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The Volva 1913 |
Plaster, 1913. Bronze cast for Vejen Art Museum, 1969. Size 143 x 165 x 89 cm. Inv. no. 154. The plaster original was donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.
Exhibitions
The Free Sculptors'
Exhibition, 1913.
The Free Exhibition, 1916. Wax sketch, dated 1915.
A volva
When the sculpture was shown at the Free Exhibition in 1913, it was accompanied by three verses from The Elder Edda describing a volva, a woman who was able to predict the future. The name means someone who carries a (magic) wand. Ancient Norse sagas tell of wandering women who made a living predicting the future and were either revered or feared by the people. In mythology, the volva's prophecies, the Vĝluspa, were often Odin's way of gaining wisdom.
The design of the sculpture
Niels Hansen Jacobsen's volva is shown as a bent old woman leaning on a stick. The figure is reacting to something or someone and is involving her surroundings in a story, but we must guess what is happening. Perhaps she is fending off Odin. The sculpture has several points in common with Niels Hansen Jacobsen's earlier "King Lear": the wildly expressive idiom and the sculpture's vehement and unbalanced thrust forward.
Einar Jónsson's "The Outlaw"
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Einar Jónsson was an Icelander who trained as a sculptor in Copenhagen, where he was apprenticed to Stephan Sinding from 1893 to 1896 and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1896 to 1899. He made his debut at Charlottenborg in 1901 with the sculpture "The Outlaw." He later exhibited his work at the Free Sculptors' Exhibition, the organization that Niels Hansen Jacobsen co-founded in 1905. Niels Hansen Jacobsen's "Volva" has a form and content similar to those of "The Outlaw," another figure from the Icelandic sagas. Accompanied by his wolf and holding his little child, the outlaw struggles through the night along the road to the cemetery, where he has promised to bury his wife's body in consecrated soil. |
