Ragnarok (the Seeress's Prophecy)

Voluspa opens with Odin raising a dead seeress and pressing her to speak. What follows is her account, moving from the world's creation through its history to its end: three years of unbroken winter, the wolf Skoll swallowing the sun, the stars falling from the sky, the world tree Yggdrasil shaking, and the ship Naglfar, built from dead men's fingernails, setting out. The fire giant Surt crosses the rainbow bridge Bifrost and breaks it behind him. In the battle that follows, Odin is killed by the wolf Fenrir and avenged by his son Vidar; Thor kills the Midgard serpent and dies of its venom; Freyr falls to Surt; Heimdall and Loki kill each other. The earth sinks into the sea.

The poem does not end there. A new earth rises from the water, green and unsown, and an eagle fishes over its waterfalls. Baldr, killed earlier in the mythic cycle, returns from the dead alongside his killer Hodr, and the surviving gods, Vidar, Vali and others, meet again on the plain of Idavoll to remember what came before. Two humans, Lif and Lifthrasir, who hid through the destruction inside Yggdrasil, emerge to repopulate the new world.

This is presented throughout as the seeress speaking in her own voice about what she sees, "I remember" and "I see", not as a myth narrated about the gods in the third person. Old Norse kept a specific vocabulary for this kind of sight, and the volva who performed it was a recognised, if ambivalent, ritual specialist rather than simply a poetic device.

Voluspa survives complete in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript copied around 1270, and partially in the slightly later Hauksbok manuscript, with real differences in wording and stanza order between the two. Snorri Sturluson quotes and paraphrases large sections of it in his Prose Edda, written around 1220, which shows the poem was already established and authoritative within two and a half centuries of Iceland's conversion to Christianity around the year 1000, though how much older the poem itself is remains unsettled; some scholars place its composition in the later tenth century, close to the conversion, others argue for material transmitted orally well before that.

One stanza sharpens the question of how far the poem as it survives reflects a Christian scribal environment rather than the pre-Christian religion it describes. A verse describing a single, more powerful ruler who comes to govern everything after the world is renewed appears in neither Codex Regius nor Hauksbok; it survives only in later paper copies. Scholars are divided on whether it belongs to the poem and was lost to a gap in both medieval manuscripts, or is a later addition reflecting an idea foreign to the rest of the vision. Because Ragnarok itself is cyclical, ending in renewal rather than in judgment or a final kingdom, most readers treat the poem's core vision as pre-Christian even where this one closing line stays contested.

Sources The Poetic EddaAnonymous (Codex Regius) with The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson