![]() ![]() ![]() This paper proposes that cosmogony and fate should therefore, whether as belief or literary metaphors, be approached with less fixity than is customary, taking into account that impressions of them almost definitely varied between poets and audiences and that the form of fate in particular may deviate from our received ideas. The same deed that creates the world consigns it to Ragnarök and its destruction. Hence, the entire history of the world necessarily crystallizes within the instant of its creation: Miðgarðr’s fate and its physical qualities are interdependent, being shaped together in a way that reflects the nature of this act. It is a thing that naturally decays over time and which is intrinsically linked, in terms of its constitution and quality, to the calibre of its materials and workmanship. Miðgarðr is judged as any created object would be. For Völuspá, this is a fundamental psychological and artistic problem, and one that the poem attempts to evade through an imagery of crafting – with profound consequences for the conceptualization of cosmogony and of cosmology. Even with the crutch of science, twenty-first century discourse is still reliant on negation and antithesis to circumscribe the concepts of pre- and non-existence, on terminology like a-spatial and no-thing. Describing the forging of existence was as difficult a task a millennium ago as it is today. ![]()
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