Ragnarok

by A. S. Byatt

  Then the Ases sent out messengers, young gods and wise birds, horsemen and runners, with one message to the whole web of Midgard, living and lifeless, warm blood, cold blood, sap and stone, that they should weep Baldur out of Hel’s power. Dark Hödur wept in his forest lair. Cattle and sheep stood stolid and bellowed and snorted and wept. Howling monkeys and rambling bears brushed tears from their eyes; vipers and rattlers hissed and were still while the tears welled. Stalactites and stalagmites dripped; geysirs mingled warm tears in the boiling steam; the surfaces of boulders and outcrops sweated tearwater, as they do when they come from frost to warm weather. There was steam in the forests and the meadows from dripping leaves; the surfaces of apples, grapes, pomegranates, snow-berries and dewberries were slippery with weeping. The sky itself was full of thick cloud which was made of tears, and wept. Under the salt surface, in the kelp forest, the creatures crowded on Rándrasill wept salt into salt, crown-of-thorns and purple squid, otters and slugs, whelks and winkles, made drops of salt water run into salt water. The lidless eyes of fish and the eyes of whales deep in blubber brimmed water into water and the sea level rose. So also did all quiet pools and rushy fountains, and even stone horse troughs inside which red threadworms wept for the brightness that was gone. Water climbed inside Yggdrasil’s channels and dripped from the soggy leaves onto the damp bark and the wet ground. The gods wept in their gold palace, even finally Frigg, who had been stony and tearless in her great grief. Tears lay like a veil on her face, a sheet of water like those that brim in the flooded grass round rivers that have burst their banks. The earth and the sea and the sky were one thing, which wept as one thing.

  Except. Not the mistletoe, this time. Not anyone or anything forgotten through the negligence of the messengers of the gods. Something, or someone, encountered in a dark, dry, rocky hole in a black desert. The diligent messenger went in bravely through the weeping rockface, into lightless tunnels – still wet – and came at last to a black hole, stuffy, not damp, in which something vast huddled and swayed. Who was the messenger? Someone close to Frigg, maybe Gna her handmaid, a horsewoman who rode out over the world at her behest. The thing in the black hole made a sound like dry leaves, like tinder, its garments rustled and swirled. It was dry as a dry bone in a dry place, and its face was a dry bone face, black as its wrappings, with cavernous eyeholes and a lipless mouth full of black teeth. This, Gna thought, was some mountain giantess. She approached – quietly – and said she was come to ask the cave’s inhabitant to weep with the rest of the world, with the whole world together, so that Baldur might return to the land of the living and bring his light with him. She said, ‘Who are you, mother?’

  ‘Thöck’ said the dry voice inside the dark bones.

  The voice ground out:

  ‘Thöck must weep with dry eyes

  Over Baldur’s ending.

  Neither in life nor in death did I have

  need of him.

  Let Hel hold what she has.’

  Gna found herself out on the trail through the mountains. Everything dripped. She rode back dejected, and told Frigg that something called Thöck would not weep.

  ‘Thöck’, said Frigg, ‘means darkness, the dark. I do not believe your dry giantess was a giantess, any more than the old woman with the mistletoe was an old woman.’

  The spring of the world was gone. There was a rainbow but it was watery and incomplete, patches of hectic colour here and there in the thick cloud, which never seemed to lift. The tides, swelled by tears, were irregular and unpredictable. Things on the earth drooped in their wetness which would not quite dry. Yggdrasil had stains of mould and decay. Rándrasill was scraped bare, in places, by rasping tongues licking up tearwater. A kind of sloth was at the heart of things.

  The gods decided that Thöck was Loki in disguise. They blamed Loki for what he had done – the use of the mistletoe – and for many things he had not had a hand in, Baldur’s bad dreams, the wayward weather, too much wet, too much scorching, dark days, too much wind. He was an enemy and they decided he was the enemy. They would take revenge. They were good at revenge.

  Loki’s House

  Loki had a house in a high place, an eyrie on a cliff overlooking a wild waterfall, Franang, which hurled itself into a deep pool, which overflowed into a rushing stream. His house was simple: it had one room, with four great doors opening in every direction. Sometimes, in the form of a falcon, he perched on the rooftree and looked with eagle eyes in all directions for the chase he knew would come. The house was sparsely furnished; there was a great fire in the centre, under the chimney, and tables, on which the trickster spread things he was studying. Odin had acquired knowledge in danger and pain, and at the cost of an eye. Odin’s knowledge was the knowledge of the forces that bound things together, and of the runes that read and controlled those forces. Treaties were inscribed on his straight spear, torn from the living Ash. This spear both kept the peace and upheld the rule of the gods, who, we have seen, were themselves often referred to, by men, with words that meant bonds and fetters. Odin controlled magic, a form of knowledge that controlled things and creatures, including the societies of gods and men. Odin dealt death at a distance to those who displeased him. He interrogated the Norns, and the dead, and the powers under the earth, in the interests of the Ases and the Einherjar. His vengeance was fearful, and the sacrifices made to him were fearful. Culprits and enemies had their bleeding lungs torn out through their ribcages, making them into ghastly ‘blood-eagles’, twisted and dripping. No creature could meet his one eye. All lowered their gaze.

  Loki was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and worked in the world. He was neither kind nor gentle, not anyway when he inhabited the world of myth. In the world of folktales he was a fire demon, mostly benign, providing warmth for hearths and ovens. In the world of Asgard he was smiling and reckless, a forest fire devouring what stood in its path.

  In his falcon shape he hunted small creatures and brought them back and spread their brains and lungs on his table so that he could study the forms lurking in the intricate shapelessness of their mass of spongy air-cells, the branching veins, the slits for their roots. Brains, too, amused him. He liked the twining convoluted lumps, white inside, grey outside, and the fissures running between the lobes. A sacrificed man was a cross, a simplified tree. A lung, a brain, was complexity run wild, an unholy mess in which a different kind of order might nevertheless be discerned.

  He collected other things which also seemed at first glance formless. A wing feather was regular, hooked plumes sprouting orderly from the spine of the quill. But down – duckdown, swansdown with matted or floating wisps – down was intriguing, there were rhythms and repetitions lurking in the puffed threads.

  He studied, most of all, fire and water. Fire was his element but he also changed himself into a great salmon and threaded his way swiftly through the crash of the waterfall, across the eddies of the deep pool, over its lip into the rushing river, which parted round a great stone, and joined again, twisting and bubbling.

  You could read the future in columns of smoke, or leaping points of flame, red, yellow, blue-green, never still but holding their shape. Why did the smoke rise smooth and fast in a straight column and then quite suddenly divide into fantastic swirling, more and more turbulent? Why did the water flow smoothly towards the rock, so you could see the fine lines of bubbles smooth in it, or let them run over your shining scales, pink and silver? And then, suddenly, the water round the rock would divide every which way, frothing and spinning in curves and curlicues, occasionally gathering and spinning round sudden whirlpools. The water grew wilder like the smoke, and in many ways resembled it. Loki wanted to learn from it – not exactly to master fire or water, but to map them. But beyond the curiosity there was delight. Chaos pleased him. He liked things to get more and more furious, more wild, more ungraspable, he was at home in turbulence. He would provoke turbulence to please himself and tried to understand
it in order to make more of it. He was in burning columns of smoke in battlefields. He was in the fury of rivers bursting their banks, or the waterwalls of high tides throwing themselves over flood defences, bringing down ships and houses.

  He was reckless and cunning, both. He swam in his waterways seeking out hiding places for when the gods came, gravel patches against which the great still fish, scaly and glittering, would not stand out, deep channels along which he could slide towards the sea, churning pools where ripples and sucking obscured the view.

  He thought like the gods, to forestall them. If he were a god, and he knew that his enemy was fish-shaped and rapid, how would he trap him? He began, with long strips of twisted linen threads, to make a net that would go across the outlet from the pool, and which would entangle the big fish. He got interested in this, and invented several new kinds of knots, and a kind of drawstring for pulling round the struggling fish. That would get it, he thought, and noticed that his fire was suddenly smoking fiercely – a strong, regular flow of smoke, going up and up, and then breaking up into whirling. This was a sign that the pursuit had found him, and was on its way, riding the clouds. He dropped the fishing net hastily into the fire – which sputtered blue and bit into it. Then he became a bird and flew to the waterfall where he became a salmon and swam down deep.

  * * *

  The gaggle of gods, with their flying horses, goat-drawn and even cat-drawn chariots, rode the north wind and broke into the house through all four doors. They looked around: the trickster was not there. One observed that he had recently been there, for the hearth, and the ashes in it, were warm. A very clever god, Kvasir, who was known for making poetry, stepped forward and studied the hot ashes. They were made of wooden logs and bracken tufts, which still held the grey ghosts of their shapes, though when they were touched they would fall into shapelessness. Lying over these burned plants was an ashen pattern, a regular pattern, a pattern of squares and diamonds, and threads and knots. Kvasir scrutinised the knots, told the others to touch nothing, and found Loki’s store of linen threads. This was the phantom of a clever trap for fish, Kvasir told the gods. A new one could be put together, after scrutinising the forms of the knotting. So he squatted down, nimble-fingered, and made a new net.

  The gods slunk out to the waterfall, carrying the fishnet. The fish heard their tread, and sank to the gravel, moving nothing but his gills. The gods stood round the deep pool and cast the net into it. They could see nothing, for the surface bubbled with turbulence. The fish moved his fins to shift the gravel, and half bury himself, and the cast net went over him. He thought about how he would get out of this, and considered making a dash for the pool lip and the open stream. But they would see him, they were sharp-eyed. Maybe, he thought, he could do what salmon did, and surprise them by making a wild leap up the falling water, and swim away, upstream. He was, he was sure, cleverer than all the gods put together and that was not saying much, said the trickster to himself in his proud mind, fanning the gravel. Kvasir however had the idea of weighting the net and dragging it across the floor of the pool, held by Thor on one side, and all the other Aesir on the other. So they did this, moving slowly and resolutely, and they felt the net hit and pull against a solid body. So they pulled the cunning strings and drew him up fighting, the sleek and lissom fish with furious eyes. He was limp until they had him at the rim, and then made a great muscular leap, and would have got away if Thor had not put out a vast hand and gripped him by the tail. The fish struggled. The thunder god held on, revenging himself for countless taunts and teasing tricks. They wrapped him in the copy of his own burned net, and carried him back to Asgard.

  The word for gods is also the word for bonds, and Loki, like his son Fenris, was bound. They took him to a cave and set up three flat stones, and bored a hole through each one. They brought his family to see his defeat – not the inordinate family from the Iron Wood, but his faithful wife Sigyn, and her two sons, Wali and Narwi. They said the shapeshifter should see shapes shifted, and they turned the young man, Wali, into a snarling wolf, who immediately set upon his brother and tore him limb from limb. Then the smiling gods killed the wolf – Odin plunged his great spear, Gungnir, into its guts. Laughing, they took the bloody entrails and sinews of wolf and man, and used them to bind Loki, between the three stones – one under his shoulders, the second under his loins, the third under his knee-joints.

  Loki stirred in the dripping web, thinking perhaps that he could still become a fly, or an earwig, and creep away. But the gods sang runes to the bonds of flesh, and they became iron and gripped.

  The storm goddess, Skadi, blithe and mocking, brought a vast snake, spitting poison, and caged it on the cave-roof over Loki’s face, so that the poisonous spittle dripped endlessly onto him.

  There he should stay, the gods said, satisfied, until Ragnarök.

  His wife crept up with a great dish, in which she caught the poison. It was said that whenever she had to take this dish away, to empty it, the prisoner writhed in his bonds, and this was what humans felt as earthquakes.

  The gods laughed at the pair of them.

  But they knew Ragnarök was coming, the thin child thought. The Fenris-Wolf was bound, and Jörmungander was made into a bond, clasped round the earth under the sea. Hel was inside her palisade. Wolves and snakes infested the mind, but were kept within limits. As the snake circled the sea, the sky-wolves circled the heavens, always pursuing Day and Night, Sun and Moon, never catching them, never relenting.

  In Asgard and the Gods Ragnarök came hard upon the binding of Loki, as though there were no meaningful events to be recorded in the gap between. The book explained that ‘Ragnarök means the darkening of the Regin, i.e. of the gods, hence the Twilight of the Gods; some however explain the word Rök to mean Judgement, i.e. of the gods’. The Twilight is particularly pleasing, though etymologically wrong, it appears – it is Ragnarök, judgement or destiny (ragna is the genitive plural of Regin). Ragnarøkkr would indeed mean twilight of the gods, but it is, we are told, a misreading.

  The thin child was baffled by the placing of the death, darkening, judgment, or twilight of the gods in the story book she had. Part of the delight and mystery of this book was that everything was told several times, in different orders and in different tones of voice. The book opened with a kind of headed catalogue of the gods, with their deeds and fates. Ragnarök has its place in this list, appearing as early as page 16, summarised poetically. But it is retold in a more naturalistic form at the end of the book, with emotions and judgments, and it is retold again in a verse translation of the Völuspa, or Wöluspa, the Lay of Wala, at the very end of the book, incantatory and chilling. It is told in the present tense, a prophetic vision of the future, seen as though it was Now. The thin child became an onlooker at the death of the world, every time she read these different tellings of the tale. Even Baldur’s bad dreams were a foreseeing of the disasters of Ragnarök. It felt different from Christian accounts of the end of things, with the undead god returning to judge the quick and the dead. Here the gods themselves were judged and found wanting. Who judged? What brought Ragnarök about? Loki, waiting to be found, waiting to be trapped, waiting to be bound, was described as knowing that his torment was the beginning of the time of Ragnarök. He would be tortured until Ragnarök came. No one, the thin child thought to herself, had any doubt that Ragnarök was coming, neither the gods, nor the wolves, nor the snakes, nor the shapeshifting trickster. They were transfixed, staring at it, like rabbits with weasels, with no thoughts of averting it. The Christian God condemned sinful men, and raised up the ‘good’ dead. The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. Not clever enough, and bad. The thin child, thinking of playground cruelty and the Blitz, liked to glance at the idea that gods were bad, that things were bad. That the story had always been there, and the actors had always known it.

  LOKI IN CHAINS

  THE THIN CHILD IN TIME

  Imagining the end of things, when you are a chil
d, is perhaps impossible. The thin child, despite the war that was raging, was more afraid of eternal boredom, of doing nothing that mattered, of day after day going nowhere, than she was of death or the end of things. When she thought of death she thought of the little boy across the road who had died of diabetes. No one at school, told of this, knew how to respond. Some giggled. They shifted in their seats. She did not, in fact, imagine this boy as dead; she went no further than understanding that he was not there and would not be. She knew that her father would not return, but she knew this as a fact in her own life, not in his. He would not be there again. She had nightmares about hangings, appalled that any human being could condemn any other human to live through the time of knowing the end was ineluctably coming.

  SURTUR WITH HIS FLAMING SWORD

  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.