kylec | Slow Havamal: 45

The 45th verse says if you have a friend you don’t trust, it’s best to speak kind words and pay compliments, then show him treachery to repay his own.

One of the hardest things for me with Havamal and certain other texts is to get outside of my Western frame of reference to understand it on its own terms. Western is code for Christian, and I’m not convinced it’s possible to grasp the moral system that I encounter here. Even (and especially) for non-Christians, the mental discord can be too loud to meaningfully penetrate. A Christian at least is aware of their moral prejudices, where they come from, and why he should follow them. The non-Christian, on the other hand, may be totally unaware, and even revile the notion that he acts along a very old groove carved 2,000 years ago. In this case, an apparent moral text would have us lie and betray someone who wouldn’t have done us any greater service. While the Christian may be inclined to turn the other cheek, I’m willing to bet most non-Christians, faced with this kind of friend, would whip out some trope like “be the better person,” “take the high ground,” or “just stop hanging out with the guy.”

The unasked question lingers heavy in the air: Why shouldn’t I hurt him? According to Odin, chief of the pantheon there’s nothing wrong with that option. Here we encounter the irreconcilability of different systems. Each is entirely coherent within itself. Those contradictions belong to the comparison of the two. Nor is translation possible. We can’t say “this aspect of Old Norse culture serves the same function as this aspect of Judeo-Christian culture.” For example, “hand” in English is not a translation of “mano” in Spanish. They may refer to something mutually comprehensible in most circumstances, but a Mexican would not likely “mano me that hammer.” There are many meanings, many metaphors attached to even a simple word. Let’s imagine another language in which their word for “hand” means the appendage just as it does in English, but also any object that appears to grasp, like a clamp, a tree branch, and certain hooks. Or perhaps their hand includes the fingers, for which there is no other word, such that a broken finger is a broken hand. Maybe there is a separate word for a hand that is severed from the body, lying in a field.

That’s a very superficial treatment of the complications of translating a single word. Now try to do it for an important cultural practice. A change to any part of a system changes the whole. If we, as Westerners, decide to stop observing a “turn the other cheek” morality because we read it was OK in a cool Norse poem, but we unconsciously continue to follow all of the other moral “agents” that make up our system of how we treat one another, we no longer have Western morality, but a broken ecosystem that must change in its entirety or unravel completely.

Nothing short of a complete cultural reinvention of myself could help me to understand how this verse fits within the rest of Norse culture. Though many practices survive in the literature, I’m quite sure there are those that don’t.

Let’s try to understand it the only way we can: through the distorting lens of our own morality. I believe harming people brings it back upon me in the long run. That may or may not be true. It’s one way I justify turning the other cheek. I also believe it’s OK to defend myself against direct attack, like my friend drawing a sword on me, but not to scheme his downfall. To a Norseman, that latter may be exactly what’s called for. This friend is a direct threat to him and his family. There can be no clean severance. Maybe the only thing that will keep him safe is an elaborate series of actions that removes the treacherous one from the picture. This is selective treachery. We can see from other verses it’s discouraged among true friends.

Why would I kill the man in a sword fight but not through a plot? I think the word “defend” applies to immediate circumstances and never involves preemptive strikes against one suspected of, but not yet, harming me. Maybe our Norseman would translate “defend” to mean what I think, plus any series of actions that prevents a reasonable potential harm from ever occurring. It may be important that it also signals to others not to mess with this guy, or that treacherous friends get what they deserve in this culture. If his idea of defending himself is different, then he probably also has a different notion of going on the offensive, what it entails, and when it’s justified. Or he may have no concept whatsoever of offense and defense. We simply can’t know from where we sit.

You can tell I’ve been reading too much on semiosis lately. In Sensing Corporeally, Floyd Merrell points out that to understand an incommensurable view requires one to reside full-time in it, which is either impossible, or the very act causes the person as he was to cease to exist. The best we can do is to temporarily venture into a narrow zone of overlap, going back and forth, never really experiencing or understanding their side, but making rough translations of varying degrees of capability into terms we do understand. Imagine a horizon that spirals out to gather a sliver of novel experience, then circles round to integrate it before spiraling out again. In a sense, this is how we live our lives from birth. It’s much more complicated than the picture I just painted, but it’s important that we never really grasp the other culture. We lop and stretch it into something we can fit in our own Procrustean bed, which changes our own world, though usually not very radically. I’m essentially learning to ask a Spanish friend to “lend me a mano with this couch.”

But changing one part changes the whole. I may never be able to understand this verse or how it fits into the whole of Norse morality, but the act of straining to do so alters my world just a little, so the next time I encounter something incommensurable, it’s a different “me,” changed from bottom to top, left hand to right. I hold no illusions of understanding, or even of translation. I merely attend to the strange world, grant it hospitality, and let my own horizons shift as they will. No scoffing, nor naive embracing. That’s the best I can do when I encounter a system that I can never be a part of. Such systems can be found everywhere from cultures both historical and contemporary, to the other people living under my roof.

Slow Havamal: 45

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