Voluspa

In Poul Anderson's Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), a skald recites the then recently composed Voluspa. Anderson does not name the poem but it clearly is Voluspa. The skald explains:

" 'It deals with how everything came to be and how it shall end...The words are of a seeress whom Odin raised from the grave to soothsay for the gods.' " (p. 217)

I have copied below a post on Voluspa from another blog:
 
The Elder Edda begins with Voluspa, a short poem that starts with an equivalent of Genesis, includes a death and resurrection story and ends with an equivalent of Armageddon. Thus, a Norse mini-Bible. Ymir and Bur's sons inhabited a yawning gap with no sea, sand, earth, heaven or grass and Bur's sons lifted the land although Voluspa does not tell us how these beings originated or that Bur's sons made the land from Ymir's body. These details are in other Eddic poems. The beginning presents a more sophisticated view of a pre-cosmic void than Genesis. Voluspa envisages nothingness, not chaos. And the other Eddic poems account for change and the emergence of life through dialectical interactions, not through divine creation. 

 

After Ragnarok, the returning or surviving gods are Baldr, Hoth, Honir, Odin's nephews and a mighty lord who comes on high, all power to hold, all lands to rule. The author of Voluspa can, like Virgil, be seen as a pagan prophet but post-Christians can simply appreciate the connections between mythologies.

The Christian King Haakon, hearing the poem, might be pleased about the "mighty lord" who is to come.