So, this poem Völuspá in the Poetic Edda seems to be a total different

kind of of source than we've got

in the in the Prose Edda, Lukas.
Is that correct? Or do they relate
to each other in some way?
You mentioned the Gylfaginning somewhere
in your thesis.
They indeed do relate to one other
, especially with regard to Völuspá
Julie mentioned just before.
As the poem somehow interlinks
the Poetic Edda with the Prose Edda.
Some stanzas from the poem Völuspá are quoted directly in the Prose Edda, and
in fact, the actual title Völuspá,
is just mentioned in Gylfaginning of the
Prose Edda, but not in the Poetic Edda itself.
The three Æsir kings mention the name
Völuspá always when they do authorize or
try to authorize their own story
by quoting stanzas from this text.
But the stanzas the Æsir kings use for
the authorization are somehow
slightly different,
in both wording and in content,
when they talk to Gylfi.
>> Can you give some example of this
different
wording, and what does it mean for
us as readers of, of these,
both of these texts?
>> I can show you this by using an example
from the story about the creation
of the world in the Prose Edda.
Let us just start with the very
beginning of the prologue,
of the Prose Edda,
because there, it starts like,
something like: Almighty gods
created Heaven and
Earth and everything within Heaven and
Earth and
finally, he also created
human beings which were
Adam and Eve where from all men descended.
This beginning, of course, is a strong
allusion to the Book of Genesis which,
we recognize for sure, and I'm sure also
medieval readers could recognize this.
The prologue, then goes on to
geographically structure the world,
we live in, and it states this,
it was derived into three parts.
One was in the south or the southwest,
which was called Africa,
where the land was firery hot and
burned by the sun.
The second part which is called Europe or Enea is from
the North, North,
Northeast, Northwest part.
>> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] Sorry.
From the west up to the north,
and the biggest and
largest part of the world, which is
called Asia takes from north over to east
down to the south and in this
Asian part and biggest part of the world,
there is also this city called Troy.
So, what we hear here is more or
less the same description as we know it
from medieval times, from a book called
Etymologies by Isidor from Seville.
>> So, this very much sounds as
if the prologue just fits into
the common scholarly opinion
about theology and geography
of the time it was written down,
and how did this common, so
to say, the learned view continental learned view,
influence the spatial structure
we have in the
Norse sources or in the Prose Edda?
>> Let's just have a look at the creation, how
the world gets created in Gylfaginning itself.
Just remember,what I said
before about Gylfi the Swedish
local king who goes to the Æsir
to find out if they are gods or
not, and they start the conversation
which is structured
by Gylfi asking questions and
the Æsir answering them and
Gylfi starts with a question
that is like which deity or
god is the highest that you believe in?
And the Æsir answer
that this god is named
by them as Allfather or Alföðr
in Old Norse.
Gylfi then wants to
know what this god had,
what great power he had and
what he did and so they tell him that
Allfather lives through all ages and
he built heaven and
earth and all things inside them, but
the biggest thing and,
and most greatest work he ever
did was that he created mankind,
gave them an ever-living soul, even if men die.
>> So, I understand, I understand it
right here that the Æsir refer to the,
the first book of Genesis as the prologue.
>> Exactly, they do so in, in their first
creation myth they use to tell Gylfi.
But Gylfi,
as the very skeptical dialogue partner,
he wants to know what did Odin before he'd created heaven and earth.
So the Æsir tell him,
he was there with the frost giant,
and he wants to know,
but how became everything,
into being when he was,
with the frost giants.
So then the Æsir have
to restructure their own,
creation myth and their
own spatial,
terminology to create a new beginning and
that's' when they start to use Völuspá in their own narration.
But, as Judy mentioned before in Völuspá ,
they begin,
the world begins with a line like:
It was at the beginning
of time when Ymir lived.
And now the Æsir do
take this same stanza but
they transform it to: It was at
the beginning of time when nothing was
so they use an idea of an empty void or
space so they don't compromise their
own story they used before with
an almighty deity or god like figure.
>> May I ask more about Ymir.
>> Of course.
>> The figure of Ymir,
this figure out of the empty space.
Do the Æsir explain more about Ymir?
And how do they set him apart from,
from Alföðr, or from Allfather?
>> Yes indeed.
They use him
as a creature without any real beginning.
They tell about two continents
one could say, one fiery hot,
the other ice cold and
when those two continents meet together
dew is dripping down and
out of this dew within an empty void,
this creature of Ymir begins to live.
And they talk about the descendants
of Ymir, which all were giants like
Ymir himself and about three brothers,
of which one is called Odin.
And the Æsir say this Odin is
the highest Gods they ever knew and,
which will create the world.
So Odin and his two brothers take Ymir and
rip him apart and
they build out of Ymir's
body parts the new world.
So they take, for example,
his flesh to build the earth and
ground and
they take the blood to build the sea and
they use his skull to shape heaven and
the sky and so on.
The creation of the world out of Ymir by
Odin and his two brothers thereby replace
the story about Allfather without
compromising the story they used before.
So now we have somehow an autonomous,
story about the creation
of the world,
which could be seen as the beginning or
starting point of Old Norse mythology and
its own world.
>> And
I think it's very interesting here again,
there seem to be a strong connection
of bodily parts and spatialty so
this thinking about what Judy told us about the world tree,
Yggdrassil and it's relations with
the perception of vision and hearing,
and hearing Gylfaginning of
the Prose Edda we have all this limbs or
the skull and the blood and everything,
which create eventually a new space,
so in the prologue, but
in the prologue to the Prose Edda, there
are no such allusions, I think, are there?
>> No, it's just, in the prologue
we have a more geographical world,
which is build up in three
parts, Africa, Europe and Asia and
now in Gylfaginning,
the world isn't split into parts as such.
But we have a circle or round shaped
world with the sea surrounding it.
But I think we already get a small hint on
how spatial relations in Gylfaginning of
the Prose Edda might be structured
and presented as the Æsir kings always
adapt topographical and spatial settings
to the story they tell Gylfi.
So they always take known facts or
stories and
retransform them to use
it as their own stories.
This adaptation culminates somehow during
the story they tell Gylfi when they
tell the story about Thor's visit
to a giant called Utgardaloki.
Gylfi himself wants
to know after he heard
stories about how strong Thor is and,
and how mighty he is.
He wants to know if Thor at any
time failed during his life.
The three Æsir kings somehow hesitate to
tell him something about failures of Thor.
But at the end, they start to
tell him the story about Thor
go out to visit the realm of giants and
this giant called Utgardaloki and
Utgardaloki somehow knew that
Thor will come to his own realm and
he played tricks on him by
creating a hall out of illusions.
And so when Thor and
his companions entered this famed hall,
they have to undergo some
tests of strength
but they all fail in those tests and
at the end after this play of tests or game of tests and
strength, the whole hall and
all the giants just disappear.
And they are out in, on a field and
Utgardaloki tells Thor:
I'm sorry I just tricked you now and when
Thor tries to take revenge on the giants
everything's gone, and
he's on an empty waste field.
So this
story sounds rather familiar
you already mentioned kind of a hall and
you already mentioned tricking,
and all these allusions so,
what's the relation there?
Where did we hear about that?
>> Yes, of course,
this telling finds it parallel in the so
called frame narrative of the Prose Edda or
Gylfaginning.
Just remember how the Æsir
knew that Gylfi was coming
due to their gift of prophecy they have.
The Æsir as well as,
Utgardaloki just made an illusion and
tricked Gylfi into their made up and
faint hall they have.
But in contrast to Thor,
Gylfi doesn't recognize that he's tricked.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Even though he hears the story about
such a tricking which is exactly the same
situation that he is in and at the end
of Gylfginning it is just the same as
with the whole of Utgardaloki,
the whole hall vanishes into thin air and
Gylfi stands inside a field, but
he doesn't realize that he was tricked.
He goes home in his own realm and
tells his own people the story which is
known today as Old Norse mythology.
>> Mm-hm, so a hall in some way must be a
welcome frame setting for dialogues.
Do you encounter such halls too Judy?
And, and
what role do they play in Gylfaginning?
>> Yeah, you certainly do.
But it's interesting.
Snorri must have got the idea
of a hall setting from
from some of these poems as well as,
as other sources.
But in the poems they're real
halls, and they're threatening places and
dangerous places to be,
rather than illusory which is,
which is an interesting
distinction between the
sort of fictive construction that Gylfi encounters.
Again these halls are really
sort of fascinating settings but,
but they're, they're not described in,
in, in great detail.
So, for instance,
the poem Vafþrúðnismál begins with Odin and
his wife presumably sitting in their
hall and he says he wants to go
out on this challenging quest to find out
if he knows more knowledge than a giant.
And so she waves him off and
says, be careful out there.
And then he sort of relocates
to the giant's hall.
And they have a wisdom contest,
and trade questions and answers,
a kind of pop quiz of old Norse mythology.
But what's at stake is, is one of
their lives and the poem ends with,
with the giant acknowledging
that he's been, he's,
he's unable to beat Odin,
and that's the end of the poem.
And what is quite interesting compared
to the analogue with Gylfaginning is
we the audience, and Odin,
are still in that hall.
[LAUGH] The giant might have died but we're still in that location.
And so there's something quite interesting
about the mis-en-scène of these Eddic
poems that,
that they'll often take you to places and
don't necessarily bring you back.
Within Vafþrúðnismál, too, just going back to
our theme of sort of spatial constructs
and different locations, there are some
very interesting little vignettes of
places, from old Norse mythology that
come through the questions and
answers, and one of them is for
instance the notion that.
At the edge of heaven,
at the end of heaven,
there's a giant disguised as an eagle,
who sits there and flaps his wing and that's where winds come from.
who sits there and flaps his wing and
that's where winds come from.
And there's another answer to a question
that tells us there's
a mythological river called Ifing.
And it's, it divides the lands of
the gods from the lands of the giants and
it flows forever.
Never stopping and
ice will never form on it.
>> [LAUGH] to come back again to the,
to the halls.
Do any of the poems describe the halls of the gods?
>> There's another
poem which is spoken by Odin
this time in disguises as Grímnir.
And the poem is Grímnismál and
it describes in
some details a sequence of halls.
Again, we're never,
they're never contiguous.
You never quite know what,
how one relates geographically to another.
But we just get these again, these
vignettes of where particular gods live.
So the Vanir god Njörðr is, lives in
a high timbered temple called Noatún.
Odin himself has more than one hall.
His most famous hall that
everyone knows about is Valhalla.
Among its many peculiar and
extraordinary features,
is the fact that it has 540 doors.
And through each of these 540 doors,
800 warriors can pass simultaneously.
And so these immense dimensions and
this kind of immediate evacuation
capacity is what you need
when Ragnarök happens.
So you, so
you sort of, I think everyone probably
has different visualizations of this.
But I see it as kind of
this huge wooden Colosseum.
Another one of Odins
halls is even stranger.
And it says in Grímnismál that he and the
goddess Sága meet there every afternoon,
kind of for happy hour,
mythological happy hour.
And they have a drink together,
and it's called Søkkvabekkr.
And its beneath the waves, so they,
they sit there drinking every day with
the sound of waves splashing over them.
And I think what is really interesting
about these whole settings,
they bring the familiar to,
to unknown territory.
And the other thing you get
a sense of throughout the Eddic corpus.
Is that the distinctions between land and
sea and between ground and
underground are much more
permeable than we think of them.
And this means that,
because of this permeability,
you can move into all these unexpected
spheres in between the ground and
underground, and between, water and earth.
Which is really fascinating.
>> Mm-hm.
I'd like to stick
to this question and answer and dialogue.
Yeah, structure between the figures this,
this dialogue
gives us sometimes really glimpses of,
of imagined spaces.
You already told us about that.
Can we assume the same proto-dialogue
structure in, in the Prose Edda, Lukas?
>> Yes, I think so because the dialogue
structure in Prose Edda
is really built to topographical
structure of this Eddic world.
Because we have Gylfi on the one hand
side asking and the Æsir answering on their own.
But the answers are created
upon these questions.
So just, think back to the first
creation method telling.
Which is, of course, an allusion to,
to the Christian,
creation method from the book of Genesis.
If Gylfi would be happy with
the first creation method
the story would break and stop there.
>> Mm-hm.
But he asks again, and again.
And, but every time he asks something
they have to invent something new.
Something better, something more precise,
until he's happy with hearing something,
and then he goes on to the next topic.
>> Mm.
>> So he, maybe we could say that
Gylfi structures the whole world,
the whole Eddic mythological
world by asking questions.
>> Mm-hm.
So, unfortunately,
time is already running up.
Although there are so
many other fascinating questions to ask.
I'd like to have some final
remarks from both of you.
Yeah, what are you tips for reading those texts today?
So, what, what's the most
fascinating thing you'd like to know
the audience outside, why should we read
the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda today?
>> Well I, I suppose what, what is so
captivating about it,
particularly with the Eddic poems.
Although it's always nice to have the foil
of the mythographic construction to,
as a sound, sounding board.
I think what's so
fascinating is the way that the,
these images really have to be
reconstructed in the imagination.
And no two readers probably will
have exactly the same topography as,
as one another.
And so as for readers of this material,
especially for the first time,
it's just wonderful to sort of dive in.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And, and to try and, try and make
sense of these different images we get
from prophecies,
from arguments, from insults.
And they, they all tell us
about the world of the Gods.
That, that is kind of partial fragmentary,
and enormously imaginative.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And, and
readers get sort of put it all together.
>> Mm-hm.
>> In their own heads.
>> Mm-hm.
>> I really think that it's
great to read both texts,
one after another,
maybe starting with the Poetic Edda.
Because, from my point of view,
the topographical layers in there and
stories are quite obscure.
And if you go over to the Prose Edda it
starts out to functions
as a whole mythological world
and mythograpical text.
But always keep in mind that
text itself tries to trick you.
So it's more or
less a meta mythology we can read there.
Reading how a world is created
while we are tricked believing
a mythology,
that is probably just an invention.
That's extremely important to remember.
Don't always trust Snorri.
[LAUGH]
>> Exactly,
so, I think that's good final words.
And I'd like to thank you both for,
yeah, being here and talk about-

>> Thank you.

>> both Eddas.