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Updated: June 1, 2025
Now, while they were young and simple they loved fairy tales, as you do now. All nations do so when they are young: our old forefathers did, and called their stories 'Sagas. I will read you some of them some day some of the Eddas, and the Voluspa, and Beowulf, and the noble old Romances.
It is the grim humor of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of the American Backwoods. That is also a very striking conception that of the Ragnarok, Consummation, or Twilight of the Gods. It is in the Voluspa Song; seemingly a very old, prophetic idea.
Blond as Baldur of the Voluspa, with a wealth of golden brown beard veiling his lips and chin, he appeared far more than six years the junior of the clear cut, smoothly shaven face that belonged to his prospective brother-in-law; and their countenances contrasted as vividly as the portraiture of bland phlegmatic Norse Aesir, with some bronze image of Mercury, as keenly alert as his sacred symbolic cocks.
Völuspa, though not one of the earliest poems, forms an appropriate opening. Metrical considerations forbid an earlier date than the first quarter of the eleventh century, and the last few lines are still later. The material is, however, older: the poem is an outline, in allusions often obscure to us, of traditions and beliefs familiar to its first hearers.
And all that is before them and the whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the world has not seen for ages a true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old Voluspa. When brethren shall be Each other's bane, And sisters' sons rend The ties of kin.
By "Time's nurse," in the foregoing lines from the "Voluspa," is meant the Mundane Tree Yggdrasil, which shall survive unscathed, and wave mournfully over the universal wreck. But in the "Edda" Hor tells Gangler that "another earth shall appear, most lovely and verdant, with pleasant fields, where the grain shall grow unsown. Vidar and Vali shall survive.
Omitting the heroic poems, there are in Codex Regius the following: Of a more or less comprehensive character, Völuspa, Vafthrudnismal, Grimnismal, Lokasenna, Harbardsljod; dealing with episodes, Hymiskvida, Thrymskvida, Skirnisför.
Among the visions which the Norse Sibyl sees and describes in the weird prophecy known as the Voluspa is one of the fatal mistletoe. "I behold," says she, "Fate looming for Balder, Woden's son, the bloody victim. There stands the Mistletoe slender and delicate, blooming high above the ground. Out of this shoot, so slender to look on, there shall grow a harmful fateful shaft.
The dragon's writhing in the waves is one of the tokens to herald Ragnarök, and his battle with Thor is the fiercest combat of that day. Only Völuspa of our poems gives any account of it: "Then comes the glorious son of Hlodyn, Odin's son goes to meet the serpent; Midgard's guardian slays him in his rage, but scarcely can Earth's son reel back nine feet from the dragon."
Gripisspa, a prophetic outline of Sigurd's life, introduces the Volsung poems, as Völuspa does the Asgard cycle. Riddle-poems. So many of the mythological poems are in this form that they suggest the question, did the asking of riddles form any part of Scandinavian ritual? The Aesir.
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