Galdr doesn’t have to have words to be powerful. Sometimes when you sing and make up your own musical sound, it can affect things if you put intention behind it. Galdr; when spoken usually revolves around the runes, chanting them over and over with intention. It’s the vibration of the voice along…
I do agree that runes are not completely necessary for galdr; and often it appears that galdr was indeed done without any definite mention of them. However, galdr by its definition is a sung or chanted form of magic with what seems to be a heavy emphasis on words and rhythm. The galdralag meter in Old Norse poetry (shown in Háttatal in the Prose Edda) is likely an example of how those songs and incantations were commonly formed, and the sagas usually present galdr as being sung/chanted by the user in a verbal form.
Of course there are other forms of magic from Old Norse culture which can incorporate galdr or even non-verbal melodic aspects, but galdr itself, based on what evidence we have, seems to be heavy on poetic composition and in general the creative use of words. The chanting of a single word (usually a rune name in this context) likewise seems to be more based on ceremonial magic or other systems rather than what has survived of actual pre-Christian Scandinavian techniques.
(bolding mine)
A few weeks ago Loki wanted to listen to the Galdr of Release from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, and then he spelled to me Galdr meant poem in old Norse. I was a bit confused when I looked it up because Google said it meant “spell or incantation” (although I couldn’t find a definitive source for this info) but I’m thinking this is what he probably meant.
edit: also this could have been a case of Exact Words in which a “galdr” WAS a poem but the word didn’t/doesn’t TRANSLATE into “poem” in English. If that makes sense.
It’s basically one of those situations where it has a certain subtlety to its definition. The source I have at hand is Geir T. Zoëga’s A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, which defines galdr as “magic song, charm” as well as “witchcraft, sorcery” (p. 158). So it is a song, but it’s a specialized type of song. At the same time, though, it relies heavily on poetic structure so while it may not be defined as a poem, it certainly carries that implied poetic element.
That’s often the trouble with doing translations, in that it can be hard to tell exactly how or in what ways a word was used when there are multiple terms for the same basic thing. ;)
The way I’ve always understood the word “Galdr” is that is refers to the magic inherent in poetic language. So it would mean both a poem (intentionally structured language) and the power of that poem at the same time.
I’ve got this notion that there’s a lot of inherent power in language, especially poetic language, and so Galdr as magic would simply be the harnessing or using of that power. And so of course, the words would have to be present.
Magic = not my division to date. But I have no trouble whatsoever buying that there’s inherent power locked up in poetic language and structure. Even I perceive energy effects around poetry. The example that springs to mind: I’ve gotten an almost overwhelming, berserker-reminiscent rush of strength and energy from chanting the defiance passage in The Battle of Maldon out loud, starting when I first studied it in college: I was translating it while working the night shift at the library circulation desk, mumbling it out loud, and I had trouble not jumping out of my skin and/or throwing things.
I think that part of Old English poetry’s tremendous appeal to me then and now is that the extra effort required to get at it, so to speak, produces a sort of mindfulness effect, resulting in an unusually deep and thorough experience of the poem in the moment. As a very swift and fluent reader, with then-undiagnosed ADD tendencies, I wasn’t necessarily used to getting that from the types of Modern English poems I favored. Fluency, per se, isn’t always your friend — Wordsworth, for instance, goes down so liquidly, so seamlessly, that unless you consciously bring something like mindfulness techniques to bear upon it, you can be reading it with very high competency — understanding it academically in assorted critical modes, finding yourself emotionally affected, no deficits at all apparent in what you’re doing — and yet, I suspect, you may not be penetrating some deep layer of the poem, because you aren’t slowing down enough to be really going through it as a moment-by-moment temporal and physical experience.
There’s a reason, I guess, that the galdr tradition is oral.
Reading OE — having to machete your way stroke by stroke through the language barrier, getting that compulsive urge to chant out loud in order to get a feel for the syllables, for the alliterative flow and beat of it — these are aspects of the reading experience that slow someone like me down to oral-tradition traffic speed. That enables a kind of focus and specificity from instant to instant (I really want to bring in fractals to illustrate what I mean here) that’s just startlingly rare … even, nay especially, for a sophisticated reader. And I think that it opens up a window of opportunity for perceiving and tapping the deeper energies at the heart of the poem .— ugh, that sounds so woo it’s gross, but the shoe fits — and that that’s why Maldon is such a breakthrough example or catalyzing case study for me as far as an intuitive understanding of this.
If I were going to pursue magic — which is by no means certain or even likely — this would be the kind of magic that I would pursue.
I’ve just started a twelve-week runes class, and the instructor turns out to have interest and expertise in runic magic as well as in what I’m there for, which is lore-based 101 and essentials of of divination. So this might, in fact, become a clearer opportunity in the near to medium term. I’m not ruling it out. I just have prima facie doubts. I will say I am provisionally impressed with this instructor’s approach overall. He spent a lot of the first class on history of recent runes scholarship and issues in quality assessment and discernment, has nothing good to say about Blum, cites better sources with appropriate caveats, and is fine with gnosis as long as it’s clearly demarcated from lore. So far so good. And if I’ve learned anything over this past year it’s not to reflexively declare a thing beyond the pale based on its preposterousness coefficient.
Remember when I was going on about how I didn’t really have a belief system but the one thing I was sure of was the power of language and some Keatsian notion of Beauty? THIS IS WHAT I WAS GETTING AT!.
And if poetry can inspire like that, it can go both ways, and we can breathe it out into the world as much as it can affect us.
