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Völuspá hin skamma (Old Norse: 'The Short Völuspá) is an Old Norse poem which survives as a handful of stanzas in Hyndluljóð, in the Poetic Edda, and as one stanza in the Gylfaginning section of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. The name of the poem is only known due to Snorri's citation of it in Gylfaginning (chapter 5):

The additional stanzas that remain appear in Hyndluljóð. In his translation of Hyndluljóð, Henry Adams Bellows comments that the preserved fragment of Völuspá hin skamma shows that it was a "late and very inferior imitation of the great Voluspo", and he dates it to the twelfth century. He further suggests that its appearance in Hyndluljóð is due to the blunder of a copyist who confused the two poems, and he does not consider them to be of any great value either as poetry or as mythology.

References

1. Orchard 1997.
2. Gylfaginning, Guðni Jónsson's edition.
3. Gylfaginning in translation by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), at Sacred texts.

Bibliography

• Orchard, Andy (1997). Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. Cassell. ISBN 978-0-304-34520-5.

Further reading

• Hyndluljoth, Translation and commentary by Henry Adams Bellows
• Völuspá in skamma, Guðni Jónsson's edition with normalized spelling
• The Prose Edda, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, at sacred-texts.com
• Gylfaginning, Old Norse text, Guðni Jónsson's edition.

External links

• MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository) Illustrations of Völuspá En Skamma from manuscripts and early print books.

• Old Norse literature
• Eddic poetry
• Ymir