalla.  This retinue, selected to serve the gods on the day of the apocalypse (Ragnarok) spend all day fighting, literally hacking each other apart, to be reassembled for feasting each night.  But feasting on what?  Andhrimnir means “Sooty front” or “Sooty face” – this is the name of Valhalla’s cook.  Eldhrimnir means “fire-sooty” and refers to the massive pot used to boil the victuals of Odin’s fighters.  Saehrimnir means “Sea Soot” or “Soot of the Sea” – it is a kenning taken to refer to a magical pig.  Saehrimnir, “best of pork” has the efficacy of being butchered each day, boiled in Eldhrimnir to be served by “Sooty Face”, the cook, to the hungry multitude – Saehrimnir is inexhaustible; the huge pig revives each morning, like the warriors he survives multiple slaughter and butchery to be available each day for the evening repast. 

We know Saehrimnir names a pig – otherwise the appellation “best of pork” makes no sense.  But why is beast named “Soot-of-the-Sea”?  Hrimnir is cognate with the English word “rime’ used to mean hoar-frost or the coating of fine ice crystals where vapor has condensed and frozen on a cold object.  The Old Norse word for “soot” is normally “sot” – a term related to “settle down upon” or “deposit.”  Therefore, the use of hrimnir for sot is already poetic.  The primary meaning of hrim and hrimnir is hoar-frost.  The efficacy of this term’s poetic use in the Grimnismal is to combine in a single word images related to fire and ice – the hrimnir in this setting is a compact oxymoron: it denotes the “rime” or hoar-frost that is created by fire.  In effect, the word has a sense of both fire/burning and ice/freezing entangled together in a single term – the effect is baroque and well-suited to the poem’s context, the tyrant’s torture of the stranger between the two fires. 

But what is the connection between the hrimnir (or hoar-frost soot) and the sea?  This is obscure – there are certainly a number of usages in which nautical terms or sea creatures are metaphorically linked to hogs.  (In the First Law of Helgi, Hunding Slayer at stanza 50, a seafaring ships are described under the kenning “blue-black-briny hogs”.  Ships are also sometimes referred to as “unnsvin” – that is “wave swine” and this word also is used for a sea-creature, likely a porpoise.  In English, a dolphin is a “herring-hog” and Danish calls the animal “marsvin” (“sea-swine”). But the analogies here run in the opposite direction of Saehrimnir which does not describe a sea beast but a land animal.)  Why would you name a pig “Soot of the Sea” or, for that manner, “hoar-frost of the sea”. 

The only conjecture that I can draw on this subject is that “Sae” (sea) may be related to “sow”.  The word Saehrimnir may be a pun – “sow”- soot or the soot that is deposited when a hog is roasted.  The connection to the sea may be that the pig is inexhaustible – like the vast and endless sea, the magical pig is boundless, has no limits, it’s flesh is oceanic.  Thus, the animal is named “Sea/Sow – soot”.  The Icelandic scholar, most likely the redoubtable Snorri Sturlason, who transcribed the verse from Grimnismal in his Poetic Edda undoubtedly knew Latin.  This leads to an additional surmise: the Latin name for pigs is Suidae (“swine”) – the word is pronounced like “soo-day” and sounds in English, at least, like “sooty”.  (Some etymologies claim that the pig call: “Sooey!” is related to the Latin name for the animal.)  Thus, Sturlason may have thought “suidae” for hog, heard a pun on “sooty” in Old Norse, and, then, thought of the prefix “Sae” as meaning both “soot” and “sea” – hence “sae -sot” for sea/soot then translating the “soot” into hrimnir for poetic effect.  Another idea that occurs to me is that pork may have been salted for preservation – was pork preserved in brine made from sea-salt?  So, does, Saehrimnir mean “sea-rime” or salt, perhaps, a kenning for “salted pork”.  “Salted pork” in the form of ham is often regarded as more or less inexhaustible.  There is a modern aphorism on this subject: in her Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer says “Eternity is two people and a ham”.  (The origin of the aphorism may be Dorothy Parker.)  The point may be that a pickled ham may seem inexhaustible to those eating it.  Saehrimnir may just mean “brined pork” or ham. 

I am skeptical about my own theory here.  It relies too much on the meaning of “soot” in English.  If any of my readers has a better surmise as to why “best of pork” is called “Soot of the Sea”, please let me know.