The völva of the Völuspá: the seeress who tells of the gods' end

The first poem of the Poetic Edda opens with a call for silence. A woman's voice asks all the holy races, the greater and lesser children of Heimdallr, to listen, and prepares to tell the history of the world from its beginning to its end. She is the völva, the seeress of Norse tradition, and the poem that bears her name, the Völuspá or “prophecy of the seeress”, is one of the most important sources for our knowledge of Scandinavian mythology.

The text and the manuscripts

The Völuspá has come down to us chiefly in two Icelandic manuscripts. The more important is the Codex Regius, written around 1270 and now kept in Reykjavík; another version, with differences in the order of the stanzas, is found in the Hauksbók, from the early fourteenth century. Snorri Sturluson, in the first half of the thirteenth century, quoted and paraphrased the poem extensively in the section of his Edda known as Gylfaginning.

The date of composition is debated. Many scholars place it around the year 1000, in a period of transition between traditional religion and Christianity in Iceland, but other proposals exist. Some details of the final vision have been read as influenced by Christian imagery, others as evidence of older pagan conceptions.

From creation to Ragnarök

The seeress speaks to Odin, who has summoned her and rewarded her with rings and necklaces. She recalls the time when there was neither sand nor sea nor sky, only the void of Ginnungagap; she tells of the shaping of the world, the birth of the first human beings Askr and Embla, the ash Yggdrasil and the Norns who, by its well, decide the fate of mankind. Again and again she interrupts her tale with a question to the god: do you know yet, or what?

Then the vision darkens: the death of Baldr, the grief of Frigg, the binding of Loki. There follow the ages of axes and swords, when brothers fight one another, and at last Ragnarök, the fate of the gods. The wolf Fenrir breaks free, Odin falls, the sun grows dark and the earth sinks into the sea. Yet the völva also sees a new land rise green from the waters, where the survivors find in the grass the golden game pieces of the days of old.

Seeresses in the sagas

The figure of the völva is not only literary. The Icelandic sagas describe women who travelled from farm to farm to make predictions in hard seasons. The most detailed portrait is found in the Saga of Erik the Red, which tells of the visit of Thorbjörg, called the little seeress, to a community in Greenland stricken by famine.

The saga carefully describes her blue cloak set with stones, her staff, her hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin and the raised seat on which she sat. The account, written in the Christian era, must be used with caution, but archaeology has recovered from several Viking Age Scandinavian graves metal staffs and grave goods that some scholars associate with figures of this kind.

In Baldrs draumar, another Eddic poem, Odin also rides to the realm of the dead to wake a buried seeress and question her about his son's fate. The völva thus appears as the keeper of a knowledge that not even the greatest of the gods possesses: knowledge of the whole span of time, from the beginning to the end and beyond, towards a renewed world.