Ragnarok and Fimbulwinter

Ragnarok, the fate or doom of the gods, and by a later and probably mistaken reading their twilight, is the destruction of the world in Norse mythology, described chiefly in the Eddic poem Voluspa and systematised in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. It is the most fully narrated eschatology surviving from any pre-Christian European tradition, and it is unusual among the world's eschatologies in that the gods lose.

The sequence is given in outline as follows. Moral collapse among human beings: an age of axes and swords, brothers killing brothers, no one sparing anyone. Then Fimbulvetr, the great winter, three winters following one another with no summer between them. The wolves swallow the sun and the moon. Yggdrasil shudders. The bonds break: Loki is loosed and the wolf Fenrir with him; the world serpent Jormungandr rises from the sea; the ship Naglfar, built of dead men's nails, is freed; Surt comes from the south with fire; and the giants and the dead advance over the rainbow bridge Bifrost, which breaks beneath them. Heimdall sounds the Gjallarhorn. Odin falls to Fenrir and is avenged by his son Vidar. Thor kills Jormungandr and dies of its venom after nine steps. Freyr falls to Surt, having given away his sword. Tyr and the hound Garm kill one another. Surt sets the world alight and the earth sinks into the sea.

And then it rises again, green, and grain grows where none was sown. Some of the gods survive or return, Vidar and Vali, Thor's sons Modi and Magni carrying their father's hammer, and Baldr and Hod come back from the dead. Two human beings, Lif and Lifthrasir, have sheltered in a wood and repopulate the world.

The renewal is the disputed element. Voluspa survives in two manuscripts with significant differences, and scholars have long debated how much of the renewed world reflects Christian influence on a poem composed or recorded around the period of Iceland's conversion, the returning Baldr, and the arrival of a "powerful one from above" in one manuscript, being the passages most often cited. Some hold the renewal to be a genuine pre-Christian element with parallels elsewhere in Indo-European material; others regard it as Christian colouring on an older and bleaker story. There is no consensus, and the problem is a standing example of the difficulty of reading pre-Christian material that survives only through post-conversion hands.

The "twilight of the gods" that gives Ragnarok its familiar English colouring is not, on the more careful philology, quite what the Old Norse says. Ragnarok most literally means the fate, or doom, of the powers; a variant spelling, ragnarokkr, can mean twilight, and the two were run together early enough that the poetic, dimmer reading became standard well before most English speakers ever met the Old Norse text directly.

The reading was fixed for the modern imagination by Richard Wagner, whose opera Gotterdammerung, "twilight of the gods," concludes the Ring cycle first performed complete in 1876. Wagner worked from the same Eddic material and from the Volsunga saga, and his title, more than any philological argument, is why English still reaches for "twilight" rather than "doom" when the word comes up outside specialist writing.

Contemporary Heathenry, the modern revival of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic practice, generally does not treat Ragnarok as a prediction to be awaited literally. Practitioners more often read it as a mythic pattern of cyclical destruction and renewal to be reflected on ritually, in something closer to the way many modern readers treat apocalyptic literature generally, than as an event with a timetable. That is a live and stated difference from how some medieval audiences may have received the poem, and from how a smaller number of literalist strands within modern Heathenry read it now, which is itself an internal disagreement rather than a settled position.