Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

by Byatt, A. S.

  There is no record of Frigg having asked humans not to harm her son. Maybe they were always helpless when faced with the gods. Maybe they did not count or were in some other story. They were not woven into the gloss and glitter, the relief and shadows of the tapestry.

  The thin child knew the promise could not hold. Something, somewhere, must have been missed, must have been forgotten. Stories are ineluctable. At this stage of every story, something must go wrong, be awry, whatever the ending to come. It is not given, even to gods, to take complete, foolproof, perfect precautions. There will be a loophole, slippage, a dropped stitch, a moment of weariness or inattention. The goddess called everything, everything, to promise not to harm her son. Yet the shape of the story means that he must be harmed.

  The gods celebrated the cohesion of earth, air, fire, water and all the creatures in and on these elements. They celebrated as they might have been expected to, with fighting and shouting. They had a kind of playground scuffle in which everyone ganged up on one unarmed victim, only in this case the centre of the scuffle was Baldur the beautiful, Baldur the victim, standing there peaceably, mildly proud of his invulnerability. They threw things at him, all kinds of things, everything they could. Sticks, staves, stones, flint axe-heads, knives, daggers, swords, spears, even in the end Thor’s thunder-hammer, and they watched with delight as these things wheeled gracefully like harmless boomerangs and returned to the throwers. The more returned, the more they threw, thicker and faster. This was a good game. It was the best game ever invented. The gods laughed and smiled and threw, and threw again.

  An old woman came to see Frigg who was in her palace, Fensalir. Frigg does not appear to have wondered who she was or where she came from. She was just an old woman like any other old woman, indeed an archetypal old woman. If you looked hard at her she was almost too perfect, the web of wrinkles over her face and neck, the intricate folds of her long cloak over her dark dress, a kind of icon of old-womanhood. If she looked at you – even if you were the queen of the Ases – you could not hold her cold grey gaze, but you knew you needed to speak to her, she shimmered with your need to speak to her, almost as though only your need held her shape together. She was Loki the shapeshifter of course, putting out waves of glamour. So Frigg asked, as he needed her to do, what they were all doing in the fields of Asgard, crying out and whooping?

  The old woman said they were hurling weapons at Baldur, and that nothing could harm him. She remarked humbly that someone of great power must have persuaded everything not to harm Baldur.

  And Frigg said, as she must, as the tale required, that it was she, his mother, who had called everything not to harm him, and had been heard by everything.

  ‘Everything?’ said the old woman.

  ‘Well, I noticed a young shoot on a tree to the west of Valhall. It is a thing called mistletoe. I was past it before I saw it, and it was barely alive, with no strength, too young to make a promise.’

  And yet, the thin child thought, she must have been worried at some level, or how would she have remembered this insignificant plant at all?

  And then, the old woman was simply not there at all. Maybe she never had been. Frigg’s huge effort had tired her. Her eyes were dazzled. She listened to the wild shrieking of the happy gods.

  Loki went for the mistletoe. Mistletoe is a feeble killer. It attaches itself to the boughs and branches of trees and sends fine threads like blind hair-worms into the rising columns of water which the leaves on the tree suck up and breathe into the air. The mistletoe has no branches and no true leaves: it is a tangle of waxy stems, with strange key-shaped protrusions and whitish gluey berries with black seeds visible through the translucent flesh, like frogspawn, the thin child always thought, seeing the lumpish globes of the mistletoe dense on bare branches in winter. Little twigs of it were pinned to lampholders and over doorways at the turn of the winter, and you kissed one another under it because it was evergreen and clinging, it represented constancy and perpetual liveliness. Next to the holly in which it was sometimes wound, it seemed ghostly, almost absent. The holly was shiny and scarlet and prickly and strong. The mistletoe was soft, floppy, a yellowish colour that was like dying leaves. The thin child had been told about it in Nature Study. She had been warned against eating it: it was poisonous, she was told, though she was also told that birds fed on it and scattered it about by cleaning its glue from their beaks on the bark of branches, and leaving the seeds with the glue.

  It could spread over a tree like an overcoat and suck the lifewater from the wood, so that the remaining corpse was a dry prop for the grey-gold fronds.

  It was mystical to the druids, she was told, but she could not find out what they did with it. It was associated with sacrifice, including human sacrifice.

  Loki tore it gently from its foothold in an ash tree. It squirmed a little in his facile fingers. He stroked it. It made its hosts put out thickets of fine, sickly twig-masses, witches’ brooms they were called, and Loki stroked and stroked his fleshy bundle, and pulled, and made hard, and spoke sharp words to it, until he had not a clump but a fine grey pole, still a little luminous, like the round pale fruit, still a curious colour like snakeskin or sharkskin rather than bark, but a pole, which he twirled in his clever hands until it balanced like a javelin and had a fine, fine point like a flint arrow.

  Loki, now again in his own bright form, stepped soundlessly into the hurling and howling throng of the gods, avoiding the missiles, aimed or returning. He turned the mistletoe spear in his hand, telling it to keep its shape. He found the one he was looking for, standing apart at the edge of the crowd, his hood pulled over his dark face. This was Hödur, Frigg’s other son, as swarthy as Baldur was golden. He had slipped second out of the womb, his eyelids sealed, like a blind kitten. They remained sealed. He was dark to Baldur’s day, night to his sunlight. They needed each other. Because he had never seen, he had his own ways of moving around Asgard, feeling for pillars, measuring steps, holding his shadowy head sideways and listening to space. If Baldur asked him what it was like not to see, he would answer, how do I know, since I have never seen. Loki, seeing him now, saw that his head was down, slightly slanted, listening to the uproar of which he was not part. What was it like, inside that skull? Caverns of blackness, or grey thick cloud, or enclosed shining lights? Loki always wanted to know everything, and might have asked, but now he was bent on mischief. For its own sake, because he alone knew how to stop the singing.

  ‘Why do you not join in the games?’ he asked Hödur. ‘It is a wonder to see Baldur, calm and smiling, in a hail of sharp stones and pointed arrows that turn away from him, and fail. You should play your part.’

  ‘I have no weapon,’ said Hödur. ‘And, as you well know, I cannot see to take aim.’

  ‘I have here a sleek and princely spear,’ said smiling Loki. ‘And I can put my hand over yours, to guide your aim. And then, you will have played your part.’

  So he took the blind god by the hand, and led him to the front of the crowd. He put the lance in his hand, and closed his own quick fingers over those dark ones.

  ‘Baldur is over there,’ said Loki, pointing with the spear itself. ‘His breast is bare, he is smiling, he is waiting for your stroke.’

  And he raised the other’s arm to shoulder height, and drew it back, and loosed his own grip, and said ‘So, now. Throw now.’

  And Hödur let the hood slip from his dark head, and threw it back, and hurled.

  The mistletoe spear hit Baldur’s breast and ran through him.

  Baldur fell. Blood blossomed and he choked.

  Hödur cast about in the sudden silence for Loki. A gnat buzzed by his ear. The shapeshifter was off.

  The grief of the gods was appalling. They broke down. They could not speak for weeping. Most affected of all was Odin: gods did not fall dead, and when the loveliest and gentlest god could be killed in a game, worse still was on the way. For a long time the assembled gods stood stupidly, unable to touch the body, or to move it. Th
e bright hair ruffled in the light wind. Dark Hödur stood alone, listening to the sobbing. The thin child closed her eyes and tried to imagine the inside of his head and failed.

  Frigg was a mother and also a power. She had set her will to making her son invulnerable, and what had been waiting for him had mocked her. Terrible in grief and rage she refused to be mocked, to be defeated, to accept this end. If he had gone down to the underworld there were powers there who could be bargained with, pleaded with. Even cold Hel would be moved by the fury of Frigg’s grief, greater, Frigg knew, than that of any other mother for any other son. This could not be done to her, as it should not have been done to him. The story ran one way, but she would twist it, turn it back on itself, shape its end to her will.

  ‘Who amongst the Ases’, she asked in a voice hoarse with sobbing, ‘will ride down to Hel and plead with its ruler to send back bright Baldur to Asgard?’

  And Hermodur, the watchman, stepped lightly forward, and said he would go. Then Odin said he must ride there on eight-legged Sleipnir, swiftest of horses, leader of the Wild Hunt, Odin’s own horse. So Sleipnir was led forward and Hermodur sprang lightly into the saddle, and spurred him on, and they leaped out of the gate of Asgard and headed for Ginnungagap.

  The gods could not punish Hödur for slaying his brother, as this had been done in the Thing, a sacred space. But they banished him, beyond Asgard, into the dark forests of Midgard, where he lurked, hiding in the daytime, ranging at night, armed with a great sword given to him by the savage wood demons. The thin child wondered if Frigg mourned this other son, or cared to think how he must feel; did she know how he had been tricked into throwing the mistletoe? The story went ineluctably on, casting a bright light on some things, leaving others, like Hödur, in thick shadow.

  Baldur’s funeral was one of the brightest, most brilliant parts of the story. His body was carried to the beach, richly dressed, and put on board his huge ship, Hringhorni, with its high curved dragon prow, and its long lean body made of pitch-black planks. There on the beach the ship was set on rollers and piled high with precious things, gold from Valhalla, beakers, pitchers, shields, hauberks, halberds, encrusted with precious stones, wrapped in silks and furs. Food was brought, flesh from the golden boar, wine in sealed vessels. Odin came with the ring, Draupnir, the dripper, a magical arm ring from which, every ninth night, eight new rings drop. Odin bent over the chalk-white face of his dead son, and whispered in his ear. No one knows what he said.

  When Baldur’s wife, Nanna, saw his body lying in the ship, she gave a great sigh and fell down. They ran to support her, tried to bring her back, and found that she was dead. So she too was dressed in her best clothes and put beside her husband on his pyre, ready for the burning.

  The ship was very heavy. Baldur’s horse had been loaded onto it, a great horse, with all its gleaming harness. The gods meant to light the piled logs, set fire to the ship, and roll it out to sea. But it was too heavy. No one could move it.

  There was a great crowd of grieving creatures waiting to see the flames spurt. Odin and Frigg, the ravens, Hugin and Munin, and all the valkyries who could not rescue this dead god. There were frost-giants and mountain-giants, light-elves, dark-elves, and the Dises, dire wailing spirits who rode the wind. One of the frost-giants said there was a woman in Jotunheim who was able to root up mountains and shift their sites. Odin nodded and a storm-giant took wings for Jotunheim. The strongwoman’s name was Hyrokkin. She came, not on the wings of the storm, but riding a monstrous wolf. Her reins were living vipers. Gods and men, driven by the wolf in the mind, and the snakes at the roots of the tree, had hunted both creatures remorselessly, destroying their lairs and holes, cleaning them out. And as they hunted the grey wolves in the forests, slaughtering cubs, spearing their dams, so Fenris’s kindred in the Ironwood grew wilder and more monstrous. As they crushed the heads of snakes and trampled on their eggs, so the kindred of Jörmungander, like the Midgard-snake herself, accumulated nastier poisons and grew in cunning. Hyrokkin’s wolf was foul and grinning, with the muscles of a bison. The adders hissed and squirmed and showed their fangs. The woman dismounted; the wolf whirled and snarled. Odin had to order four Berserkers from Valhalla to restrain it, and even they were afraid of the sharp-toothed snakes, who had to be held down with forked branches. Amid the howling and hissing the big woman trod heavily and easily. She wore a wolfskin, like Tyr the hunter, the dead head lolling over her fat face. She smiled without mirth, and put one hand on the poop of the black ship and shoved, and it began to career towards the black sea, so fast that flames burst from the rollers. She laughed, and her laughter enraged Thor, who had not been able with all his strength to move the ship. He raised his hammer to smash her head, and she put up a heavy fist to defend herself, and the gathered gods begged for peace, for quiet for the burning. Thor raised his hammer, Miölnir, and called down thunder and lightning to set fire to the ship and its burden. Blue flames licked prow and stern, rich garments and waxy gods, the mane of the terrified horse and the brands heaped round the deathbed. The flames turned scarlet and gold, and rose and roared. Slowly the ship, with its terrible cargo, moved out over the water. Its wake was crimson like blood, and the meeting of sky and sea was a black line, black on black, luridly lit by the huge fire. Thor stood there, dumb, with his hammer uplifted, and a dwarf ran suddenly in front of his feet. Thor kicked at him, and drove him into the thick of the flames. His name was Lit. This is all that is known about him, that his name was Lit, and he ran the wrong way, and was kicked into a fire that roasted him alive.

  There was a smell spreading, a smell of burning flesh, godflesh, horseflesh, dwarf flesh, of sweet herbs and scented woods, of boiling wine and melting gold, and seawater steam. It was not the end of things. But it was an end, and the beginning of another end.

  Hyrokkin rode away, despite Thor’s desire to put an end to her. Elves and dwarves, warriors and valkyries, wept hot tears. Frigg did not weep. Her will was set on undoing this death and retrieving her dead son.

  Hel

  Nine days and nights Hermodur rode the eight-legged horse through the kingdom of death, along valleys and ashen paths where there was no light, only grey on grey, solids and shadows, and no sound except the steady tread of the horse hooves. He came to the river, Giöll, which surrounds Hel’s home, and is spanned by a golden bridge. This was kept by a giant porter, Mödgud. She stopped Hermodur and asked him why he was there. His single horse, she said, made more noise than all the dead who had earlier ridden across. And his colour was wrong. Too much blood.

  Hermodur said he was seeking his dead brother, Baldur. Mödgud told him that Baldur had ridden over the bridge not long ago. And whether he alarmed her, or whether she pitied him, she let him cross the bridge and ride on in the dark towards Hel.

  * * *

  The halls were surrounded with an iron fence, hugely high. Hermodur rode along it, and came to no gate, though he did come to a cavern with a gatekeeper, a monstrous dog, or maybe a deformed wolf, whose jaws dripped blood, whose fangs gnashed, who growled perpetually, hackles high. His name was Garm. Hermodur stared at this snarling creature. He was not here to fight. He turned Odin’s horse and spoke to it quietly, backing off. Then he set Sleipnir to jump, and Sleipnir rose up and over the iron fence, and landed surefooted on the other side, in Hel’s inner city. There was a noise of grinding and boiling, from the cauldron Hvergelmir, where the dragon Nidhøggr feasted on bad men. Hermodur rode on. The dead stood silently along his road and stared at him, with the red blood running in his cheeks, with his living breath moving in his chest and throat. They were all grey, the dead. They had two expressions – one of impotent rage, and one of mild vacancy. There was no light in their dull eyes. They stared.

  Hermodur came to Hel’s hall. He dismounted, and went in, leading Sleipnir, whom he was not about to lose. It was a rich hall, hung with gold and silver hangings, and in spite of that sparkle it was dull and foggy and grey. The great hall did not exactly hold its shape. Hermodu
r felt it as a narrow tunnel, closing on him: as a vast cavern, stretching away into the distance.

  Hel was there, seated on her throne, with her black dead flesh, and her livid white flesh, sombre and stern. She was crowned with gold and diamonds, which sparked with light, and then disappeared, like quenched flames. Baldur was next to her, seated on a rich throne, with his wife beside him, and a sumptuous dish of glassy fruits, untouched, before him. His bright face was blanched. His golden beaker of mead was untouched.

  Hermodur bowed to the queen of Hel, and said that he had come to beg for Baldur’s return to Asgard. Gods and men, and all creatures, were helpless with grief, and needed the young god to bring back their liveliness, their power to hope. Most of all, said Hermodur, the goddess Frigg had asked him to beg Hel for Baldur’s return, for she could not live without him. To this, Hel replied that mothers throughout time had learned to live without their sons. Every day young men died and came quietly over her golden bridge. Only in Asgard could they die in battle every day, as a game, and live again to feast in the evening. In the hard world, and in the world of shadows, death was not a game.

  But this death, said Hermodur, had diminished the light of the world.

  So, said Hel. It is diminished, then.

  Baldur sat listless and said nothing. Nanna leaned against his shoulder, but he did not embrace her.

  ‘Tell Frigg,’ said Hel, Loki’s child, hurled out of Asgard, ‘tell Frigg that Baldur may return if every being, every creature, in the heavens and on the earth and in the ocean and under the earth, weeps freely for him. Can she save him through grief, who could not protect him through love? If there is one dry eye, anywhere, Baldur stays here. As you see, he is honoured among the dead, and he is the chief guest at my table.’