Völuspá
Völuspá is the first poem most students of Norse mythology encounter. It begins not with a god or a hero but with a woman. She is a völva, a prophetic seeress. She claims to remember nine worlds and giants who raised her before the cosmos took its current form. Dating to the tenth century, Völuspá is the best known poem in the Poetic Edda. Her audience, within the poem itself, is Odin. Why does the king of the Norse gods need a seeress to tell him about his own universe? What does she know about his past that he cannot speak of himself? And how did her words survive to reach us in manuscripts written centuries after she first spoke?
The name the poem gives the seeress, Heiðr, appears twice in Völuspá, and both appearances carry weight. She opens by calling to "the sons of Heimdallr," a phrase that identifies all of humanity as her listeners. Heimdallr is the watchman of the Norse gods; his sons, in this framing, are the whole human race. The seeress positions herself above mortal listeners before she has said a word about the cosmos.
She then turns to Odin directly. She asks him whether he wants her to recite lore she holds in her memory. The question grants her control over the exchange; she is not a messenger delivering a report but the keeper of what Odin has come to hear.
Odin's own past is part of what she can see. He sacrificed one of his eyes in pursuit of knowledge, and she tells him she knows exactly where that eye is hidden. In several refrains scattered through the poem, she pauses to ask whether he understands or whether he would like to hear more. The repeated question is not courtesy.
The name Heiðr also attaches to Gullveig, a figure burned by the Æsir who resurfaces under that name in connection with the war between divine factions. The seeress and Gullveig share a name in the poem's text, and that overlap is never resolved. Before the history of the cosmos begins, the seeress notes one detail she carries in memory: a famous tree she calls mjǫtviðr mærr.
Ginnungagap is the word Völuspá uses for what existed before the world: a magical void, empty of anything but potential. The sons of Burr lifted the earth out of the sea, drawing the first solid ground from that primordial nothing. The Æsir then placed the sun, the moon, and the stars in their proper positions and set the cycle of day and night into motion.
The Æsir had abundant gold in the age that followed. They happily constructed temples and made tools. The poem describes this period as one of joyful abundance and collaborative work, with no conflict and no shadow.
Three mighty maidens came from Jötunheimar, the realm of the giants, and the golden age ended. The poem does not explain the mechanism. It places the arrival of those maidens directly before the collapse and trusts the listener to read the connection.
The Æsir then created the dwarfs. Mótsognir and Durinn are named as the mightiest of their kind. At this point, the poem's main narrative reaches what editors consider a natural break: ten stanzas are complete. Some versions of the poem then insert the Dvergatal, a "Catalogue of Dwarfs" in six stanzas that lists dwarf names. Editors frequently omit this material as a later addition. When the narrative resumes, the first humans appear alongside a description of Yggdrasil, the world-tree.
Gullveig is burned by the Æsir, and her burning leads to the first war in Völuspá. The conflict is between the Æsir and the Vanir, the two major factions of the Norse gods. The poem calls this the first "folk" war among the deities.
The goddess Freyja becomes a figure of contention in the poem's account of divine politics. Völuspá records that she was given to the jötnar. Scholars read this as a reference to the myth of the jötunn builder, told in full in Gylfaginning 42. In that myth, a giant demanded Freyja as payment for building a wall around Asgard. The poem evokes the story in a single reference and moves on.
The Vanir war is not the last conflict the seeress describes. The poem names Ragnarök as what follows, and the seeress has seen that too.
Baldr, described in Völuspá as best and fairest of the deities, is slain, and Loki's enmity is part of what drives his death. The seeress presents these events as the prologue to the destruction of the deities, when fire and flood overwhelm both heaven and earth. The poem calls this Ragnarök, the fate of the gods.
Odin is slain by Fenrir, the great wolf. Víðarr steps in to face Fenrir, kicks his jaw open, and kills the wolf by stabbing him in the heart with a spear. Thor, described in the poem as the god of thunder and the earth's sworn protector, fights the world serpent Jörmungandr and wins. He can take only nine steps afterward before the serpent's venom brings him down.
Freyr fights the giant Surtr, who wields a fiery sword that the poem says shines brighter than the sun. Freyr falls. The gods have been summoned to their final battles. Each one plays out on a stage that the seeress has been describing since the poem's first stanzas.
Ragnarök is not the poem's final vision. She has seen what rises after the fire, and she describes that too.
Baldr and his brother Höðr return to life in the world Völuspá describes rising from the destruction. The earth sprouts abundance without seed being sown. The gods who survived gather at a field called Iðavöllr and reunite with Hœnir. They are not silent; they talk.
Their conversation at Iðavöllr covers specific ground. They discuss Jörmungandr. They talk about great events of the past. They examine the runic alphabet. The new world holds memory, and the survivors carry it with them.
The poem's final image is Nidhogg, a dragon bearing corpses in his wings. After the dragon appears, the völva emerges from her trance. Whether Nidhogg's arrival signals that the new world carries its own darkness, or whether he belongs to the natural order, the poem does not say. The text that records this moment was written down in Iceland centuries after the poem's first telling.
The Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript written around 1270, is the text editors most often use as the base for editions of Völuspá. A second complete version survives in the Hauksbók, compiled by Haukr Erlendsson and dated to around 1334. Neither can claim to be the poem's original form. Both record a tradition that had circulated orally for centuries before any scribe wrote it down.
Stanzas from Völuspá appear in an older written source: the Prose Edda, composed around 1220. The oldest surviving copy of the Prose Edda dates to around 1300. In that text, the stanzas are quoted or paraphrased. The poem's content entered written form in pieces before anyone set it down in full.
Across the Codex Regius, the Hauksbók, and the Prose Edda, the order and number of stanzas differs, and some editors have rearranged the material further. The Dvergatal presents the sharpest editorial choice: it appears in some versions and is absent from others. No surviving manuscript settles the question of whether it was always part of Völuspá. Every editor of the poem must decide what belongs and what does not, and they have not agreed.
In March 2018, a team of medieval historians and scientists from the University of Cambridge proposed that Völuspá, which they dated to around 961, was a roughly contemporary chronicle of the Eldgjá volcano eruption in 939. The dramatic, fiery imagery of Ragnarök, they suggested, drew on living memory of that event. Their broader claim was that invoking this imagery was a deliberate move to accelerate the Christianization of Iceland.
The question of Christian influence in Völuspá predates that proposal by decades. Henry Adams Bellows wrote in 1936 that the poem's author would have had direct knowledge of Christianity. He placed the poem in a transitional period when paganism and Christianity coexisted in Iceland, before Christianity was declared the official religion. He argued that this blending helped Norse paganism survive in Iceland in a way it did not on the Scandinavian mainland.
Some scholars have proposed that references to a "mighty one who rules over all" are later Christian insertions. Some have identified that figure with Jesus. Bellows thought the identification was not necessarily the case.
J. R. R. Tolkien, a philologist familiar with Völuspá, drew names from the Dvergatal for his 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit. Those names became the Dwarves and the wizard Gandalf. In 2012, the atmospheric black metal album Umskiptar by Burzum used lyrics from Völuspá throughout. Stanzas appear as sung performances and battle chants in the television series Vikings. Various stanzas are incorporated into a song called "Twilight of the Gods" in the 2020 video game Assassin's Creed Valhalla. The name Gandalf came to Tolkien from a list of dwarf names. It had waited in that catalogue for nearly a thousand years before becoming a wizard.
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Common questions
What is Völuspá and what does it describe?
Völuspá is the best known poem in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse verse. It tells the story of the creation of the world, its eventual destruction at Ragnarök, and its rebirth, as recounted by a prophetic seeress named Heiðr who addresses the god Odin. The poem is one of the most important primary sources for the study of Norse mythology.
How old is Völuspá and where is the oldest complete manuscript?
Völuspá dates to the tenth century, the century before the Christianization of Iceland. The oldest known complete manuscript version is found in the Icelandic Codex Regius, written around 1270, which editors most often use as the base text. A second complete version survives in the Hauksbók, compiled by Haukr Erlendsson around 1334.
Who is the seeress in Völuspá and what authority does she have?
The seeress, or völva, is named Heiðr in the poem, a name that appears twice. She addresses all of humanity as "the sons of Heimdallr" before turning to Odin directly, telling him she knows where he hid the eye he sacrificed in pursuit of knowledge. In several refrains, she asks him whether he would like to hear more, holding the power of disclosure throughout the poem.
What happens at Ragnarök in Völuspá?
At Ragnarök, fire and flood overwhelm both heaven and earth. Odin is slain by the great wolf Fenrir; Víðarr avenges Odin by kicking Fenrir's jaw open and stabbing the wolf in the heart. Thor kills the world serpent Jörmungandr but falls from its venom after nine steps, and Freyr is defeated by the giant Surtr, who wields a fiery sword brighter than the sun.
Did J. R. R. Tolkien use Völuspá when writing The Hobbit?
Yes. Tolkien, a philologist familiar with Völuspá, drew names for the Dwarves and the wizard Gandalf from the Dvergatal, a catalogue of dwarf names embedded in the poem. The Hobbit was published in 1937.
What is the volcano theory about Völuspá and the Eldgjá eruption?
In March 2018, a team of medieval historians and scientists from the University of Cambridge proposed that Völuspá, which they dated to around 961, was a roughly contemporary chronicle of the Eldgjá volcano eruption in 939. They argued that the poem's apocalyptic fire-and-flood imagery drew on living memory of the eruption and was deliberately invoked to accelerate the Christianization of Iceland.
All sources
5 references cited across the entry
- 1Germanic religion and mythologyEdgar Charles Polomé et al. — Encyclopedia Britannica — 2023-03-08
- 2GinnungagapEncyclopedia Britannica
- 3A Volcanic Explosion 1,000 Years Ago Was So Brutal, It Slayed Icelandic GodsPeter Dockrill — 2018-03-20
- 4Review for The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Völuspa and Nordic Days of JudgementDavid Elton Gay — February 11, 2015