What Was Ragnarok?

Short answer

Ragnarok is the Norse myth of the end of the world. It is described most fully in the Völuspá, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda, written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century. According to the Völuspá, the world will be preceded by signs including the death of the god Baldr and a great winter of three years, will be brought about by the breaking of the chains of Loki and the loosing of the wolf Fenrir, and will end with a great battle in which most of the gods and many of the giants will die. The world will be destroyed by fire and flood, and a new world will rise from the ashes. The myth of Ragnarok is one of the most distinctive features of Norse religion and one of the great apocalyptic visions in the religious history of Europe.

The signs of Ragnarok

The Völuspá describes a series of signs that will precede the end of the world. The first is the death of Baldr, the most beautiful of the gods, killed by a mistletoe dart thrown by his blind brother Höðr at the instigation of Loki. The death of Baldr is a sign of the breakdown of the divine order, and the gods, having tried unsuccessfully to retrieve him from the realm of Hel, will be unable to prevent what is to come.

The second sign is the Fimbulvetr, a great winter of three successive seasons, in which brother will kill brother and the world will be filled with violence and snow. The third sign is the loosening of Loki, the trickster, who has been bound by the gods for his treachery. The fourth is the loosing of the wolf Fenrir, who has been bound by a magic cord made of six impossible things. The fifth is the rising of the world-serpent Jörmungandr from the sea, in which the great Midgard Serpent was cast by Odin. The sixth is the breaking free of the ship Naglfar, the ship of the dead, made from the nails of corpses. When all these signs have come, the great battle will begin.

The great battle

The battle of Ragnarok is described in the Völuspá and in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. The forces of chaos, led by Loki and the fire-giant Surt, will advance across the bridge Bifröst, which will break under them. They will be met by the gods on the field of Vígríðr, a vast plain to the north of the world. The battle will be a long and terrible one, and the outcome will be the death of many of the gods and many of the giants.

The deaths of the gods are described in the Völuspá. Odin will be swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, and Odin’s son Vidar will avenge him by stepping into the wolf’s mouth and tearing it apart. Thor will fight the world-serpent Jörmungandr and will kill it, but he will fall back nine paces and die from the venom of the serpent’s breath. Freyr will fall before Surt, the fire-giant, having given his sword to his servant Skirnir in exchange for the love of the giantess Gerðr. Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, will blow the Gjallarhorn to announce the beginning of the battle, and will then fight Loki and kill him; the two will kill each other. Tyr will fight the dog Garmr, the guardian of the gates of Hel, and the two will kill each other. Only a few of the gods will survive: Vidar, Váli, and the sons of Thor, Modi and Magni.

The destruction of the world

The world will be destroyed after the battle. Surt, the fire-giant, will throw fire over the whole earth and the world-tree Yggdrasil will burn. The sea will rise and the land will sink, and the world will be consumed by fire and water. The wolf Fenrir, having swallowed Odin, will be killed by Vidar. The world-serpent, having killed Thor, will be killed by Thor. The fire of Surt will consume the whole world.

Yet the world will not end. According to the Völuspá, a new earth will rise from the sea, green and fair, with a new sun and a new moon. The surviving gods — Vidar, Váli, and the sons of Thor — will meet in a new Asgard, and the surviving humans — Líf and Lífþrasir, who will have taken refuge in the wood of Hoddmímir — will repopulate the earth. The golden tablets that the gods had hidden in the deep will be found and will be used to re-establish the rule of the gods. The world is reborn.

The religious context

Ragnarok is one of the great apocalyptic visions of the world’s religions. Like the Christian book of Revelation, the Zoroastrian story of the final battle, and the Hindu myth of the Pralaya, it is an attempt to make sense of the problem of evil and the destiny of the world. The Norse myth, however, is distinctive in several ways. It does not have a single, all-powerful god who will defeat the forces of evil once and for all; the gods themselves are doomed to fall. The new world is not the result of a victory of the good, but of the survival of a few of the gods and a few of the humans. The Norse myth is, in other words, more tragic than the Christian; the gods are not transcendent, and their world will not last.

The myth of Ragnarok was clearly meaningful to the Norse of the Viking Age. It gave a powerful expression to the sense of an ending that was felt in the Viking-Age Norse world, and it helped to make the conversion to Christianity a relatively easy transition. The Christian eschatology, with its promise of a final judgment and a new heaven and a new earth, was in many ways a continuation of the Norse myth. Yet the Norse myth survived, in the saga literature and the oral tradition, well into the high Middle Ages, and it is one of the most distinctive features of Norse religion.

The sources

The principal sources for Ragnarok are the Völuspá, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems, written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century but clearly based on much older oral tradition. The Prose Edda was composed by Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic chieftain and writer, around 1220. Both sources are based on older traditions, and both contain a great deal of mythological and legendary material from the pre-Christian Norse world. For the broader context of Norse religion, see the Norse mythology and religion.