The Havamal: A Heathen Path of Living (Part 44)

69.

Not all sick men are utterly wretched:

Some are blessed with sons,

Some with friends, some with riches,

Some with worthy works.

70.

It is always better to live than to be a corpse,

The live man catches the cow.

I saw flames rise in a rich man’s hearth,

And in front of his door he lay dead.

71.

The lame man can ride a horse,

the handless man is a herdsman,

The deaf be a strong fighter,

To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:

There is nothing a corpse can do.

These stanzas remind us that things are not always as bad as they seem and not matter how “wretched” one’s life might seem, there are still things that we can do as long as we stay alive. This stanza tells us that as long as we are alive, then there are possibilities, but “there is nothing a corpse can do.” The line in stanza 70, “the live man catches the cow”, harkens back to when cattle was a form of wealth. With a cow, one can get milk, make more cows, and butcher it for food and/or leather. Catching the cow would have been similar to finding a bag full of cash. This line alone tells us that as long as we are alive and trying to improve our lives, then you never know when good things might happen. The last two lines of that stanza remind us that death always comes to everyone, rich or poor, so why want to speed up the process?

Stanza 71 points out specific ways in which people can be useful to others despite their disabilities. In the ancient world, there was no Americans with Disabilities Act, no handicap parking, or schools for the deaf or visually impaired. Many modern people seem to assume that if one had a disability in the ancient past, then those people would have been left out to die. Though I’m sure this must have happened in some cases, archaeology has made discoveries of bones of people who would have been handicapped in some way but lived long into adulthood. They must have been cared for by others because they were important to the community regardless of their inability to work and function like others. This stanza says the same thing: just because you are disabled doesn’t mean you are useless. To be blind is better than to be dead, because there is nothing that corpse can do to help others.

As a counselor, I often work with clients suffering from depression and some of them contemplate suicide. Their lives have become so unbearable that they would rather be dead than to continue on with their lives as they are. But these stanzas remind us to look at what is going right in our lives and look at areas in which we are strong. Depression often forces us to only look at what is going wrong in our lives and the ways in which we are weak. This ‘deficit view’ of life becomes our filter until all we can see are the negatives and we don’t even believe that there are positives at all. I like these stanzas in particular because they tell us that no matter how bad we think things are, we can still do something to make our lives better for ourselves and to even improve the lives of others. These stanzas tell us to never give up hope and to never stop trying.

As the song “Outsider” from A Perfect Circle asks, “What’s your rush now, everyone will have his day to die?”