Origins, Texts, and Transmission: The Scholarly Debate
So, what is the Völuspá to us today? “Völuspá is probably the most internationally famous poem in the Old Icelandic corpus,” writes scholar Pétur Pétursson, “—and perhaps the most disputed” (Pétursson, xiii). To some, the Völuspá is important enough to heap on superlatives. Hermann Pálsson, who edited and introduced the critical version of the text in 1996, argues the Völuspá “[p]resents the drama of the cosmos in powerful, symbolic terms as a progress from the primeval chaos, through successive phases of creation, golden age, conflict, decline, and destruction, to the birth of a new and better world” (7). To others, the Völuspá represents a paradigm shift, a window into the crisis of Old Norse civilization. In Pétursson’s introduction to The Nordic Apocalypse, a book dedicated to scholarly approaches to the text, he writes: “Indeed, some scholars in recent years (and in this volume) have expressed the opinion that the poem should be viewed as a syncretic creative vision arising from a culture which was simultaneously experiencing the deterioration of its ancient traditions and anticipating the arrival of a new world order” (xvi). For others still, the Völuspá is simply brilliant and difficult. Patricia Terry, who translated the Völuspá we use in this presentation took it as part of her task to actively shape the poem for a modern audience: “Meaningless passages have been omitted, and what seems a more satisfactory order has been restored” (50).
Perhaps it is best to begin with the basics: the Völuspá is a text. It is a poem that has come down to us in a book of other poems. The Elder Edda is a collection of verse written in Old Norse. To Charles Dunn, a scholar who wrote the introduction to Terry’s version of the Edda in 1990, the poems have multiple layers of history. “For the most part they are survivals typical of oral culture of the tenth century, but we know them only as they were written down by antiquarian Christian scribes in the thirteenth century” (xvi). But even this vision of the Völuspá is simplistic. It is not simply a text, but several. Dunn writes that “[t]he oldest extant manuscript of The Elder Edda, the Codex Regius, was compiled in Iceland at a date no earlier than 1270” (xvi). There is also another version of the text from another codex, the Hauksbok, which includes a unique passage which will later prove controversial for the text’s interpretation (Ólason 35).
Debate abounds as to when we should situate the text, as well as who wrote it, and why. According to Gísli Sigurðson, who contributed an article to Pétursson’s book, the oral origins of the Völuspá are not in dispute: “most people have accepted the notion that Völuspá is the product of an oral tradition” (45). The result of this, however, is not nearly as clear. Dunn uses oral origins to speculate authorship and method of creation: “the reciter (who possibly sang to musical accompaniment) composed his lines, like most oral performers, on the basis of customary formulas and tied them together in stanzaic units” (xxiii). Pálsson writes that, rather than a male poet, “it seems more likely that the poem was created by a poetess who was herself a practising sibyl” (14). Others take issue not only with the conclusions drawn by such enterprises, but on their foundations. Sigurðson begins with an assertion that the text cannot be ascribed to one poet at all: “First we have to abandon the notion of an original poem composed by an individual author just before the year 1000” (45). How do we make sense of this poem, with its convoluted textual history and debated present among scholars that nevertheless has had an outsized impact in our English-speaking culture?
The Structure
The scholarly narratives about the Völuspá are vast; perhaps the only thing that matches the complexity of the literature surrounding the text is complexity of the poem’s own narrative. Most agree that the Völuspá depicts a creation myth, then a brief period of prosperity before launching into successive descriptions of violence and finally the apocalypse, Ragnarök, capped by a brief vision of a re-founded world. Schematizing this narrative has proved difficult. Vésteinn Ólason, who contributed a chapter on the temporality of the Völuspá in the same volume as Pétursson and Sigurðson, suggests a four part structure: “a) creation; b) events following upon creation and leading to ragnarok; c) ragnarok itself; and d) a new beginning” (27). Pálsson, on the other hand, elects for a more complex seven-part structure (11).
The existence such strictures imply that the Völuspá‘s borders are loose. Modern scholars jump to make sense of it, to define it. Even for the professionals, the obscurity the Völuspá presents is intimidating. But such a challenge can also represent an opportunity. Ólason writes that the Völuspá “forces us to fill the many gaps in the picture, to interpret, and even to find a place for ourselves in the story” (26). This exhibit will follow a similar method. Rather than provide a schema for readers of the poem to make sense of it for them, we will instead provide contextual material, weaving between material and text, to bring the world of the Völuspá into sharper focus, to illuminate some of its more frustrating (and exciting) complexities.
The Sibyl
We’ll begin with a discussion of what is among the Völuspá’s central features: its narrator. Though the text moves across ages and subjects, discusses gods, conflict, and reconciliation, contains the beginning of the world and its end, it is linked by a single voice, that of a female prophet, or volva. Pálsson argues that the speaker is a being of significant power: “Völuspá is narrated by a woman who never falters in her mastery of its vast, arcane subject: the ultimate fate of mortal gods and men. She is the earliest female voice in Old Norse known to us” (15). Such abstract depictions are illustrative, but beg further questions. How real was this figure? What might her life have been like?
The National Museum of Denmark website has a brief exhibit on the grave of a woman, found in Fyrkat, Denmark. The exhibition suggests the woman may have been a seeress, and gives evidence that she was buried with henbane. The herb, “[t]aken in the right quantities… can produce hallucinations and euphoric effects” (“A seeress from Fyrkat?”). Could this substance have played a role in the time-bending structure of the Völuspá? The woman also seems to have had money and status, with rare and valuable items on her person, including silver and bronze (“A seeress from Fyrkat?”). It is interesting to note that the woman was also buried with a nondescript metal rod:
Metal rod from burial at Fyrkat 4, DK.
Iron. L 99 cm.
(source: NMC)
The purpose of the rod is not immediately apparent. Metal was a relatively rare commodity in the Viking Age. In a high class grave, the presence of an ambiguous object—clearly smithed on the right side—draws notice. The online guide terms the object “mysterious,” and suggests that it was a ritual object, a magic wand (“A seeress from Fyrkat?”). Given the Völuspá‘s oral origins, it was experienced as performance before it was experienced as text. Might the metal rod have played a role in the Völuspá‘s recitation? We can only speculate, but an invitation to do so may well be one of the most important commodities the Völuspá has to offer.
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