a blog by Peter Leonard
Suspended above the ceiling of the new Háskolatorg building at the University of Iceland is a bright yellow circle, with capital roman letters in stark relief:
VITS ER ÞÖRF ÞEIM ER VÍÐA RATAR.
The inscription is a citation from the Hávamál, — the Words of the High One, from the Poetic Edda which inspired Snori Sturlusson to write his Prose Edda. The first preserved text of the Poetic Edda is from the 13th Century, but it probably preserves parts of much older narratives. Why choose this particular medieval text for a new academic building?
The first word, cut off in my photo above, is vits, which we have in English as “wits” and serves perfectly well as the cognate it is: knowledge, cunning.
Þörf, “to need,” has disappeared in modern English, but is still present in Modern German as dürfen and Swedish as tarva. (The proto-Germanic word probably looked something like *ɵurfan.) So the first half-line is something like “Wits are necessary…”
Moving on to the second half-line: I always like to think of Þeim as “them” because it basically is, in a dative case here. Skipping to the end of the half-line, ratar, Zoëga’s dictionary of 1910 actually cites this verse in its definition of rata: to travel; rata víða: to travel widely. The verb “to be” is then used to build this construction meaning “for those that travel far.” So the message is: You’ll need smarts if you want to travel the world.
I don’t know if the inscription goes on around the back side, but if it does so, it continues:
dælt er heima hvað.
“Dæll” is an interesting adjective, meaning gentle or easy. But this passage from the Havamal is also cited in Zoëga, for the use of dæll in the set phrase above “anything will pass at home.” If I had to guess what the words are literally doing here, it would be something like “Easy: that’s what home is.”
Interestingly, the connection between idiocy and “the home” — in either the pure domestic sense, or in the context of international travel — is one common to many Germanic languages. Think of English’s “homely”, which has a sense of “OK for inside the house, but probably not a beauty.” Swedish goes even further, with hemsk, literally home-y, translating as “horrible.” The Icelandic Web of Science has an entire page on the question of the linkage between the home and cowardice and unmanliness, which cites this exact verse from the Hávamál. “Ekki þótti það karlmannlegt,” they write, “að sitja alltaf heima og fara ekkert.” (It wasn’t thought manly to sit at home all the time and not travel.)
The payoff for translating these lines by hand is then you get to compare your work with W. H. Auden! Yes, everyone’s favorite 20th-century poet translated the Hávamál himself, and rendered this particular verse (in its entirety) as:
Who travels widely needs his wits about him, The stupid should stay at home: The ignorant man is often laughed at When he sits at meat with the sage.
So this stanza sets up a tension between the expertise and knowledge required for the well-traveled, versus the low expectations present at home. An interesting message to hover over the heads of those studying at the University of Iceland in 2011.
