Jeff Bridges as a very Odinic-looking cowboy in 2010's True Grit.

Jeff Bridges as a very Odinic-looking cowboy in 2010's True Grit.

“People ain’t always sincere
when they say they’ll give you somethin’;
you don’t know it for a fact
till it’s in yer hands.
Don’t take anybody at just his word.”

Now available: The Cowboy Hávamál, a translation of the first constituent poem of Hávamál (the Gestaþáttr) into no-nonsense, West-o’-the-Pecos English. Full text of the translation is available as a blog page here, or you can download it as a .pdf with facing Old Norse text here.

The genesis of this idea came not from within me, but from an interesting exchange with the author of the Norwegian Håvamål for Dummies. That delightful endeavor is a summary of the Hávamál’s medieval Norse wisdom in direct, plain, clipped, Norwegian, its wisdom seeming all the more grounded for its judicious use of the author’s own sociolect.

The author of that document proposed that a translation of “Håvamål for Dummies” into English would ideally incorporate the translator’s own English/American sociolect in a similar fashion, though he expressed reservations about whether a native speaker of English might have the same relationship with the text as a native speaker of a Scandinavian language. My readers must be the judge of whether I have proven these reservations baseless or not. But I believe that my relationship with this text – going back to my early teenage years, when I discovered it and saw in it a codification of much of the attitude toward life which I had learnt at my grandfather’s knee – was deep and genuine enough to come across as respectful in a more colloquial translation than I had previously done. And having often heard this same grandfather’s voice coming through the god Óthinn’s words, I have attempted to render the poem in that voice – the voice of a Texas exile in the Rockies.

“The Cowboy Hávamál” is, then, a condensation of the wisdom of the first, most down-to-earth part of Hávamál (often called the Gestaþáttr, it comprises stanzas 1-79, give or take a few) into (mostly) five-line stanzas of western-colored English. I have not endeavored to render this dialect phonetically, but only to make an “eye dialect” of sorts to suggest the dry tones of the accent behind the words – with a “git” here and a “yer” there, which I hope doesn’t interfere with smooth reading too much. In some cases I have had to settle for rendering the dialect a little more stereotypically than I’d like – much of what is so characteristic of it is its sound rather than its diction, but diction (“ain’t” and such) is easier to represent on the page than a bisyllabic pronunciation of “then” that rhymes with “fleein’.”

I have cut out much of the front matter that precedes my more formal, more complete translation of the Hávamál: the Old Norse Pronunciation Guide, the Notes on Viking Age Old Norse, and the Recommended Reading List. I trust that interested readers will easily enough find this material in that other translation, available as a .pdf on the same webpage (http://tattuinardoelasaga.wordpress.com/translations/). The emphasis in this translation is just on the voice, sad with wisdom and cynical with experience, that I hear when I read this poem.