Völuspá and Hávamál: Nordic Wisdom in English, Old Norse, and Younger Futhark

Völuspá and Hávamál: Nordic Wisdom in English, Old Norse, and Younger Futhark

Völuspá and Hávamál are the first two poems of the Poetic Edda, an ancient Nordic collection of stories and wisdom. Völuspá, the most famous of the eddic poems, consists of a witch imparting knowledge of the cycles of life on Odin. Hávamál consists of Odin's advice to men, and functions almost as a book of proverbs. They were originally kept through oral tradition. The oldest known written copies come from the 13th century Icelandic collection known as the Codex Regius. In this collection, the poems are written in Old Norse using the Latin alphabet, but it is difficult to find in Old Norse today. This book offers a translation of the poems into modern English, as well as the original Old Norse texts in the Latin alphabet, and Old Norse texts in the Younger Futhark runes. As far as I, the translator, am aware, there is no other available source written in Younger Futhark, the writing system of viking age Northern Europe. This is appealing because the poems were likely recorded in this system originally, and because they frequently reference the runes themselves. I have done the translations to preserve the content and wisdom of the poems; I am no poet, so there was no attempt to preserve the poetic meter or line management.