Ragnarök

Summary

Ragnarök is, in Norse myth, the last battle in which the gods and their enemies die and the world burns, after which a new earth rises. Its oldest continuous telling is in the poem Völuspá, "The Seeress's Prophecy", where a seeress tells Odin what is to come, from stanza 40 to the end of the poem. Snorri then retells it in prose in Gylfaginning, chapters 51 to 53, quoting that poem and Vafþrúðnismál.

The story begins long before the battle. Baldr is killed by the mistletoe shot by his blind brother Höðr, and a son is born to Odin, Váli, who avenges him when one night old. Loki is caught and bound over three stones with the entrails of his son; Skaði hangs a serpent above his face so that its venom drips on him, and his wife Sigyn stands beside him holding a bowl under the drops. When the bowl is full and she goes to empty it, the venom falls on his face and he jerks, and that is what earthquakes are. He lies bound until Ragnarök.

Then come the signs. Three winters of war, in which brother kills brother out of greed and no one spares father or son; the poem says: an axe-age, a sword-age, shields are cloven, a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world falls. After them comes the great winter: three winters in a row with no summer between, snow driving from every side and no benefit from the sun. One wolf swallows the sun and another takes the moon; they are the brood of an old woman who lives in Ironwood in the east, and the stars vanish from the sky. Three cocks crow: one among the giants, a gold-combed one that wakes the warriors in Valhalla, and a soot-red one in the hall of Hel. The hound Garmr howls before the cave Gnipahellir.

When the time comes, earth and mountains shake until the trees are torn up, and every fetter breaks. The wolf Fenrir gets loose with his mouth gaping, the lower jaw on the earth and the upper against the sky, fire burning from his eyes and nostrils. The world serpent Jörmungandr writhes in giant-fury, so the sea surges over the land, and it blows venom through air and sea. In this flood the ship Naglfar floats free, made of dead men's nails; in Snorri the giant Hrymr steers it, while the poem says Loki steers a ship carrying Muspell's people over the sea. Then the sky splits and the sons of Muspell ride out with Surtr at their head, fire before and behind him and his sword shining brighter than the sun; when they ride over the bridge Bifröst, it breaks beneath them. All gather on the plain Vígríðr, a hundred leagues each way.

Then Heimdall stands and blows his horn Gjallarhorn and wakes the gods, who meet in council. Odin rides to Mímir's well; in the poem he speaks with Mímir's head, and the tree Yggdrasil shudders and the old tree groans. The Æsir arm themselves, with all the people of Valhalla, and go out onto the plain:

Then Surtr flings fire over the earth and burns the whole world. The sun turns black, the earth sinks into the sea, the stars fall from the sky, and steam and flame rise until they reach heaven itself.

After that the seeress sees the earth rise a second time from the sea, green, with waterfalls tumbling and an eagle overhead hunting fish from the mountain. The surviving Æsir meet on the plain Iðavöllr, recall the mighty earth-serpent, the judgments of the past and the ancient runes Odin won, and find in the grass the golden gaming pieces they had owned at the beginning of time. Unsown fields bear grain, Baldr comes back, and he and Höðr dwell together. Snorri adds: Víðarr and Váli live, untouched by the sea or Surtr's fire, and dwell on Iðavöllr where Asgard had been; Thor's sons Móði and Magni come to them with the hammer Mjölnir; Baldr and Höðr come from Hel; and they sit and talk of the serpent and of Fenrir. From Hoddmímir's wood come a man and a woman, Líf and Lífþrasir, who hid there from Surtr's fire with the morning dew for food, and from them the world fills with people. Before the wolf swallows her, the sun bears a daughter who rides her mother's paths. In the poem's last stanza the dragon Níðhöggr flies over the plain carrying corpses in his feathers.

The idea the story turns on is that the end is known before it comes, and comes all the same. Odin asks the giant Vafþrúðnir about his own end and is told that the wolf will swallow him and Víðarr will avenge him; Heimdall warns with the horn; the seeress counts the events one by one. Everything the gods once bound turns against them: the wolf they fettered by a trick, the serpent they threw into the sea, Loki tied with his son's entrails. In most of the fights both opponents die. What remains is what stood outside the battle: sons who did not fight, a couple hidden in a wood, the memory of the runes and the golden pieces in the grass, so the new world begins from what was kept of the old.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ragnarök is two words: ragna, the genitive of regin, the powers who govern the world, and rök, the course of things and where it ends, so the Norse phrase means "the fate of the powers". The project's structural essay reads the first word as Arabic rukn, saying that the pillars (arkān) are torn down at that end, and the Semitic essay reads the second as raqq, which it calls the stronger alternative: raqq is the thin skin on which one writes, and Lane quotes al-Farrāʾ that it means the records brought out to the children of Adam on the Day of Resurrection. In Lane the rukn is the strongest side of a thing, the arkān of anything are the sides it rests on, and a man's rukn is his people, by whom he is strengthened. On this reading Ragnarök is raqq al-arkān, "the record of the pillars": the page on which the fate of the powers that hold up the world is written, which is what the story makes it: a seeress reading out the death of each of them at its appointed time, and the powers falling one after another. The Semitic essay first reads the name as rajaʿa + nūr, "the return of light", which reads the end of the story, when the earth rises green after the dark.

Linguistic Root

Ragnarök and raqq al-arkān

Cleasby and Vigfusson say that regin names the gods as makers and rulers of the universe, that the word takes in the world itself in the phrase "until the powers are rent asunder", and that ragna rök answers to the Saxon muspilli, whose origin is discussed under Muspelheim. They compare Gothic ragin, counsel, decree. Rök means reason, origin and the course of things; "the course of ages" can refer to the beginning of creation and to its end, and in ragna rök it falls especially on the last act, the day of judgment. Its vowel ǫ is an altered a, and the dictionary compares Old High German rahha, sentence, judgment. Snorri's form ragna rökkr, "twilight of the powers", is in their view a corruption of the old phrase, arising from a line in Lokasenna.

Lane gives rukn as "the strongest side of a thing", "the arkān of anything are its sides upon which it rests and by which it is supported", and "a man's rukn is his people or kin, by whom he is aided and strengthened"; "he is a rukn of the arkān of his people" is said of a noble. He gives raqq as "thin skin upon which one writes", as in the Qur'anic "on outspread parchment", and quotes al-Farrāʾ that it means the records brought out to the children of Adam on the Day of Resurrection.

The sounds follow the Juthoor sound laws. R is r; Arabic k belongs with q and j to one merger group that becomes k or g in the Germanic languages, so the k of rukn answers the g of ragna; n is n. In rök the doubled q of raqq answers k, and the original a witnessed by rahha answers the a of raqq. The senses meet: the arkān are those on whom things rest, regin the powers who run the world; the raqq is the record of the last reckoning, rök the course of things up to the day of judgment. What remains is that Gothic ragin is counsel and decree while Arabic rukn is a side one leans on, so joining them passes through the sense of those on whom affairs depend, and that step waits for an older witness.

Other readings in the two essays

The Semitic essay puts rajaʿa + nūr, the return of light after darkness, first, and also gives rajaʿa + nār and rūḥ. That reading divides the name as Ragnar + ök, whereas the Norse word divides as ragna + rök, and it needs an ʿ that drops and a k with no counterpart in nūr. It reads the end of the story, the green earth rising, more than the word, which means fate. The essay also gives raqana, to write well, for the first part, which meets raqq in the sense of what is written, and rawwaqa, to clarify, for the second; the Norse word has no sense of clarifying.

Key Mythic Narratives

After the fire

Snorri divides the dwellings after Ragnarök: best is Gimlé in heaven, with the drinking hall Brimir and Sindri, a hall of red gold, for the righteous. On the Shore of Corpses stands a hall woven of serpents' backs with its doors facing north, where venom runs in rivers that oath-breakers and murderers wade, and in the spring Hvergelmir Níðhöggr torments the bodies of the dead. The poem has two stanzas on the gold-roofed hall at Gimlé and on "the mighty one who comes from above to judgment, who rules over all", and scholars disagree over Christian influence in both.

The last question

Odin's contest with Vafþrúðnir ends with a question only the asker can answer: what did Odin say into his son's ear before he was laid on the pyre? The giant recognises his guest and says that with a doomed mouth he has spoken his ancient lore and of Ragnarök.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Norse Myths" reads Ragnarök as a description of the long northern winter and of climatic disaster: the great winter is a cold spell or volcanic winter that kills the crops, the wolf swallowing the sun is the polar night when the sun is gone for months, the serpent rising from the sea is storms, waves and rising water, Surtr's fire is one of Iceland's volcanoes, Baldr's return is the sun coming back in spring, and Líf and Lífþrasir hiding in the wood are survivors who resettle the land as the ice retreats. It cites the Laki eruption of 1783 as an example of a harsh winter followed by famine. The texts place the end once, at the end of time, not as a yearly cycle, and they put kin-killing and broken oaths before the cold, so the climatic reading explains the images but not the moral collapse with which the story begins.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The detailed comparison between Ragnarök and the stories of Ziusudra and Utnapishtim is in Ragnarok and Flood Narratives: the northern gods die at the end while the Mesopotamian gods outlast the flood, and the survivors here hide in a wood while there they build a ship. The page on the flood myth gathers the stories of water destroying the world. The great winter is close to the deadly winter in the Persian story of Jamshid, where an enclosure is built to keep people, animals and seeds. The Semitic essay compares Ragnarök with the Day of Resurrection: a horn blown by Heimdall and a trumpet that is blown, a sun that blackens and a sun that is folded up, a sea that surges and seas set ablaze. In the Qur'an one judge remains to reckon with creation, while in the North the gods themselves die in the battle.