For this exhibit, we will be situating the Völuspá in Iceland, and examining it from an Icelandic context. There are good reasons for this: texts containing the Völuspá are Icelandic (Ólason 25), and the scribes who recorded it likely were as well (Sigurðson 57). But this isn’t the only perspective on the Völuspá‘s origins. Charles Dunn, for example, associates the text with both Norway and Iceland (xvi). Hermann Pálsson has a hypothesis even further afield. He argues that some elements of the text were only given an “Icelandic slant” by the scribe and historian Snorri Snurluson (35). If the Icelanders didn’t play the most important role in the Völuspá‘s creation, who might have? Pálsson argues that the Sami, an indigenous group in Northern Scandinavia, may have made the greatest impression: “Völuspá may have been composed by a poetess who had been fostered by the Sami in Finnmarken, so the opening scene could have been based on actual experience” (30). This response is idiosyncratic in the scholarly community, but dramatizes just how open the histories behind these texts may be. Though we primarily discuss Iceland in this exhibition, we display items from Sweden to Denmark, under the assumption that connected trade routes may have created a shared symbology across the viking world. Be on the lookout for when this occurs. Might this mislead or detract from our study of the Völuspá? What might it add?
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