Voluspo 3-4 (Bellows)

John Lindow's guide to Norse mythology situates this passage inside a poem whose speaker is stranger than her audience: a volva, a seeress who identifies herself as older than the gods she is addressing, recounting the world's beginning to Odin because she remembers it directly rather than because he has asked an ordinary question. The verses recorded here describe the world before creation, no sea, no sand, no earth, only Ginnungagap, the yawning gap, before Bur's sons, one of them Odin himself, raise the land and make Midgard; a seeress predating the gods narrating their own world's origin to them is itself part of what the poem is doing, collapsing the distance between myth and its telling.

Lindow surveys a genuine scholarly dispute over how much of the poem, all of it recorded centuries after Iceland's conversion to Christianity in a manuscript tradition written by Christian scribes, preserves authentic pre-Christian belief and how much reflects Christian apocalyptic influence absorbed into the retelling, particularly in the poem's later, more famous vision of the gods' own end at Ragnarok. The creation account these verses give is generally read as closer to older tradition than the poem's ending, but Lindow is clear that no line of Voluspa can be dated to a pre-Christian original with certainty; the poem survives only in its thirteenth century recorded form.