In the Poetic Edda poem Völuspá, a völva narrates the vision of the gods’ fate.
The Old Norse word völva means a female seer or prophetess. In Völuspá, she addresses Odin and recounts a sweeping history of the cosmos, beginning with its creation and continuing through the deeds of gods, the death of Baldr, Ragnarök, and the renewal of the world.
The poem is presented as prophetic speech rather than as a conventional third-person story. That framing gives the speaker authority while also making the poem’s future scenes part of a remembered cosmic cycle. A völva is not the same thing as a Norn: the Norns are individual beings associated with fate, while völva is a social or ritual role. Völuspá survives principally in the Codex Regius manuscript of the Poetic Edda and is one of the central literary sources for Norse mythology.