Viking myths

Völuspá: The Prophecy of the Seer ess

A wise-woman’s visions of the creation of the world, and her prophecy of the end-times, when the gods will fall

Written by Dee Dee Chainey

öluspá, meaning ‘prophecy of the

Vwise-woman or seeress ’, is the first book of the Poetic Edda, often seen as the most important. It is preserved in its entirety in the Codex Regius (1270 CE), containing stories from oral tradition written on vellum sheets during the 13th and 14th centuries and compiled later, as well as in part in Hauksbók (c. 1334). Rather than being the dry, laborious verse that people might first assume, Völuspá is in fact a rip-roaring adventure of raging battles, rife with death, destruction and gut-wrenching anguish. Filled with tales of gods and heroes, the poem tells of a wild wise-woman or witch – known as a völva – regaling Odin with her visions of the beginning of creation, and woeful tales of the end times, known as Ragnarök in Norse myth, when gods would fall, the earth would be wiped clean, and humanity would repopulate the land once more, with only a few of the gods at their side.

Some scholars suggest that the Elder Edda is an invaluable repository of knowledge of Germanic myth; and Völuspá is the most complex and detailed description of both the creation and destruction of the world that has ever existed in this part of the globe. The work of both Icelandic and Norwegian poets is notoriously complex, and often seen as impenetrable to those uninitiated into the form and style of such verse. This form is composed of around 60 fornyrðislag (‘old verse’) stanzas – meaning ‘the way of ancient words’ – with each usually between two and eight lines long, but most often four lines. The stories contained in Völuspá are also preserved by Snorri Sturluson, in his Prose Edda, yet the Poetic Edda version is much more lively, with an amazing level of detail and layer upon layer of mythic symbolism just waiting to be unearthed; if we dig just a little below the surface, we find an intricately woven tapestry of stories that we can trace like the boughs of Yggdrasil itself, as each tales branches out to further stories of the gods brought to life within the pages. The order of the verses changes in the different sources, and modern translators have often continued this trend, switching them around to suit their own reading of the poem, yet most scholars view the order used in the Codex Regius as the most useful for understanding the tale in its entirety.

To understand the Eddic poems, we must first understand the mythical world in which the stories took place, and Völuspá sets the scene for this perfectly. The poem opens with a völva calling for all mankind to listen to her words. Here they are called ‘the sons of Heimdall’, which refers to the tale about when the watchman of the gods took on the form of a wanderer named Ríg, travelling from house to house, and fathered the progenitors of each of the three classes of humans – the thralls, freemen and nobles – in a similar vein to the caste system, making Heimdall the father of all mankind.

The witch builds the scene well, telling the listeners that she was raised long ago by the ancient jötnar, or giants, and begins to describe what the universe was like at the beginning of creation. She tells of the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, and that the land of men is but one of these. First is the creation of the worlds from a formless void,