About “The Comparative Vǫluspá”

Joseph S. Hopkins for Mimisbrunnr.info, August, 2022 Updated May 2023.. Art by Rim Baudey for Mimisbrunnr.info.

“The Comparative Vǫluspá” is a survey of six English language translations of the Old Icelandic poem Vǫluspá, the most influential and widely studied poem in the Old Norse corpus, arranged next to a public domain Old Icelandic edition of the poem. This allows for easy comparisons between editions, including modern editions. The project contains six new translation transcriptions, one new Old Norse edition transcription, and an amount of original commentary. This project is an extension of Mimisbrunnr.info’s Eddic to English, a comparison of all published English language translations of the Poetic Edda.

Ancient Prophecy, Contemporary Readers

No other text in the Old Norse corpus has proven more influential than Vǫluspá. Reference increasingly commonly in popular culture, the poem remains a common topic of discussion among scholars active in fields like Old Norse studies, Germanic philology, and Indo-European studies. Vǫluspá has long been lauded for its artistry, inspiring a tremendous amount of creatives over the years, the poem is in some ways just as topical as it was when it was written.

As an example, the poem features a seeress (a vǫlva) who provides to the wisdom-seeking god Odin with a Viking Age prophecy (spá) of Ragnarǫk, a series of events marked by rising sea levels, famine, social collapse, pollution, mass wildfires, ecological collapse, social collapse, and war, all topics one could pull directly from a newspaper headline today. Troublingly, it is all too easy to imagine a future scenario for humanity that resembles the seeress’s prophecy crossed with, say, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006).

Three primary versions of Vǫluspá are known to us: The version found in the Codex Regius (13th century), the Hauksbók version (14th century), and a version quoted and discussed extensively in the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda (also the 13th century). However exactly they reached manuscript form, these are all held to ultimately stem back to at least one oral informant who transmitted the poem before the Christianization of Iceland.

Vǫluspá did not exist in a vacuum and is but one of many eddic texts that have come down to us (and no doubt was once among many that did not survive the ravages of the ages). Indeed, other texts also discuss Ragnarǫk, which the Gylfaginning author(s) highlight. In a manner comparable to the tales of reincarnation we find in the Old Norse corpus, the poem does not describe this worldwide devastation as ‘the end’ but rather, according to the seeress, it is in fact a precursor to a vibrant rebirth: After the war-weary world is incinerated and drowned in poisonous waters, the world arises again, fertile and fresh, complete with rejuvenated plant and animal life. The gods are here too, with some even returning from the underworld after their ‘deaths’.

All is not lost for humankind, either. We learn in the eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál (and late in Gylfaginning) that a man and a woman (Líf and Lífþrasir) will survive by sheltering in a grove called Hoddmímis holt,, often interpreted as the same great central sacred tree, Yggdrasil. In turn, Vǫluspá is a great place to start, but it’s just the beginning. Of course, the seeress’s foretelling of Ragnarǫk is but one aspect of this dense poem, and readers will find much more of interest in its tightly-packed stanzas, particularly given the increased popularity and visibility of Norse mythology topics over the past few decades.

Purpose and utility

“The Comparative Vǫluspá” is an extension of Mimisbrunnr.info’s Eddic to English, where the Mimisbrunnr.info crew compares all English translations of the Poetic Edda, and assists readers in taking a closer look at all English language editions of the poem currently in the public domain in the United States.

In this resource, we compare six public domain translations. To achieve this goal, we’ve produced six new transcriptions of each, including their notes, and a little original commentary on them here and there. The present resource is useful for any student of the poem, including if you are for example:

• Encountering the poem for the first time

• Seeking a facing Old Norse-English edition

• Wondering how a freshly acquired translation stacks up to others

• Hunting for rare commentary on a particular concept

• Wanting different perspective on a tricky line or to compare notes

• Looking for material for a creative project, a tattoo, or something similar

Translators in particular will find the present resource valuable because comparing multiple translations is otherwise often a slow and cumbersome process. We’ve designed “The Comparative Vǫluspá” to be most easily compared to the latest edition of Neckel and Kuhn’s Old Norse edition. It differs in some significant ways from the latest edition, but it is still quite serviceable in a pinch. Translators will find the University of Copenhagen’s glossed digital edition of the Codex Regius manuscript to be very helpful and Skaldic.org’s Old Norse Hauksbók edition here.

However, if you’re entirely new to the poem, we strongly recommend that you use this resource in tandem with Carolyne Larrington's revised edition of the Poetic Edda (2014, Oxford World’s Classics). This is for a variety of reasons, but primarily because Larrington's revised edition contains two translations of the poem: One for the Codex Regius version of the poem and another for the Hauksbók version. These two version differ in notable ways, and most other translations combined the two (as do most Old Norse editions and English translations).

Indeed, a quick look at “The Comparative Vǫluspá” makes it clear how translations of this poem can dramatically vary from translator to translator, not only in rendering choices but also in factors such as stanza order. Each edition’s commentary also reflects scholarship contemporary to its era, for better or for worse, and older translations can differ starkly in the breadth of their coverage and the generosity of their supplemental items.