This autumn our Lore Circles are reading Voluspa, "The Prophecy of the Seeress." I have taught this poem for many years, and I want to suggest a way of reading it that I came to late and wish I had found sooner. Read it for her.
The poem
Voluspa stands first in the great manuscript of the Poetic Edda, copied in Iceland around 1270. The poem itself is older, composed perhaps around the year 1000, in the last generation or so of Icelandic heathenry. In some sixty stanzas it tells the whole history of the world: its making, the first war, the death of Baldr, the ruin of the gods, and the green earth that rises afterward from the sea.
Nearly everything we think we know about the Norse cosmos leans on it. And every word of it is spoken by a woman.
She begins by calling for silence
The poem opens with the seeress demanding a hearing from all the holy kindreds, greater and lesser. Only then does she turn to Odin and acknowledge that he has asked her to speak. This is the manner of someone addressing an assembly, and it is worth noticing who is holding the floor. Gods and mortals alike are her audience.
Then she establishes her right to speak, and it rests on memory. "I remember" is how she begins her account: she remembers the giants who raised her long ago, nine worlds, and the great tree when it was still a seed beneath the ground. She is older than the order of things that Odin rules. He needs her because she was there before him.
She is paid
About halfway through the poem there is a small stanza that is easy to pass over. Odin, it says, chose rings and necklaces for her, and in return, as the lines are usually read, received wise speech and prophecy. He pays her. The highest of the gods has come to a professional, and she is given her fee.
I find this moving. Anyone who has read about Veleda in her tower, receiving a captured warship as a gift, or about Thorbjorg in Greenland, given the high seat and the best food in a starving household, will recognize the pattern. The seeress is honored in goods as well as in words.
She is not afraid of him
Around the same point a refrain enters the poem and returns again and again: a short question which can be translated "Do you understand yet, or what?"
Scholars have heard it in different tones. I hear a challenge. She is telling Odin things he does not want to know: that his son will die, that he himself will be killed by the wolf, that everything he has built will burn. After each blow she asks whether he has had enough. He has not, and so she goes on. He is the one who cannot bear to stop listening.
What she says about a woman called Heid
Early in her account, the seeress describes "the first war in the world." It begins with a woman. A figure named Gullveig comes to Odin's hall, and the gods run her through with spears and burn her. Three times they burn her and three times she is reborn. Then the poem gives her another name: Heid, a seeress who went from house to house, who foretold well and practiced seidr.
The stanzas are hard and their meaning is disputed. But on the surface, the first war among the gods is caused by their own violence against a woman who works magic, and it is violence that fails. She cannot be killed. Many readers think Heid is the speaker of the poem herself, remembering her own burning.
Reading carefully
One line in these stanzas says that Heid was always the delight of wicked women. It is a sour little remark, and it reminds us that the poem reached us through Christian hands. When you read, watch for the places where the text seems to disapprove of its own speaker. They tell you something about the copyist, not about her.
I and she
There is one more strangeness. The seeress sometimes says "I remember" and sometimes "she sees." The poem slips between first and third person without warning. Editors used to treat this as damage. I think it is the truest thing in the poem. Anyone who has been present at trance work has heard a speaker's voice shift in just that way, as the one who sees and the one who reports begin to come apart.
And in the last line, after the new world has risen, the perspective moves one final time: "Now she will sink." The vision is over. She goes down, back to wherever Odin called her from, and the poem ends on her and not on him.
How to read it
- Read it aloud. It was made for the voice. Even in translation the refrains do their work on the ear.
- Read two translations side by side. Where they differ sharply, the original is difficult, and you have found something interesting.
- Mark every "I" and every "she." Ask who is speaking, and to whom.
- Read it for her. Not only for what she tells us about the gods, but for what the poem tells us about a woman whose knowledge the gods could not do without.
If you would like company, the Lore Circles are open to everyone.