The Dwarfs of Voluspo

Voluspo is the poem in which the events surrounding Ragnarok are laid out and foretold. It tells of a time before Ragnarok, and a time after Ragnarok. It starts with creation, and ends with an ominous stanza in which we get the feeling that evil will once again rise. Evil is never completely destroyed. It will always rise again.

The cyclical nature of good and evil appears to be embedded in the text. My thesis that Ragnarok is not only a tale of the future, but also one of a past event appears therefore to be supported in the text.

Furthermore, there are several stanzas close to the beginning of the poem that lend support to my theory that the events depicted are those leading up to the Toba Catastrophe. These stanzas are nothing more than the enumeration of dwarf names. A picture is painted in which we see a world inhabited by benign dwarfs, existing before man, and cooperating with man once the human race is brought into existence by the Gods.

This state of affairs bares a close resemblance to how things must have been in and around Indonesia prior to the Toba Catastrophe. There existed in this region a relatively advanced race of dwarfs, which appears to have interacted with humans. These dwarfs are referred to as Homo Floresiensis. They existed before the Toba Catastrophe, but perished during or shortly after the eruption.

By Cicero Moraes et alii

http://arc-team-open-research.blogspot.it/2015/08/homo-floresiensis.html,

CC BY 4.0, Link

Voluspo is believed to have received its current form some 200 years before vikings settled in Iceland. It is therefore assumed to be a relatively recent story. However, I do not believe that its relatively modern form conflicts with the idea that the basic bare bone essence of the story may be very ancient.

If the story is truly ancient, then it is likely to have been changed and re-worked over and over through the ages. Much has surely been lost. However, something so important that it fills several stanza will remain, even if its significance is lost on the people recounting it.

The lengthy reference to a tribe of dwarfs indicate that these were important to humans, so much so that they deserved a prominent place in our myths. If their mention had been brief in the original text, then they would surely have been deleted at some point. However, several stanzas in a religious text cannot easily be deleted, only reworked and altered to fit local conditions.

If Ragnarok is the story of the Toba Catastrophe, then the dwarfs mentioned in Voluspo are the dwarfs that once existed in and around Indonesia.