SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Voluspd 125
3. Introite, nam et hie dii sunt
Voluspd 9 0 does not state in one word how the world and
its first dwellers, giants and gods, came into being. In the
beginning there was only Ginnungagap, the great void.
Then we are told that the sons of Burr raised the earth
out of the sea and made it habitable, created Mi6gar6r,
marked out the paths of the planets and ordered the
passing of time.
This great leap in the poem's narrative might be
explained, it is true, by the loss of one or more stanzas.
But this assumption is unnecessary and improbable.
The poet has bypassed the popular ideas on the origin of
giants, gods and world, which are well-known from
Vafpruonismcil and Gylfaginning, because he could not
believe implicitly in them - and he had to stop somewhere.
The beginning itself had to be a mystery, for the
simple reason that the mind of man cannot stop at the last
course or the deepest foundation. One can go back over
a number of steps, say that the earth rests on an elephant's
back and the elephant stands on a turtle, as an Indian
myth has it. But what is the turtle standing on?
On one point, which is not explicitly stated, one can
doubtless assume that the poet was in agreement with the
popular concept. He considered the giants the oldest of
living beings (cir of borna). If the believers in the lEsir
of the ninth century could have foreseen that Darwin
would become famous a thousand years later for the
strange new doctrine that men were descended from apes,
they might well have thought this ridiculous, for
9. In this part 3 I shall attempt to expound V 61uspa's philosophy of life in
such a way that every present-day person can comprehend it. Far be it from
me to "take my text" from V 61uspa. I do not want to say anything other
than what the poet had in mind, and preferably to say it in words similar to
those that he would have used if he had set out to tell the same truths in modern
speech. Nevertheless I cannot avoid its being like a translation into a foreign
language, and thereby a falsification - "traduttore traditore". We use
concepts where our forefathers preferred to use images. All our thinking is
soaked in Greek and Hebrew culture, even where the words are the same as of
old, e.g. what is guIJnow and what was goIJ in the tenth century? We cannot
avoid using the word sin, which is a totally Christian concept, and so on. The
poem's sequence is naturally taken from the "emended" version.