Naudiz
Narrow on the Breast
In the English poem, hardship heeded in time becomes help: choices narrow until the necessary one is plain.
The name is reconstructed from Old English nyd, Old Norse nauðr and Gothic nauþs; like every Elder Futhark name it is a linguist's word rather than one an inscription supplies. All three poems gloss it, and unusually they agree. The Old English calls need narrow on the breast, oppressive to the heart, yet often a help and a healing to the children of men if they heed it in time. The Norwegian: need gives scant choice, and the naked man is chilled by the frost. The Icelandic is harsher still, giving the grief of the bondmaid, a heavy lot, and toilsome work. Sigrdrífumál, in the thirteenth-century Poetic Edda, has Nauð carved on a fingernail, which is a use of the rune and not a gloss of it.
Light
The English stanza turns on a single condition: hardship heeded in time becomes help. Constraint recognised early narrows the available choices, and by narrowing them makes the necessary one plain.
Shadow
The Norse stanzas offer no such turn. Need there is the bondmaid's grief, the naked man in the frost, and work that does not end: compulsion with nothing instructive in it at all.
