The Story of the Völsi, an Old Norse Anecdote of Conversion

The heroic epics and the historic sagas in Old Norse literature, grandiose monuments so imbued with heroic spirit, cast their shadows far over the lowlands, over the more modest products of a younger and more commonplace spirit. The story of the Volsi is one of the many such stories lying in the shadows. An Icelandic folktale recorded in the seventeenth century contains a drastically rearranged and distorted form of the Volsi story, only without the verse addresses. Volsi may have persisted, furtively, in semi-heathen oaths while dying out in the actual vernacular. In Old Norse poetry there are two substantives morn: the first signifies “river” and is related to the name of the French river Marne; and the other is the proper name of a giantess, or a generic name meaning “giantess.” The refrain line would then be summoning “giantesses” to accept the sacrificial offer; this indeed is the meaning rendered in the Lp.