Ragnarök

At a Glance

• Central figures: Odin the Allfather; Thor, god of thunder; Loki the trickster; Heimdall the watchman; Tyr the war-god; Fenrir the wolf; Jormungandr the world-serpent; Garm the hound of Hel; Surtr the fire-giant; and the survivors Vidar, Vali, Modi, Magni, Baldr, and Hodr.
• Setting: The Nine Realms of Norse cosmology - Asgard, Midgard, Hel, and beyond - culminating on the battlefield of Vigrid; drawn from the Norse mythological tradition of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda.
• The turn: Loki breaks free from his chains, Fenrir and the wolves devour the sun and moon, and the armies of chaos sail on Naglfar toward a final battle at Vigrid.
• The outcome: Odin, Thor, Tyr, Heimdall, Loki, Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Garm all die; Surtr burns the Nine Realms to ash; the world sinks beneath the sea and rises again green and new.
• The legacy: A new world emerges from the wreckage - Lif and Lifthrasir repopulate Midgard, the surviving sons of Odin and Thor inherit the weapons of their fathers, and Baldr returns from the dead to rule in the reborn age.

The signs came one by one, as they were always going to. Baldr died. The long winter followed. The world knew what it meant.

Fimbulwinter - the great winter without end - swept across Midgard and held for three years. No warmth from the sun. Winds from every direction. Snow over everything. Famine came with the cold, and then the killing: fathers against sons, brothers against brothers. The ties that had kept men together since the first age simply gave way.

The gods of Asgard had known since Odin gazed into the Well of Mimir that this was coming. They had known when Loki was bound beneath the earth. They had known when the dwarves forged Gleipnir and Fenrir was chained on the island of Lyngvi. Knowledge had never changed what was written. They gathered their weapons anyway.

The Wolves, the Chains, and the Ship of Nails

Sköll and Hati had hunted the sun and moon since the world was made. At Ragnarök, they caught them. The sky went dark. Stars fell. What light remained was the kind that shows nothing useful.

Underground, Loki’s bonds snapped. He had lain in that place long enough - torment dripping from the serpent above him, Sigyn catching what she could in her bowl, nothing else for company. He rose with hatred intact and made straight for the shore where Naglfar waited. The ship was built from the fingernails of the dead, every corpse that had gone uncut into the ground contributing its portion. Loki took the helm. Giants boarded. The armies of chaos sailed for Asgard.

From Helheim, Garm the hound broke free. His howls crossed every realm. The dead rose under Loki’s banner and marched. From Muspelheim, Surtr came with fire - his sword brighter than the sun that no longer shone. Jormungandr, the world-serpent coiled beneath the seas, uncoiled at last, churning the oceans as it came ashore. The Bifrost cracked under the weight of the fire-giants crossing it.

Heimdall raised Gjallarhorn and blew. The gods armed themselves and rode to Vigrid.

Odin and Fenrir

Odin led the einherjar onto the field, Gungnir leveled, wearing the grey cloak and the wide-brimmed hat he’d worn for ages. It made no difference. Fate is not moved by what a man wears to meet it.

Fenrir came at him. The wolf had grown in his chains until nothing could have held him anyway - Gleipnir had simply been the last thing strong enough to try. His upper jaw scraped the sky. His lower jaw dragged the ground. Odin threw Gungnir and fought with everything he had, which was more than any creature alive. It wasn’t enough. Fenrir’s jaws closed. The Allfather was swallowed whole.

Vidar stepped forward almost before his father was gone. He wore the great thick-soled shoe that craftsmen had been adding to since the first age, every scrap of leather trimmed from boot-making set aside for this purpose and this moment. He forced Fenrir’s mouth open with it, drove his sword through the wolf’s palate, and kept driving. Fenrir died. Odin was avenged. Neither thing undid the other.

Thor and Jormungandr

Thor and Jormungandr had nearly killed each other twice before. At the hall of the giant Utgarda-Loki, Thor had nearly lifted the serpent and gone pale when he understood what he’d been holding. Fishing with Hymir, he had hauled Jormungandr to the surface and looked it in the eye before Hymir cut the line. This time there was no cutting the line.

Thor struck with Mjolnir and shattered the serpent’s skull. Jormungandr fell - and as it fell, it spat its venom. Thor walked nine steps before his legs stopped working. He went down beside the serpent he had killed.

Nine steps. The skalds counted them.

Loki and Heimdall

These two had always had the measure of each other. Loki had called Heimdall a muddy-necked watchman who slept badly. Heimdall had been the one who tracked the Brisingamen theft back to Loki. They had fought before in seal-form off a headland, struggling in cold water for a necklace. Now they fought with steel.

It was even. It ended even. Each landed the killing blow. The world lost its trickster and its watchman in the same moment, which may be what the world deserved.

Tyr and Garm, and the Fire of Surtr

Tyr had lost his hand to Fenrir years before - fed it into the wolf’s mouth as a pledge while the other gods bound him, knowing full well what would happen. He had one good hand left when he faced Garm. They killed each other. It was the kind of death Tyr would have considered acceptable.

Then Surtr walked through what remained.

The fire-giant raised his sword and set the world alight from one end to the other. Asgard burned. Midgard burned. The mountains shook apart. The oceans swelled and covered what the fire hadn’t taken. Everything the gods had built, every hall and bridge and sacred grove, went under flame or water. Surtr himself was destroyed in the conflagration.

The Nine Realms were gone.

Lif and Lifthrasir

The sea drew back. The land came up again, green and clean, wet with the water that had covered it. Eagles flew over new mountains. Rivers ran clear.

Lif and Lifthrasir came out of Yggdrasil. The world-tree had stood through everything, and these two had sheltered inside it through the long burning, living on morning dew. They walked out into a world that had no history yet and began the work of filling it.

Vidar and Vali came. Modi and Magni came, carrying Mjolnir between them, their father’s hammer still serviceable. Baldr walked up from Hel, Hodr beside him - the two brothers freed by the death of the old world, neither bound any longer by the grief that had attended them before. They took what remained of their fathers’ gear: Odin’s gold game-pieces, scattered across the new grass, found and gathered and held.

The age that came next would carry different names for its griefs. But it came.