The Right Waters, ref. 3
Mar. 14th, 2012 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
widsithI invoke the Commonwealth! I know what was in Othroerir; Othroerir was in it, In it, it was hoarded, Hoarded, it was stolen, Stolen, it was spilled, Spilled, I caught it; Caught, it was given away, Given away, it stays my own, My own is the Commonwealth. I invoke it! The land may not be hidden from its lover.
Form and function would suggest that this is Amergin's invocation of Ireland, or so I can gather from readily available sources that have paraphrased accounts. Leaving the framework aside, consideration of the content draws on the history of Othroerir, and so "Skaldskaparmal" or "Havamal" from the Icelandic prose and poetry compiled by Snorri Sturluson and anonymous others are the most obvious places that this would take us. Granting that Myers was drawing on what would have been currently published work, Eddas are a good guess.
Only it's hard to proceed from here. Norse storytelling isn't really the point of "Skaldsakparmal": demonstrative stories and excerpts of lost poetic texts are provided together with descriptive prose as a kind of instruction in traditional Icelandic literature, featuring various examples as object lessons for the purpose of making some point or illustrating some notion.
Events referenced in Golias's chant are nevertheless described more completely and less obliquely in Skaldskaparmal; restricting myself to one source probably means picking that one. Despite this choice the only source I could find for Myers' interpretation of the "rhymester's" or "poetaster's" share spilled from Othroerir was in a footnote to the 1923 Bellows translation of "The Sayings of Har", explaining verse 107 with the claim that the mead Odin spilled on his flight home was the way the human gift of poetry was won.
