Coda: Making a Völuspá

So, what is the Völuspá to us today? We know its edges are indistinct. We know it was used to contain cosmologies, set down narratives. We know it means something different when discussed by different people. We’ll end here by returning to the Völuspá in its most basic sense: the Völuspá is a poem. It uses formal elements to aid communication.

The Völuspá was written in the Germanic tradition of alliterative verse. It has dozens of stanzas—most of them quatrains—though the exact number differs from version to version. It is also relatively uniform metrically. Each line is broken into two by a ‘caesura,’ a natural gap between one half-line and the other. On either side of this line break, two words will start with either the same sound or a vowel sound in an ‘alliteration.’ For the Old Norse original, these alliterative words will also bear stress (Dunn xxiii). Patricia Terry, the translator whose verse we work with in this piece, “tried to suggest, if not reproduce [the poem’s] alliteration” in English (xiii). For the original Völuspá, the final word typically does not alliterate. This didn’t necessarily carry across in Terry’s translation. Other lines of the translation, while poetic, don’t alliterate at all. How might this change the poem in translation? Are there any stanzas in this piece that make this especially evident?

She knows that Heimdall’s     hearing is hidden.
where the holy tree     rises to the heavens;
she sees a rushing     turbid river
pour from Odin’s pledge.     Seek you wisdom still?

Veit hón Heimdallar hlióð um fólgit
undir heiðvönum    helgum baðmi.
Á sér hón ausak    aurgum forsi
af veði Valföðrs.    Vituð ér enn – eða hvat?

— The Völuspá (trans. Terry; ed. Pálsson)

Click here or listen below to hear Julian Jamison reading the Völuspá in Old Norse for LibriVox, a resource for free, public domain audio books. Can you notice any metrical patterns in the recording? How is the experience of the poem different in its original language?

Experimental archeology is a technique used by scholars to gain a new perspective on the past by putting principles of archaeology into action. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, for instance, used what they knew from archeology build a ship close as possible to how the vikings might have built one. They then sailed it to Ireland, following a viking route. The voyage influenced, in turn, how scholars conceptualized viking ships and sailing. (“Sea Stallion from Glendalough”). To take a page from experimental archeology, we’ll end this exhibit with one final kind of making. Below are words from Terry’s translation of the Völuspá. Following the instructions below—as closely or as loosely as you like—try making a line, or a couplet, or a quatrain inspired by the Völuspá.

1. Choose a word from the first table below. Any word will do; pair it with another from either table and a connecting word of your choice. This will be your first phrase.
2. Look back at the table. All words in the same column as your first, if undivided by a space, alliterate: they either share an initial sound or both begin with a vowel. Choose two words, at least one of which should alliterate with a word in your first phrase, for your second (on the other side of the caesura).
3. Put the two phrases together. They should look something like this:

Emptiness of time     is the Æsir’s Valhalla

Repeat as many times as you would like! Try making a quatrain, like one of the Völuspá’s, or experiment with form. Rules can be broken. Do you notice anything new about the text of the Völuspá after trying your hand at writing alliterative verse?

Table 1. Alliterative words.

Table 2. Other words.

Every attempt to comprehend history in some sense creates it. Borders and conjectures are necessary: they make it possible for us to grasp material across huge stretches of time. But shaping the past, no matter how inevitable an act, will always have implications. The Völuspá provides a useful synecdoche for Viking Studies. By looking closely at the past’s ‘formal elements,’ we internalize what it could have been like to create. We better understand history, it shapes us, and in some small sense we make it our own.

« Previous | Home | Next »