A Primer for Forgetting

Оглавление

Lewis Hyde. A Primer for Forgetting

Отрывок из книги

A Primer for Forgetting

Common as AirTrickster Makes This WorldThis Error Is the Sign of LoveThe Gift

.....

MÍMIR’S SKULL. All-Father Odin, leaving one of his eyes as a pledge, acquired his ancestral knowledge and runic wisdom by drinking the waters that bubble up in Mímir’s spring at one of the roots of the World Tree, the great ash Yggdrasil. The giant Mímir (the name means “memory”) guards that spring, and he too “is full of ancient lore” for having drunk its waters. Some of the Norse stories have it that Mímir was decapitated in a battle with the Vanir but that Odin kept the head alive with herbs and magic spells and, as with the severed head of Orpheus singing still in a cave at Lesbos, this head went on sharing its secrets whenever Odin was in need. Says the seeress in the Völuspá, “Odin murmured with Mímir’s head” as Ragnarok—the doom of the gods—drew near.

Some have suggested that what is found in Mímir’s spring is not only water but also the giant’s severed head or, rather, his skull, there being Celtic and Germanic traditions in which skulls placed in wells give curative and prophetic power, especially if the skull itself is used as the drinking vessel (as one once was by the poet Byron, who, discovering on his estate the bones of “some jolly friar,” had the skull mounted as a cup for wine—“the drink of Gods”—so as to “rhyme and revel with the dead” in imitation “of the Goths of old”).

.....