Some Cardinal Points in 'Vǫluspá'

Prior to Viking-Age contacts with Greenland and North America, cultural traffic with Scandinavia transpired along vectors to its South and East. Alignment with neighbours southward steadily increased throughout the Middle Ages, so that Norse convergences in religious and political expressions with those of the cultural heirs to the Western Roman Empire are well documented. Less so remain historical ties which bound Scandinavia, along with the Eurasian forests and steppes, to Eastern civilizations beyond them, as such intercourse transgressed frontiers which came to be erected by a hegemony focussed around Rome, in its opposition to rivals variously oriented towards Byzantium or Mecca. This paper treats the significance of East and South within the cosmology of 'Vǫluspá', especially in terms of the differences which exist among the surviving recensions of the poem regarding the structural role of Orient within its narrative. Key to this analysis will be a mapping between the terrestrial sphere of mankind and its celestial counterpart, home to the Norse tívar. The figurative language used to orient such a cosmos links 'Vǫluspá' with Norse astronomical conceptions attested elsewhere in the eddaic corpus and in early scaldic verse, which do not appear to stem directly from Latinate learning. The paper is aimed to demonstrate that the construction of the eastern quadrant in the Hauksbók recension of 'Vǫluspá' is both more archaic and more authentic, involving a series of lectiones difficiliores, with respect to the recension attested in the Codex Regius and most likely to that underlying Snorra Edda, as well. Close reading of the poem in Hauksbók reveals the East as a source of salvation from, rather than an accomplice to, voracious powers destructively extending from the southern quadrant. Thus 'Vǫluspá' can offer textual support to early Viking-Age archaeological testimony as to the importance for Scandinavia of a poorly documented region once dominated by the Scythian branches of the Indo-Iranian cultures.