The VOLUSPA: PREDICTION Of SUNBURST

An analysis of material from the Voluspa Saga reveals that its description of "world-ruin" is consistent with the predictable consequences of a plausible solar event which ejected an almost imperceptible percentage of the sun’s surface into earth’s orbit. The saga’s description of solar phenomena are suggestive of physical processes which we observe in other stars. The solar neutrino deficit problem, considered in conjunction with geological evidence of mega-glaciation, suggests occasional solar instability, and that we are in such an era. This body of prophecy has already been partially fulfilled by a recent phenomenon: rising sea-level due to the greenhouse effect. Also, the bible contains prophecies which describe exactly the same phenomena, in terms which are objectively comparable.

I would like to begin by noting that I have used a "poetic" translation of the Voluspa (Auden’s) and feel sure that a scholar, working with primary sources, could wring more significance from this work than I have. The remarkable thing is that in its corrupted and translated form it still makes a scientifically understandable statement! Here are the lines that I commend to your attention:

...till the world ruins:...

The waters are troubled, the waves surge up:

Announcing now the knell of Fate

...

Surt with the bane of branches comes

...

Men tread Hel’s road, the heavens split open

...

Now death is the portion of doomed men

Red with blood the buildings of gods,

The sun turns black in the summer after,

Winds whine ...

Earth sinks in the sea, the sun turns black

Cast down from heaven are the hot stars,

Fumes reek, into flames burst,

The sky itself is scorched with fire

The first line fragment introduces the subject of world-ruin, and the next two tell us the sign by which we may know that fate is imminent: "the waters are troubled, the waves surge up". "Troubled" is one of those terms about which expert research might enhance our understanding: it may have reference to the general degradation and depletion of the seas; or it may simply reinforce "surge up". For the sake of this discussion it is sufficient to point out that a rising sea-level is the knell of fate. When that becomes a salient feature of the era, the event I have called SunBurst is upon us.

Surt with the bane of branches comes

...

Men tread Hel’s road, the heavens split open

The fact that these lines are separated from the introduction and the more coherent statement that follows leads one to wonder if they refer to events that occur after the seas are rising, but before those spoken of in the next stanzas. They seem to be a part of the world-ruin prophecy, but are so fragmentary and vague that I will not attempt to adduce them as evidence of any particular physical phenomenon. One notes that the first line suggests that the sun scorches the forests, which is entirely consistent with the greenhouse effect. The second line might be construed to relate to the loss of the ozone layer, or some yet unforseen calamity, however I believe that, taken together, the lines merely suggest a recapitulation.

 

Now death is the portion of doomed men

Red with blood the buildings of gods

"The buildings of the gods" is a recognized kenning for clouds. With these lines we come to the beginning of terrestrial effects; the poem says that when the clouds turn red we have a visible warning of the solar event! Is it merely coincidence that Rev. 6:12 says, "the full moon became like blood". This seems to be another manifestation of the red shift in sunlight, and the more persuasive because the two accounts are enough different that one is clearly not derived from the other. Yet from a modern, scientific understanding we can sense a relationship between the two, which wouldn’t have been so obvious to prescientifics, who may not have known that the moon shines by reflected sunlight. Revelations also says, "the sun became black as sackcloth", and the conjunction of these two "same but different" predictions, of a most implausible event, are mutually reinforcing.

The sun turns black in the summer after

Says the Voluspa. The summer after when? Presumably the summer after the redshift in sun and moonlight, is noted, but arguably anytime after the preceding summer. Probably about six months by the "feel" of that syntax, and not longer than nine. It is worth noting that sunspots, which are ejections of solar material, look black against the background of the higher temperature surface gases. A radiating shock wave ejection event (as postulated here) would darken the sun; also the ejected material would obscure its light, which is the normal cause of red sunsets. It is intriguing that the time scale, of the implied delay between the observation of the clouds turning red and the sun turning black, is similar to the time required for ejected material to cross the space to earth’s orbit at chemical explosive wavefront speeds. The sun turning black is might be associated with the ejection event, while the red shift might be either the outer manifestation of an internal event, or obscuration by an ejection, or both. In any case, the sun turning black is the sign that effects are about to escalate from vivid cloudscapes to hell on earth.

Scientists of that era might observe the phenomenon and associated neutrino emissions, and by those and other observations know what we can only speculate about. While it is not possible to pin this down from a fragmentary, poetic source, we can see that a general scenario is presented: sometime after the rising seas become emblematic of the era, a solar event occurs which causes a noticeable effect on the insolation that is experienced on earth. There seems to be a delay between the first, visible effects, and a subsequent event or the earthly experience of same. Such a delay would be consistent with the differential in speed between light, which takes a few minutes to reach us, and an ejected mass which might take months, but might only be a delay between a primary and subsidiary, more serious, event.

The point is that all these interpretations imply solar "events", which are associated with discontinuities in energy output; these are plausibly associated with radiating shock waves, and such shock waves carry off portions of a star’s surface. The saga makes it plain what happens to the earth: I have called the terrestrial effects FireFall.

Winds whine...

I will only consider the kinetic effects of the putative ejection mass and its interaction with our atmosphere; of course there will be other effects, but I can’t think of any likely to ameliorate the situation. Every particle captured by earth’s gravity will lose energy through interaction with the atmosphere, and almost all that energy will degrade into heat. Clearly one of the first effects will be to create very high energy atmospheric circulation patterns: winds whine. In my view, this mention of the wind (first) tends to authenticate the vision-report. I don’t think a pre-scientific scald, making up an apocalypse, would have mentioned the winds first; and they would be a dramatic, early effect of atmospheric heating.

Earth sinks in the sea, the sun turns black

Cast down from heaven are the hot stars

Again this seems to be a recapitulation of the whole prophecy. Here, and above, we may have repetition that occurred through conservation of portions of conflated sources. Of course, saying that earth sinks is equivalent to the sea level rising. But note the assertion that fiery chunks of material are falling to earth; while aggregation of solar material can’t be ruled out a priori, one would expect a plasma. Revelations agrees, saying, "and the stars of the sky fell to the earth"; these might well be the space stations, satellites, and junk in orbit.

Fumes reek, into flames burst

The sky itself is scorched with fire

We might compare these lines with several in scripture which call for a world-ruin by fire from heaven and the melting of earthly elements. These two lines from the Voluspa are so plain and sensible that they call attention to the matter-of-fact quality of the observation. The atmosphere gets so hot that all volatiles are cooked out of solids and liquids, and these flammable vapors ignite. The last line may simply relate to how hot the atmosphere gets, or it may imply that oxygen is depleted by the ubiquitous combustion. The event is so dramatic (the air and sky itself on fire) there is no need for poetic embellishment; again there is an authenticity about this report. It is plausible that such a world-wide fire-storm would cause Fimbul Winter (the mythic four-year-long winter) in the same way that firestorms in the wake of nuclear war would cause a "nuclear winter".

 

There is historical evidence of previous solar instability in the geological record, and there is replicated evidence of disparity between solar energy output and neutrino emission; I suggest that these observations imply the sun may now be in such an era.

To begin with the geological evidence: it reveals that at least twice in its history, the earth has been so heavily glaciated that the ice fields almost met at the equator. Ice and snow fields have a much higher albedo than water or earth; that means they reflect almost all the sunlight that falls on them and, aside from a tiny fraction captured by the atmosphere, all that energy is lost to space. Leaving aside the suggestion that the periods of glaciation themselves imply reduced solar output (hence instability), consider only the matter of albedo. Once the situation had gone so far that most of the earth was glaciated, it follows that insolation must have increased to higher levels than allowed the formation of that ice. If solar energy output had remained constant our planet would never have thawed.

And astrophysicists know enough about what happens inside of stars to have noticed a very strange thing about the sun. A star of its mass and luminosity should be creating more neutrinos than are observed: a lot more. There have been several Big Science observations that have served to verify the discrepancy, but no believable explanations have been forthcoming.

One thing to consider is that the average photon spends well over a million years getting out of the sun after it is created, whereas the associated neutrinos escape immediately, some of them passing through the earth minutes later, and all of them long gone before their associated photons could be observed. So, if sometime in the last couple of million years, the sun’s power output declined we would still be seeing fossil photons, but not their associated neutrinos. Because of this effect the solar radiation received by earth would decline imperceptibly at first, but after awhile the earth would begin to cool off noticeably. About a million years ago a cycle of ice ages began; it is plausible that this is an effect of declining solar output. What happened, the last time, when the sun powered up again?! It seems plausible that such an event would cause a radiating shock wave. Also we know that the sun shrunk, under the influence of gravity as radiation pressure declined along with power output; perhaps that is not always a smooth and continuous process. A sudden, incremental inward collapse would create a shock wave that rebounds off itself in the center of the sun, and explodes outward. Either event (or perhaps some other I have not imagined) would blow a fraction of the sun’s surface out to envelope the earth’s orbit in an event far less violent than, but mechanically analogous to a nova.

On the surface of the earth it would seem that fire was falling from the sky.

 

 

HERE COMES THE SUN

 

This near eternal sun

    has, now and then, diminution

Then the earth grows glaciers

    snowfields in Sahara

And had it not grown bright again

    no man had seen its light

Neutrinos tell us now it’s dim

    and we’ll see by fossil photons

The veil of FireFall

    swirl a pall about the earth

 

 

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