Hagall Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Hagall's two stanzas agree closely on the physical image, hail as the coldest of grains, echoing the Old English Haegl stanza's own whitest of grains, but the Norwegian poem then takes a striking turn its Icelandic counterpart does not follow, closing the stanza with a direct statement that Christ created the world of old, an explicitly Christian line embedded in what begins as a purely meteorological image, evidence that whoever composed or transmitted the Norwegian poem in the form that survives felt no tension in placing a Christian theological statement directly beside an inherited pre-Christian rune name.

The Icelandic poem instead stays within the natural world for its whole stanza, extending hail's cold grain into a shower of sleet and, more unusually, a sickness affecting serpents, an image whose precise sense is not fully explained by the surviving text and which this entry states as attested without claiming full confidence in its original significance. Dickins' 1915 edition notes the Norwegian poem's Christian insertion here as one of several points across its sixteen stanzas where a Christian frame is layered onto material that plainly predates the conversion of Norway, a pattern broadly comparable to the Old English poem's own handling of Ger and Daeg discussed elsewhere in this survey of the runic traditions.