Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods

First there is a killing season, and then there is a winter that will not end. Before the world falls, brothers turn on brothers and sisters’ sons stain their kinship with blood, and the old prophecy names the age in four hard strokes: an axe-time, a sword-time, a wind-time, a wolf-time, before the world goes down. Snorri sets a chronology under the verse. First come three years of great wars in which men slay each other for gain, and then the Fimbul-winter arrives: snow driving from every quarter, frost so severe and winds so keen that there is no joy in the sun, and it comes three times over, three winters running with no summer between them. The world does not end in a single stroke of fire. It is starved and frozen and turned against itself first, and only then does the sky begin to break.

The name has been softened over the centuries into a twilight of the gods, a dying fall, a dimming of the lights. That is a later colour, closer to Wagner than to the Norse. The old words ragna rök mean the doom or the fate of the powers, the reckoning owed to the gods, and it is worth keeping the harder sense. This is not a slow dusk. It is a foretold, appointed ending that the gods have known about all along and can do nothing to stop.

Stars hurled from their places

The unmaking begins in the heavens. Two wolves that have chased the sun and moon across the sky since the beginning finally run them down: one devours the sun, the other swallows the moon, and the stars are hurled from their places. Then the ground itself gives way. The earth and the mountains shake so violently that trees are torn up by the roots and the peaks topple, and in that heaving every bond and fetter in the world snaps at once.

This is the moment the whole doom has been waiting for, the line the old poem keeps tolling like a bell: the fetters will burst, and the wolf runs free. Fenrir is loose. His lower jaw is on the earth and his upper jaw reaches to heaven, and he would gape wider still if there were room; fire flashes from his eyes and nostrils as he comes.

Timber of uncut nails

The muster of the doomed is under way, and it comes by sea. The Midgard-serpent, the world-encircling snake, thrashes toward the shore in a giant’s fury, flooding the land and spewing venom that fouls the air and the water alike. A ship works loose from its moorings, and it is the most dreadful vessel in the North: Naglfar, built from the uncut nails of the dead.

This is why the old telling warns that a man who dies with unpared nails supplies its timber, a ship both gods and men wish to see finished as late as possible, because when it sails the end has come. It is steered by the frost-giant Hrym. A second ship of the dead comes on with the people of HelThe Norse realm of the dead, ruled in Snorri's telling by Loki's daughter of the same name. aboard, and here the two great sources part ways on a small point: the poem has it sail from the north with Loki at the helm, while the stanza Snorri quotes brings it from the east with the hosts of Muspell. North or east, the ship is the same, and so is its cargo.

Bifröst shatters under the riders

Then the sky itself is torn in two. Through the opening ride the sons of Muspell, the fire-giants, and at their head comes Surt with fire burning before him and behind, wielding a sword that shines brighter than the sun. As that host gallops out across Bifröst, the rainbow bridge that joined the worlds to heaven, the bridge shatters to pieces under them. High above, Heimdall the watchman stands and blows the Gjallarhorn with all his strength, and the blast wakes every god; on the roads of Hel the dead quake to hear it.

Odin rides to Mímir’s well to seek one last counsel, and the great ash Yggdrasil groans and shudders to its roots, so that nothing in heaven or on earth is free of fear in that hour. All the hosts are converging now on one place, a plain called Vigrid, and it is vast beyond reckoning: a hundred miles on every side, room enough for the whole of creation to come to grief.

Each god matched with his killer

What follows on that field is not a melee but a set of appointed single combats, each god matched with the thing fated to kill him. Odin rides out first in his gold helm with the spear Gungnir, straight for the wolf, and the wolf swallows him: the joy of Frigg falls, and the highest of the gods is gone in a single gulp of those heaven-and-earth jaws. His son Vidar turns at once and avenges him. He sets one foot on the wolf’s lower jaw, a foot shod in a shoe cobbled together through all the ages from the leather scraps that men cut from their own shoes and cast aside, then seizes the upper jaw in his hand and tears the beast’s mouth apart, and so Fenrir perishes. Close by, Thor meets the Midgard-serpent, the old enemy.

He kills it, and he wins great renown for the killing, but the serpent’s venom is already in him: he walks nine paces from the dead coils and falls, and no more. Frey faces Surt and trades heavy blows before he goes down, undone by an old bargain, because he no longer has the good sword he gave to Skírnir. The god Tyr and the hound Garm, loosed from his cave, close on each other and both die of it. Loki and Heimdall, watchman and traitor, meet at the last and kill each other too. And when the gods are down, Surt does the thing he came to do: he flings his fire out over the whole earth and burns up the world. The sun turns black, the earth sinks into the sea, the hot stars fall from heaven, and flame leaps high about the sky itself.

Golden game-pieces in the new grass

That should be the end, and in most doom-tales it would be. What sets the Norse vision apart is that the seeress keeps looking, past the fire, into what comes after. She sees the earth rise a second time out of the water, green again and fair, and the unsown fields bearing their harvests of themselves. The gods who were fated to survive gather where Asgard once stood: Vidar and Vali, whom neither the sea nor Surt’s fire could harm, and Thor’s sons Modi and Magni, who inherit their father’s hammer Mjölnir.

Up out of Hel come Baldr and his brother Höd, the murdered god and the blind hand that killed him, returned together to a world that has burned away the old grievances. The survivors find, lying in the tall new grass, the golden game-pieces that the gods had owned in the ancient days, as though the toys of a lost childhood had been left out overnight and found again in the morning. Snorri’s account is fuller and more orderly than the poem’s here, laying out who lives and who returns; the poem foregrounds Baldr’s coming-back, the tables in the grass, and a hall roofed with gold, fairer than the sun, standing on Gimlé, where the righteous shall dwell forever.

Fed on nothing but morning dew

And humankind is not finished either. Through all the burning, two people lie hidden in a place called Hoddmimir’s-holt, a man and a woman, Lif and Lifthrasir. They feed on nothing but the morning dew, and they come out into the washed and greening world to become the parents of a race so numerous that their children fill the whole earth again. Even the sun has left an heir: before the wolf caught her, she bore a daughter as fair as herself, and this daughter now rides her mother’s road across the reborn sky.

The prophecy that opened on brothers killing brothers closes on a new sun, a green earth, and a golden hall. But the seeress does not let us leave on pure light. Her last vision, as she sinks back down out of sight, is of a dark dragon rising: Níðhöggr, flying up from the black cliffs of Niðafjöll with the bodies of the dead borne on his wings. The world is remade, and something old and hungry still moves under it.

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. (Völuspá 59, trans. Bellows)