Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

by Byatt, A. S.

  RAGNARÖK

  It began slowly. There were flurries of sharp snow over the fields where the oats and barley were ready to be harvested. There was ice on the dewponds at night, when the harvest moon, huge and red, was still in the sky. There was ice on water jugs and an increasing thin, bitter wind that did not let up, so that they became used to keeping their heads hooded and down. There was a wonderful harvest of frosted grapes, to make the Mosel wine, the eiswein, which was put down in casks. Winter vegetables wilted on their stems, frozen before they were plump. The leaves in the woods and forests fell early, and blew about in the eddies of bitter wind. The light, at first, was clear and cold: things glittered, ice in the cart-tracks, icicles growing on sills and bushes, and not shrinking, not melting, thrusting on. Then, as winter set in, the sky darkened. It was full of thick iron-grey clouds full of snow, and the air itself was full of snow and hail and ice-splinters eddying. The surface of the earth hardened, shrinking and dense, frozen too deep for spades to disturb. Root vegetables could not be lifted, could not be disinterred. Ice thickened on lakes, and spread sluggishly into the courses of rivers. Fish went down and down, swimming at first under the ice-shelves, then settling into the mud, cold and limp, barely breathing. Men went out with axes and hacked off buckets of ice to melt in the house for drinking. At first this excited them. It was a test of strength. A test of manhood. Cattle were enclosed and the sheep brought in, those who did not die in the drifts which rose higher and did not diminish. Hens came into houses, and pigs lay by the hearth. Men went out on snowshoes, and skis, and sledges, and took down trees for firewood, and hunted the increasingly furtive and cunning wood creatures, rabbits and hares, small deer and partridges, small fowl with their feet frozen to the twigs in the bushes.

  They needed to survive until the spring. Until the days at last grew longer and the sun would melt the snow and the ice, and the wind would die down, and skins could be in the air without being frostbitten.

  The shortest day came, and the humans danced, stamping, in the snow, and made bonfires, to greet the turn of the year.

  But the year did not exactly turn. The sky became a paler grey, that was all, and the earth and air and water stayed icy.

  They began to use things that could not be replaced. The pig’s throat was slit and it was butchered and frozen and roasted. Those hens that did not lay were strangled and plucked and boiled and were not replaced because most chicks died. Feeding the sheep – and the horses and donkeys – became hard – very hard – because of the ruined crops and the frozen fields. Courage became endurance, and soup was needed too much to be fed to the dying.

  Outside, in the perpetual twilight, wolves howled and padded. They were hungry and angry.

  This, they thought, was how it would be when the Fimbulwinter came. The fat sun was dull red, sullen, like embers. She gave little light, and what there was was ruddy or bloody. They longed in their bones and their brains for clear light, for a warm wind, for buds, for green leaves. The winter stretched into another year, and another. The seas froze: icebergs clashed by the coasts, and floated into the bays. This was, they began to understand, not a likeness of the Fimbulwinter, but the thing itself.

  They became raiders. They overran each others’ housesteads, howling and roaring, slaughtering the weak and emptying the meagre stores. They drank what mead there was, swallowed the wine as though there was no tomorrow, which they began to believe was true. Hungry creatures, hungry men, will eat anything. The battle-winners feasted among the dead bodies, which were being torn at by creeping, crouching beasts. They gripped each other and fell about the fire, fornicating with whomever was to hand, with whatever was to hand. They bit and kissed and chewed and swallowed and fought and struggled and waited for the world to end, which it did not, not yet. They ate each other, of course, in the end.

  The skies thickened and thickened. Things – Dises – leathery winged female things – wailed in the wind and perched on the crags, staring and screaming. Nidhøggr the great worm who gnawed the roots of Yggdrasil came out and sucked the blood from the dead as they lay in the freezing slime. From the Kettlewood, where Loki lay bound amongst the geysirs – which still spouted hot – came a louder howl of wolves, wolves in the wood, wolves padding over the snow, wolves with blood on their fangs, wolves in the mind.

  Wind Time, Wolf Time, before the World breaks up.

  That was the time they were in.

  In Asgard the sheen on the gold was dulled, but the magic boar could still be eaten at night and reborn for the next feast. Yggdrasil was shaking all over, leaves were falling, branches were wilting, but the tree still stood. Odin went down to the well at its roots and spoke to Mimir’s head under the black ruffled water. No one ever knew what he learned, but he came back set and cold. They waited. They did not act, they did not think, perhaps could not think. Idun lay, curled in her wolfskin. The apples of youth were withered and puckered.

  Under the ice the earth boiled. South in Muspelheim the age-old fires raged, and shapeless fire-creatures wandered, flamed and flickered, as they always had. But now hot rocks, a rain of searing ash, and spreading tongues of glassy lava, red-gold and spitting, turning to red-black and sullen, pushed their way through the hard earth. Red domes rose and rose, bubbling and frothing, breathing death gases, falling on forests, making firewood of them. Loki’s place of torment was called the Kettlewood because the stones that tortured him stood in a cave amongst boiling geysirs. Now these blew more and more furiously, spouting cinders, and the earth shook itself, like a beast in great pain, and the shapeshifter’s bonds broke. He stood there laughing amid smoke, steam and a whirlwind of tossed stones, and set off south, striding through chaos. He went rapidly through the sacred wood where the Fenris-Wolf was bound, and the soil burst open at his tread, and the trees writhed and fell and the magic rope, Gleipnir, made of the trample of cats, the beards of women, the breath of fish and the spittle of birds, shrivelled and fell apart. Fenris yawned and dislodged the sword from his bleeding gullet. He shook himself and his hairs hissed like fires. Father and son loped on, going south to the land of flame. Crimson cracks opened under their feet in the thick glaze of the ice. They laughed. They howled with laughter.

  The guardian of Muspelheim sat on its borders. His name was Surtr, the Black One. He held a hot sword, too bright to look at, and black smoke swirled round him. He rose to his feet – up and up – and shook his sword and called, and the hosts of Muspelheim, with white-hot weapons and slings of flame, were on the march.

  Odin saw them, from his high seat, Hlidskialf. They were roaring on towards a field called Vigrid, a hundred leagues in all directions. This was the moment. This was the beginning of the end. These gods were gods who had existed in waiting, waiting to make a last stand. Heimdall the herald rose up and blew the great horn, Giallarhorn. It had been crafted with this last great cry in mind. The gods rose up and armed themselves, swords, shields, spears, hauberks, glimmering gold, and the Einherjar did the same. Odin went down again and spoke to Mimir’s head in the black water, now further blackened with falling soot, which was everywhere. The great tree trembled and shook. The surging earth was loose about its roots. Its branches flailed: leaves were ripped off in the gale and added to the hot air stream: the fountain of Urd began to boil.

  The gods went over the bridge, Bifröst, the rainbow bridge that linked Asgard and Midgard. They were damaged already, when they set out. Tyr had lost his arm to the wolf, Odin his eye to Mimir, Freyer had given away his magic sword, Thor’s wife, Sif, had seen all her magical hair fall away from her bald head. Thor himself, according to some poets, had lost the hammer he had thrown after the Midgard-serpent. Baldur had lost his life. There are two ways, in stories, of winning battles – to be supremely strong, or to be a gallant forlorn hope. The Ases were neither. They were brave and tarnished.

  Yggdrasil drooped. Its leaves hung and flapped. Its roots were shrinking. The columns of water inside the bark were troubled and feeble. The squirrel
chattered with fear and the stag’s head hung. Black birds spun away from the branches into a red sky.

  The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.

  The ship was launched in the east. It was a terrible and a beautiful ship, made of a material buoyant and dully translucent, the horny afterlife of dead men’s nails, culled as they pushed out, after the blood stopped. It was a ghost ship, bone-coloured, deathly grey, as though all the floating mess in the water, that would neither rot nor disintegrate, had coagulated and clung into this ramping vessel. Its name was Naglfar. Its helmsman was the giant Hrym. As a small child the thin child had imagined it like a schooner with ghostly rigging and flying pennants. Then she came to see it was a dragon-prowed, long-necked, long-bodied raiding ship, like a dead snakeskin made of layers of scales from the toenails, shining dimly. It was manned by frost-giants and fire-giants, both together, and dashed on in a cloud of boiling steam.

  As the crust of the earth boiled and spat, the skin of the sea began to dance madly, with geysirs blowing onto the waves, which were full of floating death, shoals of battered glimmering fish, carcases of whales and narwhals, orcas and giant squid and sea-snakes, all boiling up and torn apart by heat and cold and raw force.

  Then, behind the stern of Naglfar the surface of the sea rose in a mountain, immense, streaming, with shifting clefts and gullies, pouring with ripped seaweeds and grains of crushed corals. In the midst of the mountain was the horrid head of Jörmungander, the Midgardsomr, the band of snakeflesh that held the solid world in shape. Up and out she came, uncoiling and driving, her fleshy mane towering, her vast tail rising from rock and sand, stirring the whole sea. Naglfar floated lightly on the maelstrom of her motion, and Hrym, the frost-giant, shook his axe to greet the monster. Her body was wound in ripped-up weeds and dead men’s ropes and chains, with the dead men still dangling and gaping. She began to writhe in the water, making purposefully for the battlefield, Vigrid. Like her father and brother the great snake laughed out loud, and poison dripped from her fangs and made flames on the crests of the waves. Vast surges of seawater overran the coasts, beaches, rocks, harbour walls, delta, estuary, marsh. The world was unrecognisable.

  When the bond round the earth was loosed, other bonds broke. The hell-hound, Garm, snapped his chain and leaped out to join his wolf kindred. The sun in her chariot, and the moon in his, whipped up their horses in their everlasting rush round the sky. But the tireless pursuing wolves, joined by Garm, with crimson eyes and gullet, knew that their time had come, galloped faster, and fastened their teeth in the haunches of the silver horse and the swarthy. The horses screamed and swerved, and light in the world went mad, black, blazing white, dark as hell, lurid red. The wolves tore the throats out of the horses and turned to the drivers of the chariots, sun-woman, night-mother, moon-boy and the boy in the bright chariot of day. Somewhere in the middle air, as the chariots rolled in their fall, the wolves tore apart sun and moon, day and night, drank their blood and swallowed them.

  The stars, it was thought by some, were an outer light, shining through holes in Ymir’s dead skull. But now, as the wolves began to lope, laughing, through the sky towards Vigrid, the light began to drop out of the stars, they fell like spent candles or dead fireworks, raining down on the burning and boiling earth. Fenris saw his sky-brothers and howled to greet them. He had grown. His snout scraped Ymir’s skull and his jaw lay along the singed earth.

  The gods and the warriors of Valhall advanced like berserkers onto the battle plain. They roared defiance – this was what they knew how to do – and the wolves, the snakes, the fire-giants and the frost-giants howled and hissed back, whilst Loki stood smiling in the leaping light of the red flames, which was all the light there was.

  Odin advanced on the Fenris-Wolf, balancing his ash-spear, Gungnir. The wolf’s hackles bristled. His mean eyes glittered. He yawned. The god drove the spear into the gaping jaws. The wolf shook himself, snapped the spear, took three steps forward, gripped the great god, shook him, broke him, swallowed him. Wailing swept through the Einherjar. They staggered, fell back, and then advanced again, mute now. There was nothing else to do.

  Loki’s children towered over the field, the wolf-laughter joining the hissing mirth of the snake. Thor, full of grief, threw himself at the snake with flailing fists and a thunderous hammer, breaking her skull. She writhed, fell and spat poison. Thor turned to tell the gods all was not lost, the snake was down. He lived for nine paces in the stream of poison she had poured over him, and then fell, dead.

  There were other duels. One-armed Tyr, still in his wolfskin, fought with the hell-hound, Garm, until both were exhausted and beaten down, never to rise again. Freyer was despatched by the bright sword of Surtr. A young son of Odin, whose name was Widar, crept across corpses and stabbed the Fenris-Wolf through his blooded pelt. The wolf coughed and fell, smothering the avenger under his weight.

  Loki watched the kills and killing of his monstrous children. Then, as the battlefield began to settle into a welter of bloody slime, he fenced with Heimdall, the herald, the far-sighted, both with the recklessness and eagerness of the doomed. They killed each other; their bodies fell across each other and were still.

  The earth was Surtr’s. His flames licked the wounded branches of Yggdrasil and shrivelled the deep roots. The homes of the gods fell into the lake of fire. Grieving Frigg, on her gold throne, sat and waited as the flames licked her door sills and ate up the foundations of the house. Unmoving she flared, shrank black, and became ash amongst the falling ash.

  Deep in the kelp forests Surtr’s fire boiled in the foundations of the sea. The holdfast of Rándrasill ripped loose and its lovely fronds lost colour, lost life, tossed in the seething water amongst the dead creatures it had once sheltered and sustained.

  After a long time, the fire too died. All there was was a flat surface of black liquid glinting in the small pale points of light that still came through the starholes. A few gold chessmen floated and bobbed on the dark ripples.

  RAGNARÖK, THE LAST BATTLE

  THE THIN CHILD IN PEACETIME

  The thin child stored this picture of the end of things, like a thin oval sliver of black basalt or slate, which was perpetually polished in her brain, next to the grey ghost of the wolf in the mind, and the gleaming coils and blunt snout of the snake in the mind. She read for what she needed, and chose not to imagine, not to remember, the return of gods and men to the refurbished green plain of Ida, which was related in Asgard and the Gods. The careful German editor of that book observed that this resurrection was probably a Christian contamination of the original bald end. That was enough for the thin child. She believed him immediately. What she needed was the original end, the dark water over everything.

  The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.

  She had stored Ragnarök against the time when it would become clear that her father would not come back. Instead, one night, after midnight, when the blackout was still over the windows, he came back, unexpected and unannounced. The thin child was woken, and there he was, standing in the doorway, his red-gold hair shining, gold wings on his tunic, his arms out to hold her as she leaped at him. Walls of defence against disaster crumbled in the thin child’s head, but the knowledge of Ragnarök, the black disk, held its place.

  They went back home, the thin child and the family. Home was a large grey house with a precipitous garden in the steel city, which had its own atmosphere which could be perceived as a wall of opaque sulphurous cloud, as they came in from the countryside to which they had been
evacuated. The thin child’s lungs tightened desperately as the fug closed in on her.

  There was something of Bunyan’s allegory about the places to which they returned. The old house was in Meadow Bank Avenue, an oval space like a long pan, from which a steep, narrow path sloped down to a place called Nether Edge. The thin child was quite a bit older when she understood the beauty of the words, Nether Edge, as opposed to just saying them quickly and thinking of the place where the butcher had his shop, with his hatchets and knives and bloody limbs of creatures, where the huge buses raced and boomed, where the stationer sold sherbet, newspapers and gobstoppers.

  In the midst of Meadow Bank Avenue was a large oval patch of grass which was the Green, surrounded by a low fat grey stone wall on which you could sit. At one end was a group of tall trees, beech and oak. It must once have been a village green, where Blake’s children were heard at play. Modern children still played on it, but it had been immured in the spread of suburb.

  The thin child’s father, in his spare time, which diminished as he became more and more successful, took to building a garden. There was a small flat lawn and a wash house, behind the house, and at the end of this exiguous lawn a wooden arch which the child remembered from the days of her infancy, an archetypal arch, covered with archetypal roses, red, white, sugar-pink. Under the arch the garden fell precipitately down towards Nether Edge. The roses had run wild in the war. They spread in thorny thickets like those in fairy tales. The thin child’s father, singing as he worked, curbed and trained them, fastened them to the rustic poles of the arch, licked his pricked fingers and laughed. He ordered stones from the countryside, grey stones like those which were cleverly built into the walls that kept in the moorland sheep. He began to set the plunging garden in order with dry-stone stepped terraces, holding in flowerbeds with lilies, Shirley poppies, rose bushes, lavender, thyme and rosemary. He made a pool from an old stone sink, in which swam tadpoles and a stickleback the thin child caught in a net on a picnic, a furious red swimmer she named Umslopogaas. It was a pretty garden in its newness, despite the soot in the air. The thin child loved her father, and loved the garden, and wheezed.