Rígr

Summary

Rígr is the name a god takes in Rígsþula, the Lay of Ríg, a Norse poem that tells how people came to be divided into ranks. Ríg walks the earth, stays in three houses, and in each house a son is born who becomes the father of a rank: thralls, then free farmers, then lords. The prose lines before the poem say: "Men say in old stories that one of the Æsir, who was called Heimdallr, went on a journey and walked along a seashore until he came to a farmstead, and called himself Rígr." So Ríg is Heimdall in this prose alone; the stanzas themselves do not name Heimdall.

Ríg walked the green roads, an old, strong and knowing god, and came to a house with its door ajar and a fire on the floor. In it sat an old couple, Ái and Edda, "great-grandfather" and "great-grandmother", in old-fashioned dress. He gave them counsel and sat between them on the bench; Edda served him a heavy, lumpy loaf packed with husks and broth in a bowl; he slept between them three nights and went on. Nine months later Edda bore a swarthy son, and they named him Þræll, "thrall". He grew up with wrinkled hands, thick fingers and a bent back, binding bast and carrying brushwood all day, and married Þír, a bandy-legged woman with a sunburnt arm. Their children built fences, dunged the fields, tended swine and goats and dug turf, "and from them came the races of thralls".

Next Ríg came to a hall where a couple sat at work, Afi and Amma, "grandfather" and "grandmother": the man whittling a beam for the loom, his beard trimmed, the woman turning the distaff. Ríg did as before, and Amma bore a ruddy son named Karl, "free man", who learned to tame oxen, make ploughs, timber houses, build barns and drive the plough. He married Snör, and among their sons were Smiðr, "smith", and Bóndi, "householder", "and from them came the races of freemen". Then he came to a hall whose doors faced south, where Faðir and Móðir, "father" and "mother", sat gazing into each other's eyes; the man twisted a bowstring and shafted arrows, the woman smoothed linen, and the table held white wheaten loaves, silver dishes, roast fowl and wine. Móðir bore a son with fair hair, bright cheeks and eyes as piercing as a young serpent's, named Jarl, "earl", who learned the shield, the bow, the spear, horses, hounds, the sword and swimming.

Here Ríg came back. He came walking out of the thicket, taught Jarl runes, gave him his own name, said he had a son, and told him to take the ancestral fields. Jarl fought until he ruled eighteen farms, dealt out rings and horses to his men, and married Erna, the daughter of a chieftain, who bore him sons, the youngest of them Konr the young. Konr knew more runes than his father, runes of eternity and runes of life; he could save men, blunt sword-edges, calm the sea and quench fire, and he understood the speech of birds. He contested in runes with his father and won, and so earned the right to be called Ríg. Then a crow said to him: why do you snare birds? Better to ride horses and draw the sword, for Danr and Danpr have nobler halls than yours. There the poem breaks off.

The idea the poem turns on is that the ranks of people are told as the story of one family. They have one father, Ríg, and what separates them is the house they are born in: its food, its furniture and the work of its people. Coarse bread and firewood for the thrall, oxen and plough for the free man, bow and sword for the lord. Then the name climbs rank by rank: Ríg gives it to Jarl, and Konr the young takes it by knowledge, because he knows more runes than his father. His Norse name is Konr ungr, and said together the two words sound like konungr, "king". The king in the poem is a lord who learned the runes and took the god's name.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read Ríg. The final r of Rígr is the Old Norse nominative ending, which leaves Ríg. Cleasby and Vigfusson think the name is most likely borrowed from the Irish word for king, rí, genitive ríg, so that Rígsþula is "the King's Lay". We read it as Arabic al-rāʿī, "the shepherd", from raʿā. Lane gives raʿā al-amīru raʿiyyatahu, "the prince ruled his subjects"; the rāʿī is "a ruler or governor who manages the affairs of a people", and the raʿiyya "the people ruled"; and the saying "every one of you is a shepherd, and every one of you is answerable for his flock", which goes on to name the man in his family, the servant in his master's property and the wife in her husband's house. The r is r, and the ʿ of this root was heard as g by the Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible, who wrote Reuel as Ragouēl and Reu as Ragau. This is what the poem makes Ríg: he enters every house and gives its people counsel, sets each rank in its place, and then his name becomes the name of the king.

The project's Norse Semitic-reading essay does not read Ríg, but it reads Heimdall, whom the prose makes Ríg, as hāma + dalla, the wandering guide. In the poem Ríg walks the roads and guides each household to what serves it, and the same line returns at every house: "Ríg knew how to give them counsel". The two readings meet in one figure: the wanderer who guides and the shepherd who rules.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby and Vigfusson describe Ríg as the hero of a poem "which traces the origin of royalty to king Ríg as the ancestor of all kings", say that the story belonged to Heimdall, and call the name "very likely an invented name, a poetical disguise, borrowed from the Gaelic word Righ, which means a king", so that Rígsþula "would therefore literally mean Konungs-þula, the King's Lay". The Dictionary of the Irish Language gives rí, genitive ríg, "a king", translating rex and princeps in the Old Irish glosses. The Norse dictionary also says that konungr, "king", is a derivative of konr, "a man of noble extraction", and that the poem's Konr ungr "is a mere poetical fancy".

In Arabic raʿā is first to keep and feed livestock, then to govern people. BDB sets Hebrew rāʿâ, "pasture, tend", beside Akkadian rēʾû, a verb "pasture" and a noun "ruler", and beside Arabic and Aramaic. In the epilogue to his laws Hammurabi says of himself: "I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight". So in the old Semitic tongue the shepherd is the ruler, and in the Irish tongue the king is the one who rules; the poem joins the two in Ríg, who gives each house counsel, sets each rank its work, and then leaves his name to the king.

The comparison keeps the r at the start, takes the long í after it as a vowel, and puts the final g where the ʿ stands. The Juthoor laws make ʿ usually drop when a word passes into another tongue and make gh become g, so what supports hearing this ʿ as g is the witness of the Greek translators in Reuel and Reu, from the same root. That is the weak point of the reading.

Key Mythic Narratives

The children's names

The poem lists the children of each house, and the names tell their rank. Among the thralls' daughters is Ambátt, "bondwoman"; among the freemen's sons are Smiðr the smith, Bóndi the householder and Þegn the landholding freeman; and Jarl's sons all bear words for child, heir and offspring, such as Barn "child", Arfi "heir" and Sonr "son", the last of them Konr.

The manuscript and the lost ending

The poem survives in one manuscript only, the Codex Wormianus, copied around 1350, and only there is the prose that makes Ríg Heimdall. Its end is cut off after the crow's words about Danr and Danpr, so what Konr did next is not known.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Norse myths reads Thor as the god of farmers and smiths and Odin as the god of kings and nobles, and calls this a class division: knowledge for Odin, labour for Thor. That is its reading of the two gods, not of this poem, but the poem draws the same line inside one family: the plough for Karl, the runes for Jarl and Konr.

Georges Dumézil opens his 1958 article on the poem by observing that the Germanic peoples have a clear three-function theology, summed up in Scandinavia by Odin, Thor and Freyr, sovereignty, physical force and fertility, but do not divide their societies by those functions, unlike the Celts and the Indo-Iranians, among whom Ireland and Gaul had druids, a warrior nobility and herders and farmers. The poem is the Norse text that does set society out in ranks, and its order differs in one plain point: it has no class of priests, and the sacred knowledge, the runes, goes to the lord and the king. Whether it reflects an Irish model met by Norse travellers or an older order is debated; the borrowing of Ríg's name from the Irish word for king strengthens the first view.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In India the order of people comes out of the body of Puruṣa, the first man, whom the gods offered in sacrifice: "When they divided him, the Brahmin was his mouth, of his arms the warrior was made, his thighs became the farmer and trader, from his feet the servant was born." Both texts make a person's rank the rank of his birth. They differ in everything else: in India four orders from the limbs of one man cut up in a sacrifice, with the priest, the mouth, at the top; in the North three from three nights of one god in three houses, with the lord and then the king who knows the runes at the top. The body that becomes a world in India is one form of the cosmic body pattern. Rigveda 10.90.11–12.

Ríg does not create people; Odin and his brothers had made them from two trees on the shore, Askr and Embla. He gives them their stations. His story continues the making of the first humans: creation gives people breath and mind, the poem gives them their work.

The ordering of work among people, from firewood to plough to sword, is one of the things myths credit to culture heroes, and in the poem Ríg teaches by example: he sits on each house's bench and eats its food, and teaches the runes himself to his third son.