Voluspa: The Seeress Who Told Odin How the World Ends

A seeress tells Odin the whole history of the world, from the void and the first giant to the fall of the stars and a new earth.

The Voluspa, 'the prophecy of the seeress', is the first poem of the Poetic Edda. A seeress tells Odin the history of the world from Ymir and the void to Ragnarok and a green new earth.

The Voluspa, "the prophecy of the seeress", is the first and most famous poem of the Poetic Edda. It survives in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius (c. 1270) and in a different version in Hauksbok, and parts are quoted in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. Most scholars date its composition to around 1000 CE, the period when Iceland was converting to Christianity.

A volva, a seeress who remembers the giants who raised her, speaks to Odin. She recounts the time of Ymir and the yawning gap, the ordering of sun, moon and stars, the making of the first humans, Ask and Embla, the world tree Yggdrasil, the first war between gods, and the death of Baldr. Then she looks forward to Ragnarok, when the wolf breaks free, the gods fight their last battle, and the world burns.

The end is described in vivid cosmic terms: "The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars down from heaven are whirled." But the poem does not stop there. The seeress sees the earth rise again, green, out of the waves, the surviving gods meeting on the plain of Ida and finding golden game pieces in the grass.

Scholars debate how much Christian influence shaped the poem's apocalypse and renewal. Some see a pagan poet responding to Christian ideas; others see genuinely old Norse eschatology. For readers interested in sky events, the poem stands out for its catalog of cosmic disaster, stars falling and the sun darkening, followed by a reset of the world.