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Search me. The pregnancy thing? Ties into some thoughts I was having a couple of weeks back about these two bits of lore (x-posted from Lj):
'From the Lesser Völuspá...
"The wolf did Loki sire on Angrboda,
And Sleipnir he bore to Svadilfari;
The worst piece of witchcraft seemed the one
Sprung from the brother of Byleist then.
A heart ate Loki— in the embers it lay,
And half-cooked found he the woman's heart—
With child from the woman Lopt soon was,
And thence among men came every troll-woman." [emphasis mine]
The 'troll-woman' thing is what gets me. It appears that it's a translation of the word flagð, and I've also seen it translated as ogress, giantess, witch. Female energy, then; wild female energy, of a fierce, fearsome, devouring nature.
Compare this passage from the Völuspá
"The war I remember, the first in the world,
When the gods with spears had smitten Gullveig,
And in the hall of Hár had burned her,
Three times burned, and three times born,
Oft and again, yet ever she lives.
Heid they named her when she came to the house,
The wide-seeing witch, in magic wise;
She performed seið where she could worked seið in a trance,
To evil women she was always a joy."
So one the one hand we're told that the witch lives and goes around teaching her scary magics to people (especially those evil women!  ), whereas on the other it's suggested that Loki has devoured her heart and given birth from it. I don't necessarly see the two interpretations as mutually exclusive, because we're in the melty melty realms of myth here where there's more than one way to skin a cat. We can see the witch as having survived by being reborn from Loki... one could almost say that the Balesmith himself has become her, temporarily, in the way that a possessed person "becomes" a God... And the brood of flagð? Those who have learned her wicked ways, perhaps.' |
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