The Völva (the Seeress)

The Seeress — the völva of the Völuspá — is the voice of the greatest poem in the Norse corpus. An ancient prophetess, dead and raised by Odin to answer his questions, she remembers back before the beginning, when there was neither sand nor sea nor sky, only the yawning gap; and she sees forward past the end, to Ragnarök and the green world reborn from the water afterward. In her mouth the whole mythology unfolds as a single sweep of time — the gods shaping the worlds, the first war, the murder of Baldr, the binding of Loki, and the doom rushing toward them all: the wolf loose, the sun gone black, the stars falling, the gods and their enemies destroying each other on the last field. She is not a character so much as the corpus's eye on eternity — the cold, far-seeing voice that holds the beginning and the end of everything in a single prophecy.