Yggdrasil · Cold and the Dead
Náströnd
A hall far from the sun, woven of serpents’ backs.
In Thorpe’s translation
42. She saw a hall standing, far from the sun, in Nâströnd; its doors are northward turned, venom-drops fall in through its apertures: entwined is that hall with serpents' backs.
- Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Völuspá, stanza 42 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
What the sources say
Völuspá describes a hall standing far from the sun in Náströnd, its doors turned north and venom dripping in through its openings; it is woven of serpents’ backs. In the next verse the seeress sees murderers and oath-breakers wading sluggish streams there. Gylfaginning gives the same picture, in its account of the dwellings after Ragnarök: a vast, direful hall made of the backs of serpents wattled together like wickerwork, with the serpents’ heads turned inward and venom flowing in which murderers and oath-breakers wade.
- Völuspá (Poetic Edda), stanzas 42-43 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ)
- attributed to Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning (13th century), the passage on the dwellings after Ragnarök
Names and background
The name means Corpse Shore (other translators offer Strand of the Dead or Dead Body Shore). The two main sources do not tell the story in quite the same way. In Völuspá a seeress says she saw the place, and the singular Náströnd is used. In Snorri's Gylfaginning the verse is introduced as spoken in the first person, the plural Nástrandir appears, and people are said to be doomed to wade the streams, which turns a vision into a fate.
The two also differ on where the dragon Níðhöggr is. The poem places him at the hall; Snorri's prose puts the worst of it at Hvergelmir, where he tears at corpses. Wikipedia’s article does not try to reconcile these.
- Wikipedia contributors, Náströnd (opens in a new tab)
Where the sources attest it
Náströnd, “corpse shore”, appears in Völuspá stanza 38 (Bellows’s numbering) as a hall with its doors facing north, and stanza 39 tells of the oath-breakers and murderers who wade there. Bellows glosses the name “Corpse-Strand” and notes that the third line of stanza 39 is probably a later addition, missing from most late paper manuscripts. In the Hauksbók text these stanzas follow stanza 43 instead of standing where Codex Regius has them.
Snorri quotes both stanzas in Gylfaginning and uses the plural form Nástrandir. He describes a hall woven of serpents’ backs with venom dripping through the roof. No archaeological evidence is cited.
- Völuspá (Poetic Edda), 38-39
- Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation) (opens in a new tab) (1916), Gylfaginning LII Rights: Public domain. Chapter numbers follow this edition.