Ever since I was a child, my literary tastes have bounced back and forth between stories of fantasy and escape and stories of people’s lives in the real world. This push-pull may have been prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s, which happened when I was in grammar school and too young to understand the implications of the news. A much talked about issue in my hometown was which families were building bomb shelters, and if it was a smart or a stupid thing to do. The household where my Brownie troop meetings were held had climbed on the bandwagon, but my parents pooh-poohed the idea. From a child’s perspective, the subject was impossible to contemplate. Even the idea of it made everything in my world suddenly not make sense. Where would we go if the unthinkable happened and an atom bomb landed in our midst?

Diverse cultural and religious traditions from around the globe include stories of a green paradise emerging from the ruins of an apocalyptic ending to all life on earth. It’s possible to imagine mystics and visionaries from the distant past casting their sight as far out into the future as they could possibly conceive. Some of them foresaw a time when the world would be wracked by powerful forces that threatened to destroy everything. It is our good fortune that some of the tales they told have been carried down through the ages.

The Völuspá, also known as the Seeress’s (or Wise Woman’s) Prophecy, opens the Poetic Edda, a compilation of mythological and heroic poems from Iceland that dates back to sometime around the year 1000 A.D., a time when the old pagan gods were fading away under the spreading influence of the Christian religion. It is the oldest surviving source material for Norse myth and legend.

In the poem, a volva, or wise woman, has been summoned by Odin, chief of the gods, to advise him about what the future holds in store. In a magnificent sweep of events, she tells of the creation of the world and its inhabitants, roots her chronicle in present-day happenings, reveals just enough of Odin’s secret doings to establish the power of her visionary skill, and then tells of a far distant time when the gods will fall to their doom and the world will be destroyed, only to have a fresh, new, green earth arise to take its place. The Völuspá is a primary source for accounts of the Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods in Norse mythology. It is considered to be one of the finest poems in all of Germanic literature.

The Eddas (both the Poetic version and its later counterpart, the Prose Edda) were well known to J.R.R. Tolkien, who mined them for source material to use in his imaginative writings. The names of Gandalf and most of the Dwarves who appear in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings originate in several stanzas of the Völuspá known as the “Catalogue of Dwarfs.”

The Völuspá is available to us today due to a fortuitous combination of human ingenuity and twists of fate. Some unknown individual a thousand years ago (give or take a century or two) imagined and articulated the seeress’s grand vision. At a later date, someone wrote down the prophecy in poetic form, in keeping with the literary customs of the day. Quite some time after that, another person copied it in a compilation of poems, placing it first in the manuscript. The Völuspá then passed through many hands before reaching modern times, where the skills of translators and interpreters have turned its distilled wisdom into a form that can easily be found online. Among other things, it’s an antidote to Twitter.

The question that intrigues me is, what if the wise woman’s prophecy was based on a real vision of the future? What would that mean for our lives today, a thousand years later?

In the latter part of the poem, after several stanzas describing a time of chaos and anarchy rife with loose morality and disintegrating family structures, the prophecy of destruction reaches its peak:

The sun turns black, | earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down | from heaven are whirled;
Fierce grows the steam | and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high | about heaven itself.

The imagery reminded me of accounts I had read of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, published in 1946, pieces together a narrative of the bomb’s blast and its aftermath through the stories of six survivors. The accounts of the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Father Wilhem Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki and Miss Toshiko Sasaki include the following descriptions of what they experienced that day:

a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky… It seemed a sheet of sun… everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen…

Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around… Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker… [a five-year-old asked] “Why is it night already?”…

[she] looked around and saw through the darkness that all the houses in her neighborhood had collapsed…

the terrible flash…reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth…

It began to rain… The drops grew abnormally large… huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall… The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot…

There had been no breeze earlier in the morning…but now brisk winds were blowing every which way… New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge anymore… the wind blew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under the bridge could no longer keep their footing… Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard… suddenly­­­—probably because of the tremendous convection set up by the blazing city—a whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel—pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting…The vortex moved out onto the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and eventually spent itself…

they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire…

The seeress’s apocalyptic vision in the Völuspá is followed by a new world prophecy:

Now do I see | the earth anew
Rise all green | from the waves again
The cataracts fall, | and the eagle flies,
And fish he catches | beneath the cliffs…
…Then fields unsowed | bear ripened fruit,
All ills grow better…

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, who was badly injured when the bomb struck, bounced around from various hospital settings in the countryside and then returned to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima the following month. It was the first time she was able to survey the wreckage from a conscious state. She was particularly struck by the degree to which wild nature had overrun the landscape:

“Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact, it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt.”

At some point along the way into adulthood, I realized we would collectively sink or swim together; i.e., humankind would either evolve and develop more sophisticated means of conflict resolution, or we were doomed. In historic terms, the Völuspá was probably concerned with the possibility of a sudden, deadly, fire-and-ice volcanic eruption raining down on the fields and villages of medieval Iceland. But the words of the long ago seeress’s prophecy carry a haunting resonance in this age when the threat of nuclear terrorism should not be taken lightly.

Albert Einstein once wrote, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” Old myths offer a fresh lens for viewing historic and current events, shining new light on patterns and themes that have universal applicability. Modes of thinking are slowly evolving towards an appreciation of the interconnectedness of all life. Hopefully, we will successfully steer away from unparalleled catastrophes and “see the earth anew, rise all green.”