Ragnarök: The Twilight of the Gods

The Norse were unusual among ancient peoples in one specific way: their gods were mortal. Not conditionally mortal, not theoretically mortal — the gods of Asgard knew their fate precisely, in advance, and it was total. Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, had been prophesied in detail, and every attempt to prevent it — including binding the wolf Fenrir, chaining Loki, killing the jötunn — was only slowing what could not be stopped.

Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered. Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls. The Völuspá's catalogue of the end is specific and brutal. Brothers kill brothers. Children dishonor their parents. Heimdall raises the Gjallar-horn, and the sound carries through all the nine worlds. Yggdrasil, the world-tree whose roots touch everything, shakes. The wolf Fenrir breaks his chains. The Midgard Serpent rises from the ocean. Loki escapes his imprisonment and leads the army of the dead against Asgard.

The gods go out to meet them knowing what will happen. Odin rides into battle against Fenrir and is swallowed whole. His son Vidar will tear the wolf's jaws apart and avenge him, but Odin will still be dead. Thor kills the Midgard Serpent with his hammer and takes nine steps — the text is precise about nine steps — before the venom kills him. Frey, who gave away his magic sword for a wife, fights without it and falls. Tyr and Garm the hound kill each other. Loki and Heimdall kill each other.

Then the world submerges. The earth sinks beneath the sea. The stars fall. The darkness is complete.

And then — and this is what makes Ragnarök unlike most apocalyptic narratives — the earth rises again. The poem does not end with destruction. The Völuspá's seeress, who has seen all of this, also sees what comes after: The earth anew / rises all green from the waves again. The cataracts fall. Eagles fly. Fish leap beneath the cliffs. The surviving gods meet in the fields of Ithavoll and remember. The golden tables they once played on lie there in the grass.

Whether the Völuspá's renewal was an indigenous Norse tradition or an influence from Christian apocalypticism — which would have been widespread in Iceland when the poem was written down around 1270 CE — is a subject scholars still debate. But what the poem gives us, either way, is something precise: a theology of doing the right thing in the full knowledge that it will not save you. The gods fight knowing they will lose. The world ends knowing it will begin again. The courage the Norse valued was not optimism. It was something harder.