A Seeress Commissioned by Odin

The Voluspo opens with the seeress herself speaking, asking for a hearing from what she calls the holy races, addressing her audience as Heimdall's sons, both high and low. She then turns directly to Valfather, a name for Odin meaning father of the slain, stating that it is his will that she relate the old tales she remembers, of men long ago. In four short lines the stanza sets up the frame for the entire poem that follows, an ancient seeress commissioned by Odin himself to recite a history of the cosmos that reaches back before her own memory and forward to its eventual destruction. Henry Adams Bellows' translation marks the poem's characteristic caesura, the pause partway through each line, with a vertical bar, a feature of the original Old Norse verse form carried into the English rendering. Why humankind should be addressed as Heimdall's sons is not explained anywhere else in the surviving poems, one of several details in the Voluspo that later readers have had to leave standing without a firm answer. The stanza's request for a hearing, aimed at both high and low among its audience, positions the poem from its very first line as speech meant to be heard by an entire assembled world rather than confided privately to Odin alone, even though Odin is the one figure the seeress addresses directly and names as the one whose will she is following.