Slow Havamal: 98

[kylec]

In the 98th verse, Billing’s girl tells Odin to come back in the evening to woo her, because it would be improper unless no one else knew of such a scandalous act.

Odin is rebuffed but not entirely rejected. The woman he yearns for will allow him to woo her, but she’s concerned with appearances. She doesn’t want to be seen with him. Billing—her father or husband, probably—would be upset, and people will talk. But it isn’t the act of romantic relations that she finds improper. It’s the knowledge others may have of it.

That the scandal resides in someone finding out rather than the consummation of a love is interesting. From the girl’s perspective, there is nothing wrong with the satisfaction of this desire, so long as no one thinks ill of them. What is wrong, then, is the attitudes she fears from others. They are too harsh or meddling. An act of desire is put off until the dark, where it can hide in the shadows. Desire itself isn’t wrong, but there are consequences for doing it publicly. The scandal is created not by the act of making love, but by the knowledge of it.

It’s a humorous notion, but it holds with my understanding of virtue. A virtue is a set of behaviors wherein someone limits themselves or sacrifices in order to benefit the community. Were Odin and the girl beholden to no one, no one could fault their relationship. Most Americans today would think that it doesn’t matter who knows, the error stands. Maybe that was the case then, too, or maybe the harm only entered the picture with revelation. A desire, then, harms to the extent that it confounds another living being’s will. My hunger isn’t wrong, but the cow sure didn’t enjoy it. Nor will Billing have his way if Odin can have it first.

It’s a fascinating perspective on rules, because we can hardly do anything without violating the will of some blade of grass among us. While our instinct is to consider a man sleeping with a forbidden woman as some absolute wrong waiting to be discovered—wrong, still, regardless of if it comes to light—the girl in this poem, at least, suggests that what Billing doesn’t know won’t hurt him. That is, a crime is only as bad as the benefits it brings, minus the harm. Perhaps it’s no less a violation of will for Billing to keep her away from what she wants. Until a scandal rocks the community, everyone is fine.

I’m not sure how I feel about the loophole. Like many, I tend to think of laws as absolutes, existing in some transcendent abstract state that requires no subject to observe their violation. In living practice, that certainly isn’t how anyone experiences harm. There are other considerations. Is an oath broken at the moment of the act, or the moment the violation comes back around to harm the original intent? For example, if you swear you won’t eat my steak, am I wronged when you eat it, or when I go to grab it and wind up hungry? It sounds like some kind of manipulative argument to avoid certain responsibilities. That view hinges on the idea that these rules exist in some absolute, timeless sense and that their violation in the abstraction, rather than in the practical consequences, is the threshold for a wrong. Certainly, it has to be violated there at some point either way. Is that alone enough to harm? I leave it to the conscientious reader to decide.