Ragnarök

Also Known As: Old Norse ragna rǫk, “the fate” or “doom of the powers”; Snorri Sturluson’s variant ragnarøkkr, “twilight of the powers”, is the form that reached English as “Twilight of the Gods”, helped along by Wagner’s Götterdämmerung of 1876
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Events and Tales
Mythical Attributes: The prophesied unmaking of the world, in which the bound monsters break loose, gods and their enemies kill each other on a plain a hundred leagues wide, fire takes everything, and a green earth rises from the sea.
Role in Mythos: It is the ending the whole Norse mythic cycle is pointed at, fixed in advance and known to the gods, who march into it anyway.
Relation to Humans: Humanity is destroyed twice over, first by the moral collapse of the wolf-age and then by Surtr’s fire, with the warriors taken to Valhalla dying a second death alongside the gods. Two people survive by hiding, Líf and Lífþrasir, who eat the morning dew in Hoddmímis holt and repopulate the world afterwards.

Three winters arrive one behind another with no summer between them, and the snow drives in from every quarter at once. By then it is far too late to matter. Before the cold there were three more winters of war across the whole world, brothers killing brothers for what the dead man owned, no one sparing a father or a son. The poets called the stretch an axe-age and a sword-age, a wind-age and a wolf-age, and they did not mean it as ornament. Shields split. Kinship failed. Nobody showed anybody mercy.

Out at the edge of Jǫtunheimr, while all this is going on, a herdsman named Eggþér sits on a grave-mound in good spirits and plays a harp. Above him in the tree a cockerel the colour of red gold crows to the giants. A second bird, Gullinkambi, crows over the Æsir and wakes the dead warriors in Óðinn’s hall. A third, sooty red, crows underground in the halls of Hel. Three birds, three worlds, one alarm, and the last easy morning anybody gets.

Then the fetters go. Garmr has been howling in front of the cave-mouth at Gnipahellir for as long as the prophecy has been running, and the seeress returns to him like a refrain: the bond will break and the ravener will run free. Skǫll catches the sun and swallows it. Another wolf takes the moon. The stars go out of the sky one by one, the ground shakes hard enough to tear trees out by the root, and every chain and knot in creation comes undone at once. Fenrir gets loose. The sea climbs over the land because Jörmungandr is thrashing in the shallows and coming ashore.

There is a ship for this. Naglfar is built from the untrimmed fingernails and toenails of the dead, which is why Snorri Sturluson pauses in the middle of the apocalypse to advise his readers to cut their nails before they die, since every uncut nail is one more plank. The sources cannot agree on who has the tiller. Völuspá gives it to Loki. Snorri hands it to the frost-giant Hrymr and puts Loki at the head of Hel’s champions instead. Either way the ship floats on the flood, and behind it the sky itself splits open and Múspell’s sons come riding through the tear with Surtr in front, fire running ahead of him and after him, his sword brighter than daylight. Bifröst breaks under the weight of them.

They gather on Vígríðr, a field a hundred leagues on every side. Heimdallr puts the Gjallarhorn to his mouth and blows loud enough to wake every god there is. Óðinn rides to Mímir’s well and asks the head in the water for counsel, which is the last piece of wisdom he will get and no use to him. The ash of Yggdrasil groans and shudders where it stands. Dwarves moan at their stone doors. Nothing in heaven or on earth is without fear.

Then it is simply a matter of who kills whom. Óðinn goes against the wolf, and Thor cannot come to his father’s help because his hands are full of the serpent. Freyr meets Surtr and it is a hard fight and Freyr loses it. Týr and the hound Garmr kill each other. Loki and Heimdallr kill each other. Fenrir swallows Óðinn whole, and Óðinn’s son Víðarr steps forward and sets one foot on the wolf’s lower jaw, wearing the shoe that has been accumulating since the beginning of time out of every scrap of leather men have trimmed from a toe or a heel, takes the upper jaw in his hand, and tears the beast’s face apart. Nobody wins.

Thor gets the best moment and the worst. He kills the Midgard Serpent, the thing he has been circling his whole existence, and then turns and walks away from the body. He manages nine steps. The venom the serpent has been breathing over the air and the water is already in him, and on the ninth he goes down on the ground and does not get up. The poem calls him the defender of Miðgarðr in the same breath that it kills him.

Surtr throws fire over everything then, and the whole of it burns. The sun turns black, the earth goes down into the sea, ember-smoke boils up against the sky, and the heat plays against heaven itself.

That should be the end, and in one telling it more or less is. Vafþrúðnismál runs the same catastrophe without much of a renewed world at the far side of it. But Völuspá keeps going. The seeress watches the earth come up out of the water a second time, green, with waterfalls running down it and an eagle overhead hunting fish off the crags. The surviving Æsir find each other on the field at Iðavöllr and sit talking about the great earth-rope and the old runes, and someone turns up the gold gaming pieces they used to own, lying in the grass. Fields grow without being sown. All evils heal. Víðarr and Váli are there because neither the sea nor Surtr’s fire could touch them, and Thor’s sons Móði and Magni come carrying Mjöllnir between them, and Baldr walks up out of Hel with his blind brother Hǫðr beside him, the two whose quarrel started the countdown in the first place. Líf and Lífþrasir come out of the wood where they hid, having lived on dew, and the human race starts again from two.

The last thing the seeress sees is Níðhöggr flying over with corpses caught in his feathers, and then she sinks. Scholars have argued for a century about that image. Some read it as evil surviving the cleansing intact. Others read it as the sign that Ragnarök is not a distant appointment at all but something already happening while the poem is being spoken. Both readings work, which is probably the point.

What drives the whole story is fate, ørlög, the thing shaped into the world at the moment of its making. The gods are not surprised. Óðinn has been told, Baldr’s death has already happened, and the Viking Age understood itself to be living inside the countdown rather than before it. Their strength is real and none of it is any protection: Freyr gave away his sword long before he needed it against Surtr, Óðinn’s accumulated wisdom buys him nothing, and Thor’s arm kills the serpent and cannot outlast its poison. The limit is not that the gods are weak. It is that everything made will fail, because it was made, and the only thing the Æsir get to choose is the manner of walking out onto the field.

None of this was written down while anyone still believed it. The Codex Regius was copied around 1270 and Snorri assembled his Edda about fifty years earlier, both by Christians in an Iceland that had been converted for two centuries, and Snorri in particular tidied and systematised as he went. The reborn green world, the hall at Gimlé more beautiful than sunlight, the venom-river hall on Nástrǫnd where oath-breakers and murderers wade: the resemblance to a Christian last judgement is close enough that some scholars treat the whole resurrection as an import. The counter-argument is simply that there is no pre-Christian written record to compare it against. What there is, though, is stone. A red sandstone cross four and a half metres tall has stood in the churchyard at Gosforth in Cumbria since the early tenth century, and carved on it is a bearded man forcing apart the jaws of a beast with his hands.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens in Ragnarök?

Ragnarök begins with three years of war followed by Fimbulvetr, three winters with no summer between them, after which the bound monsters break free, wolves swallow the sun and moon, and the gods meet their enemies on the plain of Vígríðr. Almost everyone dies in paired duels, Surtr sets the world on fire, and the earth sinks into the sea. In the Völuspá account the earth then rises again, green and fertile, and a handful of gods and two humans begin the world over.

Who dies at Ragnarök and who kills them?

Óðinn is swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, who is then killed by Óðinn’s son Víðarr; Thor kills the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr and dies of its venom nine steps later; Freyr is killed by the fire-giant Surtr; and Týr and the hound Garmr kill each other, as do Loki and Heimdallr. Víðarr, Váli, Móði, Magni, Baldr and Hǫðr survive or return afterwards.

Does the world end permanently at Ragnarök?

No, not in the fullest surviving account. Völuspá describes the earth rising green from the sea a second time, fields growing unsown, the surviving gods reassembling on Iðavöllr, and two humans named Líf and Lífþrasir emerging from Hoddmímis holt to repopulate the world. Vafþrúðnismál gives much less of this renewal, and some scholars argue the rebirth reflects Christian influence on the thirteenth-century texts.

Does Ragnarök mean “Twilight of the Gods”?

Not originally. The Old Norse ragna rǫk means something closer to “the fate” or “doom of the powers”, and the “twilight” sense comes from the variant ragnarøkkr used by Snorri Sturluson, which Richard Wagner then cemented in English by titling the last opera of his Ring cycle Götterdämmerung in 1876.

Where does the story of Ragnarök come from?

It survives in Old Norse texts written in Christian Iceland: the Eddic poems Völuspá and Vafþrúðnismál in the Codex Regius manuscript of about 1270, and the Gylfaginning section of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda from around 1220. Carved stone monuments are older, including the early tenth-century Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, Thorwald’s Cross on the Isle of Man and the Ledberg stone in Sweden.