The Dvergatal (“Reckoning of dwarfs”) is a list of dwarf names of Northern mythology, in which Tolkien picked up the names of the members of Thorin’s company. The Dvergatal is a part of the Vǫluspá (“Prophecy of the Seeress”), a most important poem from the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda, an anonymous collection of verse related to the ancient Scandinavian heathenry, gathered and preserved in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript from the 13th century. The Vǫluspá tells through the mouth of a wise-woman the fate of the world in a set of great and wild visions; it is both a cosmogony and a eschatology. Snorri Sturluson, the great Icelandic writer of the 13th century, copiously quotes from it in his own digest of Northern mythology, the Prose Edda or Younger Edda.

We know of the Vǫluspá from the Codex Regius (Konungsbók), the book of Haukr (Hauksbók) and the quotes in the Prose Edda ; the versions are slightly different, for instance regarding the name of some dwarfs. The text given here was reconstituted in the standardised spelling of Old Norse by superposing versions. The English text follows the 1936 translation by Henry Adam Bellows, modified so as to achieve a correspondence with the Norse text given beside.

The text is transcribed in Germanic runes or futhark, from the series called Younger Futhark, used in Scandinavia from the 9^th to the 12^th century. The runes are of the “long-branch” variety, also (rather improperly) called “Danish runes”. We made use of Robert Pfeffer’s typeface Pfeffer Mediæval.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe