Voluspå. En Liten Bok Med Store Ord.
(Voluspå. A Small Book With Big Words.) Winter/Spring 2026

Merits & Awards
Gullkalven 2026: Design – Gold
Gullkalven 2026: Håndverk (Craft) – Gold
Gullkalven 2026: Print – Silver

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“A Small Book with Big Words" is a recontextualization of Voluspå, one of the oldest and most central poems in Nordic literary history, presented in an unexpected format. The title carries a double meaning. The words are physically large on the pages, but they are also large in a historical and cultural sense. Voluspå is a poem that has carried the Norse worldview for many hundreds of years.

The concept is rooted in the idea of transformation. Voluspå has never had one fixed form. The poem first lived through oral tradition, where it changed with each person who retold it. It was then copied by hand by learned scribes who altered the content according to their own agendas. Only when it was written down in the Codex Regius around 1270 did it take on a canonized form. By placing the poem in a new and unexpected format, I myself enter the lineage of those who have transformed Voluspå throughout the ages.

The book is not necessarily intended as a functional reading object in the traditional sense. It is just as much an object that raises questions about the medium itself, about what a book can be, and about what a thousand-year-old poem can become when it is released from its canonized form and placed into something new and unexpected.

The book is 1580 pages, A7 format, and weighs approximately half a kilogram.

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