#dvergatal

The Lineage of Praiser (Völuspá [Dvergatal], st.14-16)

first of all how dare you use that picture. secondly, what

you didn't publish my submission so HA.

okay. i'm gonna break this down. with proper grammar even.

The Dvergatal is the 'list of dwarves', a section of stanzas (I think it's 10-16 or something) in the Völuspá, 'the prophecy of the seeress', which is the first poem of the Poetic Edda. The Dvergatal has its own name because many scholars believe it to be a corruption of stanzas, and many translators will remove it from the beginning of the Völuspá and make it a separate fragment. (If anyone's read the Lee M Hollander translation, he does this.) 

The nature of my argument was that Litr, a dwarf who is kicked into Baldr's funeral pyre in what seems to be a random fit of rage of Thorr, is actually a transitory element that brings the apocalypse and acts as a medium of life-death earth-air interaction. When Litr burns with Baldr he secures the end of the world, and the rebirth that occurs after the lands sink below the primordial seas as the Eddas tell us. He is also the reason Baldr rises up from Hel and reclaims the new earth.

That being said: dwarves as a whole function in this same manner. The purpose of Dvergatal is, in my literary analysis, a key into understanding how Ragnarok comes around. The dwarves appear in the poem immediately following the arrival of "three giant girls" aka the women who in almost every source connote the Ragnarok. A dwarf poem, Alvissmal (sayings of All-wise), does the same sort of transition in the body of the Poetic Edda. At the end of the mythological poems their is a poem about Volund and then All-wise, then the heroic poems begin. This is after Baldr's death. Even in the context of the entire narrative of the book dwarves are the catalyst.