The Saga of Vanadís, Völva and Valkyrja

and fractions of myths must sometimes be put together from many sources to find a
whole, a meaning for a modern person. In some cases this may be due to lost stanzas,
lost or distorted lines. My belief is, however, that this way of hinting at stories or themes,
giving bits of images, and the extensive use of kenningar, comes from the fact that at the
time people knew the stories and their symbolic imagery and could fill in the blanks for
themselves. In the Christian world we need only mention the virgin, the cross, Judas, or
water turned to wine, and the whole western world knows the rest of the story. Or in a
more mundane context in this age of information we use concepts like input, the web and
browser, and everyone knows the hidden meaning of those “kenningar” in that context.
The author of Völuspá, whether a völva herself or not, assumes that the listener or reader
knows what the völva is referring to when she gives hints, or uses metaphoric or
symbolic imagery. She remembers the whole story. She refreshes our distorted memory
by mentioning the tree, the first war in the world, the golden tablets hidden in the grass,
Ginnungagap, Gullveig, Óðinn’s eye, Heimdallur’s ear, the betrayals, the wolf, the three
þursameyjar 39 (giant maidens), etc. She may fear this knowledge will be lost with the
changing times and she puts stepping-stones and images into this perfectly composed
poem so that we may remember it too. Another possibility, not least at times of religious
changes, is that the poem is meant to be a mystery to those outside the old faith, and
therefore clad in disguise.
Parts of Völuspá may have existed earlier and in some other form, although the
perfect harmony and poetic beauty of the poem as a whole suggests that it was originally
composed very close to the way we find it today. Some words have of course been
distorted and stanzas have shifted. In the manuscripts one can detect spelling mistakes
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