Slow Havamal: 109

[kylec]

In verse 109, the frost-giants come to Odin to ask him about the “Evildoer” who stole the mead; whether he was hiding among the gods, or had been killed by Suttung.

The frost-giants visit Odin, now out of his disguise, to find out if he is harboring the one who stole the mead of Oderir, apparently unsure whether the thief got away or was killed by Suttung during the escape. To our amusement, they have no idea they’re speaking with the man they seek. Odin has played a fine trick. His disguise was clever enough that he is now unrecognizable.

I don’t know what to take from this verse besides a funny story, but if there’s anything, it might be various guises we wear, and what they allow us to do. As Gunnlod’s lover, Odin managed to seduce a woman and use her to steal a treasure if the giants. Now in his customary get-up, he’s unknown to his pursuers.

We think of ourselves as a continuous, single identity. The things we did at one time belong to us, just as the things we do now. It’s interesting to consider that there might in fact be some distinction—not entirely, but enough—between past versions of ourselves. Certainly something persists. Just as certainly, something vanishes, or rather transforms. A line from Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Often by pretending we are certain people, we open up the opportunity for us to change our behaviors in ways that would never have been justifiable or possible under our standard identity. We also allow others to see us differently. But is that guise really us?

What else is a man if not his actions? Charles Sanders Peirce’s Pragmatic maxim goes as follows:

“Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then the whole of our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

In two different statements, we get a sense of how Odin might not be recognized. For practical purposes, in pretending to be another, he became that other, if briefly. That’s especially true from the frost-giants point of view. They have no way to connect that figure with the Odin before them. We know there’s a connection. But do we know they’re the same?

We might look at a life as a series of identities, successively adopted and abandoned. The whole of our actions at an interval of observance is who we are. When our actions change, so do we. This is a spatial view, with episodes lined up in order, changing to the next. In the temporal view, and the challenging notion of “duration” we get from Henri Bergson, there is only ever the whole, which includes all moments we think of as past the way our experience of a song includes all notes, rather than experiencing them as discrete entities a half-second at a time.

The joke in this verse is that we experience Odin as the whole, incorporating the past, while the frost-giants experience him as separate from the actions of the mead thief. What parts of ourselves do we fail to connect with the present version, as the frost-giants have done? Where have we identified two instances in an unhelpful manner, perhaps as we’ve done with Odin and the mead thief? If we form our conceptions based on the net effects of an entity’s actions, are we defining the distinction between entities properly, or might we see more connections if we could see more actions, connections which would blur the borders and reduce the number of characters in our world of conception?