Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

by Byatt, A. S.

  Orca and snake fished together. They took big fish – the fat, slow, lazy cod, some the size of a man. They were prodigal feeders: they ripped out livers and eggs and discarded fins and bones. Perhaps the most amusing to chase were the bluefin tunny, a warm-blooded, sleek-skinned, speeding race, bright-eyed and shield-shaped, purple and pearly. They came across human traps for these beasts, cities of nets, with intricate entries, corridors and inner chambers, leading one way, to the slaughterhouse. The two of them ripped these houses apart, with fang and tooth and muscle, enjoying the rush of liberated fish, smiling at some, swallowing others. They headed the shoals and picked off the fish on the flanks. They caught seals as orcas catch seals, the black and white smiling beast spy-hopping, erect in the water, then lobtailing, slapping with its flukes, so that crabeater seals, leopard seals, basking on flat rocks, were washed away in the commotion of water towards the seasnake’s wide grin.

  They played together and their play ended in crimson water and choking.

  All this time she grew. She was as long as a marching army on land. She was as wide as underwater caverns, stretching away and away into the dark. She spent more and more time in the darkest depths, where no sunlight came, where food was sparse and strangely lit with glowing reds and cobalt blues. She came across mountain ranges in the water, and belching chimneys and columns of hot gas. She sipped at the blank white shrimp down there, and picked the fringed worms from their crevices. Nothing saw her coming, for she was too vast for their senses to measure or expect. She was the size of a chain of firepeaks: her face was as large as a forest of kelp, and draped with things that clung to her fronds, skin, bones, shells, lost hooks and threads of snapped lines. She was heavy, very heavy. She crawled across beds of coral, rosy, green and gold, crushing the creatures, leaving in her wake a surface blanched, chalky, ghostly.

  Thor Fishing

  She came up from the depths one day and saw a head as horrid as her own, a horned head with glassy eyeballs and a bloody stump, a head with a thick brow and staring nostrils. She raised herself, swaying like the spyhopping orca, and gulped. Inside the bull’s gullet was a hook, a heavy hook, a hook for dangling cauldrons. She swallowed it before she had time to see it. It yanked, it pulled, the deadhead went up and the snake-head followed after, bursting through the sea surface in a fountain of stinking spray.

  There was a boat, a fishing boat, like many she had wrecked, by accident, in play. In the boat was a frost-giant, grey and silver and bluish, with a massive fall of icy hair and a huge sprouting ashen beard. Attached to the line, attached to the hook, attached to the bull’s head was a face as fierce as her own, black with fury and effort, eyes glinting red under thick brows, crowned with fiery hair and surrounded by a flaming red beard. Thor, the thunder god, hauling her in on a rod and line. Up she came, and up, more and more of her, towering like the mast of the boat. She fastened her sore mouth on the bait, and pulled. The rod arched and quivered. The god held fast and the boat twisted in the water. The snake shook her fleshy mane and hissed poison. The god glared, and tugged, and glared. The giant said, ‘We’re done for.’ The sky darkened, clouds piled into black banks, the snake twisted and hissed, the god held fast, as lightning split the cloud cover. Nothing had hurt the snake like this. She threshed the sea-surface and snorted. The line bent the rod, but strong runes held it firm.

  Then the giant, whose name was Hymir, moved across the boat, which was full of slapping water, took out a great hunting knife, swiped at the line, and severed it. The snake bellowed and sank. The god, bursting with fury, took his short-handled hammer and hurled it at her head. It struck a blow. Her thick dark blood swirled in the seawater. Then the hammer fell on and down into the dark, and the snake went after it. Hymir said dourly that Thor would regret that blow, and the god swung his fist at the stony head and knocked the giant overboard. The god swam and waded to the beach. The snake rubbed against the rocks, trying to tear out the hook and the trailing line. She coughed up the deadhead, bashing her cathedral-mouth on razor-rocks, and the hook came out, trailing black shreds from her gullet.

  The snake was angrier after this meeting. She killed more wantonly, she stove in boat planks, she uprooted sea forests for the pleasure of her rage. Sometime later, in the kelp forest, she came across Rándrasill – not where it had been – in its gold and amber light, its holdfast in the depths, its great stipe buoyed up by cushions of air in bladders under the streamers. She had seen it once with delight. Now she moved in for a massacre, sparing neither bladefish nor seahorses, neither soft otters nor nesting gulls, neither crown-of-thorns starfish nor prickly urchins, nor those smaller jellies and fine eels, slugs and periwinkles which clung to the weed. She tore with her great jaw at the fronds of the weed itself, shaking her mane from side to side, stripping away whole households, wound in the stipe itself. Ripped arms hung limp, stirred and whirled in the water. Everywhere was murky, full of thick eddies of dust.

  She travelled on, lumping her vast bulk over coral reefs and colonies of mussels, crushing, grinding. One day, in the dimness, she saw a wavering form, lumpen and twitching, which she took to be a great whale, maybe wounded, resting on the seabed. Jörmungandr, still bad-tempered, eased forward and snapped. The pain was excruciating, and travelled all round the earth, and back to the soft brain in her vast skull. She had met her tail. She was wound round the earth like a girdle. She thought of resting on the sea floor in an eternal knot. Where she was was desolate black basalt, thick empty depth. She raised her head and began to drag herself, and then to swim in long folds. If she was to rest, she would rest in populated waters, she would lie on beds of pearls and corals, where schools of fish floated past to be snapped up, where the shadows of ships danced on the surface, where there was living kelp to rest her head, where there was food and more food for her vast appetite.

  Baldur

  The thin child considered Baldur the beautiful. He was a god who was doomed to die – in the book this was what was told about him. The figure in the painting of Jesus talking to the animals, all white gentleness and golden radiance, was also a god who was doomed to die. This god would come back to judge the quick and the dead. Or so she was told. Asgard and the Gods had explanatory paragraphs in which its scholarly German author discussed solar myths and vegetation myths. The sun went into the dark at the winter solstice. Plant life shrunk to its roots under the earth, hard as iron, as they sang in the carol, water like a stone. The stories celebrated the return of spring, the sun high in the sky, leaves bursting out, grass new and bright green.

  Baldur went, but he did not come back. The thin child sorted in her new mind things that went and came back, and things that went and did not come back. Her father with his flaming hair was flying under the hot sun in Africa, and she knew in her soul that he would not come back. She knew it partly because of the things tangibly unsaid when the family at Christmas raised small glasses of cider, and drank to him, and the hope that next Christmas he would come back. There were stories that ended, instead of going in circles and cycles, and the story of the beautiful god was one of those, and she found it grimly satisfactory. Though her readings and rereadings at all times of the year gave it a kind of eternal recurrence. The story ended, but she began it again.

  These gods, she understood, were apprehensive gods, fearful gods, right from the beginning. Asgard had defensive walls and sentinels on watch. There was an expectation of doom. There was the lovely Idun, who lived in a green bower amongst the strong branches of Yggdrasil, and gave the gods the golden apples of youth and strength. One day, the story went, for no reason, she disappeared from the tree. The branches of Yggdrasil hung sapless and withered where she had balanced and smiled. No birds sang. The well Odrörir in which the water of life, cold and dark, was watched by the Norns, had sunk and was stagnant.

  Odin sent his raven, Hugin (which means thought), to find out where Idun was. The great bird circled, and went down into the dark, into the land of the dark-elves, where he spoke to the dwarf
-lords – Dain, whose name meant dead, and Thrain, whose name meant stiff. They were sleeping deeply and could not be roused, but muttered of destruction, darkness, threats and endings. The raven returned with riddling words. The skies were sinking to Ginnungagap. Things were falling apart. Torrents of airs tumbling and swaying. Idun was under the roots of the drooping Ash in the lair of an ancient giant, Narfi, the father of black Night. The gods went and found her there, shivering and speechless. They wrapped her in a white wolfskin, which covered her brow, so that she could not see the living branches from which she had fallen, and she was comforted. The gods questioned Urd, the Norn, standing by the brim of the cauldron of wisdom. What had changed? Had time and death ambushed them? Were they themselves changed? Idun, shivering in her pale pelt, ancient Urd in her flimsy black drapes, seemed like the drowsy dwarves, sodden with sleep. They could not answer, but wept, floods of tears, brimming in their eyes, splashing on their hands. The huge teardrops, one after the other, swollen and then bursting, were like mirrors in which the questioning gods saw only their own anxious faces. Everything was at once sluggish and slow, and speeded up, rushing to some ending.

  Bright Baldur too was seized by sleep. He was sluggish, as winter-sleepers are, who cannot wake, who slide backwards into somnolence and dreams. He dreamed of the wolf with his bloody mouth, breaking free of the magic rope that bound him, snapping the sword in his gullet between his vast jaws. He dreamed of the Midgard-serpent, lapped around the world, unknotting her coils and rising above the waves, spitting poison. He dreamed of Hel and her dark halls, her living-and-dead face, her pale crown, the beaker she had prepared for him when he should come to sit down at her side. Most dreams, the thin child knew, are wispy and thin, can be torn away by a determined sleeper, can be reduced to a peepshow or puzzle in which the dreamer is a looker-on, not threatened. But there are gripping dreams of real terror, more real than the world the dreamer wakes to, thick, suffocating, full of hurt and hurt to come, in which the dreamer is the victim of ineluctable harm.

  She had dreams of that kind in this wartime. They were sometimes foolish. She dreamed again and again that ‘the Germans’ were secreted under her metal bedstead, sawing steadily through the legs, so they could grasp her and carry her off. She knew they were there, even when she woke and knew it was absurd. Bus stops and cafés had posters of grey helmets crouched under benches and tea-tables, listening in, waiting to pounce. If they came, the world would end, but she did not, waking, imagine them coming.

  She dreamed also that they had taken her parents and tied them up in a hollow in the middle of a dark forest, the Ironwood. They lay, her parents, bound and helpless amongst dead bracken and mulch. The shadowy grey-helmeted Germans moved purposefully about, doing things with metal and ropes which she could not understand. She herself was hidden above the rim of the bowl, looking down on the terrified prisoners, not even wanting to know what the Germans were about to do. What was fearsome, the thin child understood, was to have helpless parents. It was a chink in the protective wall round her, so she believed, conventional childhood. She dreamed what she did not know, that her parents were afraid and uncertain. She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.

  She asked herself who were the good and wise Germans who had written Asgard and the Gods to collect ‘our German stories and beliefs’. Whose was the storytelling voice that gripped her imagination, and tactfully suggested explanations?

  Frigg

  The goddess Frigg set out to make every thing on the earth, in the air, in the ocean, swear not to harm Baldur. In Asgard and the Gods, the German editor quoted Snorri Sturluson’s Icelandic Edda. Frigg, the thin child read, received solemn promises that Baldur should not be harmed by fire and water, iron and all kinds of metal, stones, earth, trees, diseases, animals, birds, poison, snakes. The thin child tried to imagine this oath-swearing. Frigg was pictured in the ur-book, tall, stately, imperious, crowned, with very long pale hair, flowing in the wind. She wore a tight chain-mail shirt, a seemly skirt and incongruous Grecian thonged sandals. Did she set out in her chariot, or was she on foot? The thin child had a literal, visual imagination, that was how she was.

  She saw the goddess in the chariot, rushing through the sky, calling out to the clouds, which were Ymir’s brains, to the forked rods of lightning, the hailstones and snowstorms and floods, begging them not to hurt her son, and the thin child imagined those entities pausing a moment in their rushing, flinging and burning to acquiesce, to hold off. But the thin child also saw the goddess walking. Mostly she was travelling down steep paths around high craggy mountains, the landscapes of the early fearful stone chaos from which the German book said men had first made gods and frost-giants, Hrimthurses. The goddess in a shimmer of gold light spoke fearlessly to all these inordinate forms and beseeched them not to harm her son. And again, there was a moment of quiet, and a stillness of agreement. The goddess rushed down to the roots of the mountains, the dark underground caverns where dragons and great worms gnawed the roots of the World-Ash, and spoke to the beasts, and not only to the beasts but to the shining walls of the caverns, to millstone grit and basalt, to veins of iron and tin and lead and gold and silver that were intricately threaded in the stones. She spoke to the boiling pits of red lava and the flowing steaming pumice. To sapphires, diamonds, opals, emeralds, rubies. The thin child, in an ecstasy of imagination, heard all these inanimate things whisper and grate and rustle, and promise. Everything was part of one world, and it would not hurt Baldur the Beautiful.

  Sometimes the thin child imagined the beasts in ordered rows, as they were going into the Ark, or in the early days of creation. Sleek, hairy beasts with snarling lips and rending canine teeth. Black panthers, spotted leopards, striped hyenas, padding lions, tigers burning bright with hot eyes, prancing jackals and of course the wolves, the grey wolves, the stalkers, the allies of the imagined enemy. They all promised, and with them the Bandar log – the howling monkeys – the duck-billed platypus with its lethal tooth, the bears on the ice and in the jungle, with friendly faces that belied their malice, all these promised, along with the predators of the hedgerow, weasel, stoat, badger, ferret, shrew. The creatures who promised bore no relation to the bunny rabbits and sweet squirrels who listened to the divine teacher in the clearing in the woodlands. They were ruthless, red in tooth and claw, hunters and hunted, both at once, but they paused to promise and the goddess breathed more calmly and went on her way. Birds promised, eagles, hawks, kites, jays and magpies, along with bats hanging like folded leather in the caverns, with small mouths that drank blood.

  The thin child spent a tremulous time imagining the snakes. She had once seen the cast skin of an adder, with its diamond head. They opened their fangs, and hissed and promised, adder and bushmaster, krait and cobra, the biting snakes and the spitting snakes, the rattlesnakes and the great constricting snakes of the jungle, boa constrictor and anaconda. And there were the sea-snakes, coiling and flashing in the oily sea, and the water predators, muggers and alligators, and then the fish, smooth sharks and gleeful killer whales, giant squid and stinging medusas, and the shoals of tunny and cod. The line stretched out to crack of doom; things promised that could hardly be thought of as harmful, oysters and earwigs, anemones in woods and on coral reefs, grass even, all the hundreds of kinds of grasses. All the harmless-looking or enticing plants that were killers, deadly nightshade, sooty purple, laburnum with dangling sharp yellow blossoms, the gaudy death-cap, the horse mushroom, and the fly-agaric.

  Between the trees and the animals Snorri listed diseases. How do you swear a disease to harmlessness? The thin child suffered dreadfully from asthma. Because of this disease she lay in bed and read encyclopaedias and Asgard and the Gods. She imagined the asthma which inhabited her as an alien creature, it was true. It was pure white and flimsy, it spread its parasitic body through her desperate lungs, her spinning brain, it was like roots working their way into stonework, it was a
relative of the boa constrictor and the strangling fig. She had to learn how to sit, how to lie, how to hold her ribcage to accommodate its grip. She imagined Frigg speaking urgently to it – do not hurt my son – and the brief moment when it let go, to promise. She imagined the fiery faces of measles and smallpox, hot and greedy, nevertheless promising. Measles had taken over the sack of her skin and broiled there. Chickenpox had burst through her, boiling up in pustules. But they promised Frigg. Not to harm her son.

  Everything was held together by these agreements. The surface of the earth was like a great embroidered cloth, or rich tapestry, with an intricately interwoven underside of connected threads. She walked through the fields to school, in spring and in summer. There were borders of flowers round the wheatfields, full of scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers, great white moondaisies, buttercups, cowslips, corn buttercups, lamb’s succory and thorow-wax. Broad-leaved spurge, red hemp-nettle, shepherd’s purse, shepherd’s needle, corn-parsley. In the long grass in the meadow were milkmaids, orchids and knotgrass.

  Under the earth worms were busy, millipedes ran, springtails flourished, all kinds of beetles dug burrows and laid eggs. Maggots and caterpillars squirmed; some were eaten by fledglings and harvest mice, some changed miraculously into butterflies, white and gold, umber and purple, bright blue, pale blue, mint-green, spangled with stripes and frills and eyes on black velvet. Up out of the corn came skylarks, spiralling and singing. Plovers tumbled overhead, crying, peewit, peewit. She had bird books and flower books, the thin child, and noted them all, tree sparrow, bullfinch, song thrush, lapwing, linnet, wren. They ate and were eaten, it was true, they faded and vanished as the earth turned, but they came back at the solstice, and always would, whereas Baldur was doomed to die, for all the promises. If her father did not come back, he would never come back.