Page:The Elder Edda and the Younger Edda - tr. Thorpe - 1907.djvu/137

 harm shall obstruct thy wishes. On a stone fast in the earth I have stood within the door, while songs I sang to thee.

16. My son! bear hence thy mother's words, and in thy breast let them dwell; for happiness abundant shalt thou have in life, while of my words thou art mindful.

singular poem, the authorship of which is, in some manuscripts, assigned to Sæmund himself, may be termed a Voice from the Dead, given under the form of a dream, in which a deceased father is supposed to address his son from another world. The first 7 strophes seem hardly connected with the following ones, which, as far as the 32nd consist chiefly in aphorisms with examples, some closely resembling those in the Havamal. In the remaining portion is given the recital of the last illness of the supposed speaker, his death, and the scenes his soul passed through on the way to its final home.

The composition exhibits a strange mixture of Christianity and Heathenism, whence it would seem that the poet's own religion was in a transition state. Of the allusions to Heathenism it is, however, to be observed that they are chiefly to persons and actions of which there is no trace in the Odinic mythology, as known to us, and are possibly the fruits of the poet's own imagination. 111