The text of Grougaldr, ‘Groa’s Incantation’, and its partner text, Fjolvinnsmal, ‘Fjolvinn’s Speech’ (together known as Svipdagsmal), has come down to us in texts dating from the C17th.
Bridal Quest romances became popular in Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages and it seems to me that here an older myth has been reworked in a more fashionable guise. (This can be compared to the sagas of the warrior poets, such as The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue, where the older themes of heroism met the new, European themes of romantic love.) A clear indication of this is seen when Menglath, in her penultimate stanza, says ‘ath thu ert aftr kominn mogr til minna sala’ – ‘that you are returned to my hall’, implying he has already been there before. So, something is missing and the reworker in grafting together the two poems has failed to edit the older versions to avoid the inconsistency.
The poem’s protagonists’ names are suggestive of ancient roots: Groa is the name of the volva who appears in the myth of Thor’s duel with Hrungnir, Svipdag is a descendant of Othinn (in the prologue to Snorra Edda), Menglath’s name suggests the necklace-loving Freyja and Fjolsvith is a by-name of Othinn (Grimnismal 47). However, tempting though it may be, we should not assume that the two Groas are the same. There is a magic-wielding Groa in Vatnsdaela saga (chapter 36), so the name is certainly one that is associated with magic. The characters have been made more acceptable to the early mediaeval audience as magical rather than divine figures.
Einar Olafur Sveinsson points out a similarity to the Irish legend of Art Mac Conn (see John McKinell, ‘Meeting the Other in Old Norse Myth and Legend’, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge 2005, p.203) where the wicked stepmother lays a curse on the hero after beating him at chess – that he can never eat food in Ireland until he fetches a king’s daughter from the Other World; the third stanza of Grougaldr has the phrase ‘ljotu leikborthi’ – ‘with an ugly playing board’, suggesting Svipdag’s stepmother prefaced her task-setting in a similar manner, but the expression may only be figurative of a difficult situation. Whilst the two stories have parallels, their differences are indicative of, at most, a common Indo-European archetype.
McKinnel also discusses Lotte Motz’s theories in ‘The King and the Goddess. An Interpretation of Svipdagsmal’, (Arkiv for nordisk filologi, 1975) – that Groa and Menglath are aspects of the same goddess into whose cult Svipdag is initiated. As Menglath is far from helpless, what Svipdag achieves is his destiny rather than a conquest. Her theory also explains Menglath welcoming him back, as she is Groa as well. Although there was a goddess cult in late heathen Norway (see Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla’s chapters on Hakon Jarl), all in all the idea of Groa and Menglath being two aspects of the same divinity seems a decidedly modern notion.
Whatever its origins, Grougaldr belongs to a tradition that loved necromantic episodes, as in Voluspa and Baldrs Draumar, that loved to hear of the imparting of practical, magical help (as opposed to the recitation of mythological and gnomic knowledge in the wisdom contests of Alvissmal and Harbarthsljoth) in a series of cryptic verses, as in Havamal (stanzas 147 – 165) and Sigrdrifumal.