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Wherever we turn, whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in meaning and in form the same solutions proffered.
Whether the new world which Vafthrudnismal and Völuspa both prophesy belongs to the original idea or not is a disputed point.
Ash and Elm in the Edda were the Adam and Eve of the human race. There were no intelligent men on earth "Spirit they possessed not, sense they had not, blood nor motive powers, nor goodly color. London: Trubner & Co. 1866. It is certain, however, that the ash was the typic tree of all life, since the next verse of the Voluspa is devoted to Yggdrasil, the tree of existence, or of the world itself.
In Völuspa there is no descriptive introduction, and no dialogue; the whole is spoken by the Sibyl, who plunges at once into her story, with only the explanatory words: "Thou, Valfather, wouldst have me tell the ancient histories of men as far as I remember."
One of the oldest and most interesting is the "Voluspa," or Song of the Prophetess, a kind of sibylline lay, which contains an account of the creation, the origin of man and of evil, and concludes with a prediction of the destruction and renovation of the universe, and a description of the future abodes of happiness and misery.
But when it was full she poured the poison away, and meanwhile poison dropped on Loki, and he struggled so hard that all the earth shook; those are called earthquakes now." Völuspa inserts lines corresponding to this passage after the Baldr episode, and Snorri makes it a consequence of Loki's share in that event.
Professor Bugge's North of England theory is slightly stronger, being supported by several Old English expressions in the poems, but these are not enough to prove that they were composed in England, since most Icelanders travelled east at some time of their lives. A later study will deal with the Heroic legends. Ynglinga Saga. Völuspa. A poem of similar form occurs among the heroic poems.
The very bareness of the outline is sufficient proof that the material is not new. The framework is apparently imitated from that of the poem known as Baldr's Dreams, some lines from which are inserted in Völuspa. This older poem describes Odin's visit to the Sibyl in hell-gates to inquire into the future.
Some wild Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa in the Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these later Skalds; and it is their songs chiefly that survive.
A tree so much extended as this ash of course had its parasites and rodentia clinging to it and gnawing it; but the brave old ash defied them all, and is to wave its skywide umbrage even over the ruins of the universe, after the dies irae shall have passed. So sings the Voluspa. This tree is a worthy type of the Teutonic race, so green, so vigorous, so all-embracing.
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