SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

THREE ESSAYS ON VOLuspA
By SIGURDUR NORDAL
TRANSLATED BY B. S. BENEDIKZ AND J. S. McKINNELL
TRANSLATORS' NOTE. The following essays are
the weightiest material in Professor Nordal's edition
of V oluspd (1923, rev. 1952) which marked a turningpoint
in the study and criticism of the poem. They are
printed here to make them available in English to students
of Old Norse poetry. All references in them to "my
text" or "my commentary" are to this edition. The
translators, though kindly permitted (and even encouraged)
by Professor Nordal to revise the text liberally, have
not felt it right to intervene between the author and his
reader more than is unavoidable, and so have restricted
themselves to the sparsest of additional footnotes.
I HISTORY
V Oluspd is the most famous poem of the Norse world,
and beyond it, and there are many reasons for this. The
subject is exalted and of universal application: the
destiny of the world, of gods and men, and the battle of
opposing powers described in such a way that every man
recognises his own story. The poet was at once a man of
profound vision and a great artist, and must have lived in
an age which forced him to exert all his powers in this
creative effort. From the beginning the poem was laconic
in expression and hard to understand, and now it is in
fragments, and in parts corrupt. It mocks its editor in the
words of the sibyl, "Vituo er enn - e5a hvat?" But
the harder it is to understand, the more powerfully it