Ragnarok

by A. S. Byatt

  Asgard

  The gods in Asgard feasted and drank mead from golden plates and golden cups. They delighted in metalwork, most particularly in gold, and acquired hoards of trinkets and magic rings from the dark smithies of the dwarves. They played practical jokes on each other, and quarrelled. They went to the edge of the circle of Midgard and confronted giants, came back and sang their own praises. The thin child formed the view that both the Christian heaven and the Nordic one were boring, possibly because mortal men could not understand them. There were the saints, in the hymn they sang, casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea. The words were lovely, golden, glassy sea. But eternity menaced the thin child with boredom.

  Odin, the ruler of the gods, lived in Valhalla, Valhöll, the hall of the slaughtered. It was vast. It was roofed with golden shields and had five hundred doors. Its inhabitants were the Einherjar, dead warriors snatched from the battlefield by the hovering shield-maidens, the Valkyrie, at the moment of being killed. Battle was what they had lived for. Battle was their eternal vocation. Every day they went out and fought each other to bitter death. Every evening they were brought back to life and feasted in Valhöll on the roast flesh of the boar Sährimnir, who, when his bones were picked clean and his blood supped up, was resurrected, made solid and snorting again, so that he could again be slaughtered, roast and eaten, day after long day.

  The thin child shivered with fear and excitement at the thought of Odin, a god both sinister and dangerous. He was a damaged god, a one-eyed god who had paid with the other eye for the magical knowledge he had drunk from the fountain of Urd, in which the severed head of the Jotun, Mimir, told histories, stories, spells of power, runes of wisdom. Odin was a god who lurked, disguised as an old man in a grey cloak, with a hat pulled over his empty socket. He was a god who asked riddling questions and destroyed those who gave wrong answers. He carried a war-spear, Gungnir, carved with runes which unlocked the secrets of men, beasts and the earth. The spear was fashioned from a branch torn from Yggdrasil itself. It was lopped into shape. It left a wound and a scar.*

  Odin was pictured in the Asgard book in the palace of King Geirod who had roped the wrists of the unknown visitor and set him to scorch between two fires. It was a good picture; the black, enigmatic figure squats between the flaming brands, neither smiling nor scowling, but brooding. After eight nights without food or drink, the visitor was given a horn of beer, and began to sing, louder and louder, a song of Asgard and the warriors in Valhöll, of Yggdrasil with its roots in the roots of the world. Then he revealed himself, and the king fell on his own sword. Odin was an unpredictable god who accepted sacrificed men in the form of ‘blood-eagles’, tied to tree-trunks, their lungs torn back through their ribs. He was a god who had himself endured torture, which had made him stronger, wiser, and more dangerous.

  I know that I hung on a windy tree

  Nine long nights

  Wounded with a spear dedicated to Odin

  Myself to myself, on that tree of which

  no man knows

  From where its roots run.

  No bread did they give me nor drink

  from a horn,

  Downwards I peered;

  I took up the runes, screaming I took

  them

  Then I fell back from there.

  Nine mighty spells I learned . . .

  Odin was the god of the Wild Hunt. Or of the Raging Host. They rode out through the skies, horses and hounds, hunters and spectral armed men. They never tired and never halted; the horns howled on the wind, the hooves beat, they swirled in dangerous wheeling flocks like monstrous starlings. Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, had eight legs: his gallop was thundering. At night, in her blacked-out bedroom, the thin child heard sounds in the sky, a distant whine, a churning of propellers, thunder hanging overhead and then going past. She had seen and heard the crash and conflagration when the airfield near her grandparents’ home was bombed. She had cowered in an understairs cupboard as men were taught to cower, flat on the ground, when the Hunt passed by. Odin was the god of death and battle. Not much traffic came through the edges of the small town in which the thin child lived. Most of what there was was referred to as ‘Convoys’, a word that the thin child thought was synonymous with processions of khaki vehicles, juddering and grinding. Some had young men sitting in the back of trucks, smiling out at the waving children, shaking with the rattling motions. They came and they went. No one was told where. They were ‘our boys’. The child thought of her father, burning in the air above North Africa. She did not know where North Africa was. She imagined him with his flaming hair in a flaming black plane, in the racket of propellers. Airmen were the Wild Hunt. They were dangerous. If any hunter dismounted, he crumbled to dust, the child read. It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control.

  In the daytime, the bright fields. In the night, doom droning in the sky.

  _________________

  * This part of the story was first told by Richard Wagner.

  Homo Homini Lupus Est

  Then there was Loki. Loki was a being who was neither this nor that. Neither an Ase nor a Jotun, he lived neither in Asgard nor in Jotunheim. The Ases were single-minded beings. They concentrated on battles and food, or in the case of goddesses on beauty, jealousy, rings and necklaces. Iduna the fair lived in the green branches of Yggdrasil and grew the bright apples of youth, which she fed to the gods. Once, when a giant grabbed her and her apples, Loki took the shape of a falcon and carried them home in his talons. Alone among the gods, Loki was a shapeshifter. He ran across the meadows of Midgard in the shape of a lovely mare. This beast distracted the magic horse of the giant who built the walls of Asgard – so well, that she later gave birth to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed. Loki was a pestering fly, who stole Freya’s golden necklace, Brisingamen. He was intimate with secret places. He disguised himself as an innocent farmgirl, milking cows; he shifted sex as he shifted shape. He was slippery. He wrestled Heimdall the herald in the form of a seal. He was a salmon, leaping up a waterfall, or sliding smoothly under the surface.

  The Germans believed his name was related to Lohe, Loge, Logi, flame and fire. He was also known as Loptr, the god of the air. Later Christian writers amalgamated him with Lucifer, Lukifer, the light-bearer, the fallen Son of the Morning, the adversary. He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

  He was amused and dangerous, neither good nor evil. Thor was the classroom bully raised to the scale of growling thunder and whipping rain. Odin was Power, was in power. Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself.

  The gods needed him because he was clever, because he solved problems. When they needed to break bargains they had rashly made, mostly with giants, Loki showed them the way out. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories – if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems.

  There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult. In myths he was the third of the trio, Odin, Hodur, Loki. In myths, the most important comes first of three. But in fairy tales, and folklore, where these three gods also play their parts, the rule of three is different; the important player is the third, the youngest son, Loki.

  He had a wife, in Asgard, Sigyn, who loved him, and two sons, Wali and Narwi.

  But he was an outsider, with a need for the inordinate.

  The thin child, reading and rereading the tales, neither loved nor hated the people in them – they were not ‘characters’ into whose doings she could insert her own imagination. As a reade
r, she was a solemn, occasionally troubled, occasionally gleeful onlooker. But she almost made an exception for Loki. Alone among all these beings he had humour and wit. His changeable shapes were attractive, his cleverness had charm. He made her uneasy, but she had feelings about him, whereas the others, Odin, Thor, Baldur the beautiful, were as they were, their shapes set, wise, strong, lovely.

  Eastward the old one

  in the Iron

  Wood raises the wolves

  of Fenrir’s race

  one is destined

  to be some day

  the monstrous beast

  who destroys the moon.

  The Iron Wood was outside the walls of Asgard, outside the meadow of Midgard, a dark place, a devilish place, inhabited by things that were part-beast and part-human, or even part-god, or part-demon. The old one in the poem is Angurboda, Angrboða, bringer of anguish, a giant with a fierce face, a pelt of wolf-hair, clawed hands and feet, and sharp teeth. Loki played with her, rippling like flame over and in her body, pleasuring her against her will, clutching and clasping and escaping, invading and ungraspable. They spoke to each other in snarls and hissings. Sigyn would not have known this ferocious Loki or recognised his triumphant howl as his seed went in. Did he foresee the shapes of his children? One was a wolf-cub, armed already with an array of sharp teeth and a dark throat behind them. One was a supple snake, with a crown of fleshy feelers and teeth sharp as her brother’s, though fine as needles. She was dull gold with blood-red flickering over her scales as she stretched and coiled.

  The third was a woman, or a giantess, or a goddess. She was a strange colour, or colours. Her form was uncompromising, straight-spined, with long legs, strong, capable hands, firm feet. Her face was, there was no other way of putting it, severe. She had carved cheeks and a wide, unsmiling mouth, inside which were strong sharp teeth, wolfish teeth, teeth for ripping. Her nose was fine and her brows were dusky, like smoke, like the lower world’s kenning for ‘forest’, seaweed of the hills. Her eye-sockets went back and back. Inside their caverns were unblinking dark, dark eyes, like pools of tar, or wells where no light was reflected. But the colour. Half of her was black, and half of her was blue. Half of her, those who saw her also reported, was living flesh, and half was dead. Sometimes the line between the black and the blue split her cleanly, running from the crown of her black head, down the long nose, the chin, the breastbone, the sex, to the space between the feet. But sometimes the black and the blue floated on and in each other. They were beautiful, like the last blue of the sky meeting the dark of the coming night. They were hideous, the colour of bruises on battered or moribund flesh. She slept naked, coiled and curled with her terrible kin, scales, fur, snout, fangs, lids over glaring eyes. They emitted a raucous hissing and purring. They delighted Loki. He fed them and watched them grow. Who knew what they might do? They grew, and grew.

  Odin sat on his throne, Hlidskialf, holding his spear, Gungnir, surveying Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim and Ironwood. Two black ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), told him what they had seen during their flight. He turned his fierce face towards Ironwood.

  Loki was, in the beginning, in the days when the Gap was flooded by Ymir’s pouring blood, the foster brother of Odin. They had sworn blood-brotherhood, and ridden in the same boat over the blood. Now Odin imposed order, and Loki smiled at disorder. The gods knew that the three monsters were dangerous and would be more dangerous. Odin sent out a force to fetch them, Hermodur the bright, and the god of the hunt, Tyr. They crossed the bright bridge, Bifröst, which joins Asgard to other worlds, crossed the river Ifing and came to where Loki was, in the dark land of the Hrimthurses. They seized the three and carried them back to the steps of Hlidskialf. The wolf yawned. The snake coiled herself into a knot. Hel stood rigid, blue-black, staring.

  Odin acted. He threw two of the three out into space. The small snake gleamed dully in the air, and fell, and flew, and fell, and came down on the surface of the bright-black ocean that surrounded Midgard. She stretched, and swam for a time, rising and falling on the waves. Then she sank, or plunged, and was out of sight. The gods applauded.

  Odin took Hel and flung her towards Niflheim, the dark land of mists and cold. She remained rigid, like an arrow from a bow, a sharp-nosed missile, on and on, down and down, nine days falling through sunlight, moonlight and starlight, past the racing chariots of the Sun and the Moon, past the tips of firs and past their roots, into and through the lightless bogs and swamps of Niflheim, across the cold torrent of Giöll and into Helheim, where she was to rule over those human dead who were not fortunate enough to die in battle, a land of shadows. The bridge over Giöll was gold, and the perimeter fence of Hel was iron, high and impassable. Inside the dark hall a throne waited for the bruised, livid being, the goddess, the monstrous child, and a crown lay on a black cushion, made of white gold, and moonstones, pearls like congealed tears and crystals, like frost. When she took up the crown, and the wand which lay beside it, the dead began to flood into her hall like whispering bats, innumerable, insubstantial. She welcomed them, unsmiling. They wheeled about her, whistling weakly, and she had dishes brought, with the ghosts of fruits and flesh, and beakers, inside which were the ghosts of mead and wine, with ghostly bubbles at the rim.

  And the wolf? Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind. Humans heard the howling in the dark, an urgent music, a gleeful reciprocal chorus; the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head. There, too, are the bristling coat, the snout, the teeth, the blood. Firelight, and the light of the full moon, are reflected in inhuman eyes, glittering in the dark, specks of brightness in deep shadows. Humans respect wolves, the closeness and warmth of the pack, the ingenuity of the chase, the calling and growling, messages from the throat. Odin in Asgard had two tamed cubs at his feet, to which he threw the meat he did not eat. Wolves are free and monstrous: wolves are the forebears of dogs, which are creatures of the hearth and hunt, who have replaced the pack leader with a human one. Humans and gods made their own packs to hunt down and kill the wolf packs. Maybe cubs were taken from a lair when the parents had been slaughtered, and fed on milk and meat, and brought in from the wild. Maybe a solitary cub sat on its haunches at the edge of a clearing and howled, and was taken in by a woman, and fed and tamed. They point their snouts at the moon, and howl.

  The god, Tyr, was a hunter and a fighter. He wore a wolfskin as a cloak; the great dead head lolled above his bearded face, hairy, blind and snarling. When Odin hesitated over how to dispose of the Fenris-cub, Tyr said he would take it, and feed it, and tame it perhaps, so it could hunt with him. Fenris growled in his throat and laid back his ears. The thin child in wartime wondered why omniscient Odin did not simply destroy the wolf and the snake, who were clearly venomous and appalling, and full of animosity towards the Ases. But he clearly could not do this – he was constrained by some other power, which gave shape to the story that held him. The story decided that the destroyers must survive. All the gods could do was inhibit the monsters, disable them. Tyr believed he knew the wolf, because he knew the wild. He took him to the woods of Midgard, fed him, and ran with him through the trees. They played together: when the beast was bigger, they would hunt together.

  The wolf grew. Like his father he was inordinate. His voice deepened and opened out – he had a gamut of growls, chuckling barks, full-throated howls which could be heard, louder and louder, in faraway Asgard. Tyr heard it as the music of the wild. He was the only one. The playful cub became a lolloping youngling the size of a boar, and growing every day. He killed for pleasure, which Tyr put down to juvenile playfulness. He left bleeding hares in the snow, and gutted fawns in the forest. He grew to the size of an ass, a colt, and then a young bull. Midgard resounded to his racket, and his silences were ominous, because when he was silent, he was stalking, and no one – no god – knew what he would take it into his head to stalk next. Tyr brought him flanks of pork, and dead geese, to placate him, to have his confidence.
Fenris swallowed, and howled, and killed.

  The gods decided to tie up the wolf. The words men used to describe the gods were the words they used for fetters or bonds, things which held the world together, within bounds, preventing the breakout of chaos and disorder. Odin ruled with a spear, wrought from a branch torn from Yggdrasil, a spear carved with the runes of justice, a spear which had brought war into the world, to solve disputes, a spear which finished off warriors and was their way into Valhalla and eternal roast pork, honey and chess-play. The gods controlled. The wolf was the raging son of the incomprehensible and unpredictable Loki, who mocked their solemnities and said they would come to no good end. But something in their sense of the order of things led them to decide merely to restrict and torture the great beast, not to try to slay him. To do this they needed guile, they needed to trick him into co-operating, they needed him to submit.

  They made a strong fetter, which was named Leyding, and they went in a gang to the wolf in the woods, and spoke to him pleasantly and said they had brought this plaything for him, to show off his power. They would bind him in it, for fun, and he would break out, and show them the power of his sinews and nerves. The wolf’s hackles rose: he looked at them with cold, calculating eyes, the pupils narrowed to pinshots. He could do that, he said, rolling his wiry muscles under his glistening hair. But why should he? They had been betting, they said, facing the beast at the edge of the clearing, from where he could vanish into the dark wood, or spring tooth and claw upon the gods – they had been betting on how long the breakout would take him. Heimdall, the herald, who guarded the high gate of Asgard, could hear the grass grow on the earth, and the wool springing from the hide of sheep. He could hear the wolf’s blood pounding and pumping, he could hear his pelt expanding. ‘Play with us’, he said to the beast, who took a calculating look at Leyding and lay down on the forest floor and held out his great clawed pads. So they took the fetter, and bound his feet, trussed them together, bound his jaw, avoiding the smell of his hot meaty breath, and left him like an ox made ready for roasting. He made a strangled sound, and shook his head from side to side, and coughed in his constricted throat, and coughed again, and shook himself, swelling all his joints, and the fetter cracked and buckled and fell to the earth. The wolf stood on his feet and glowered at the gods and made a sound between howl and purr, which they knew was laughter. He looked at them, almost expecting further play, but they fell back and returned to Asgard.