Jormungand, the mighty serpent who dwells at the bottom of the ocean and encircles the land, will rise from the depths, spilling the seas over all the earth as he makes landfall. The chain that has been holding back the monstrous wolf Fenrir will snap, and the beast will run free. Yggdrasil, the great tree that holds the cosmos together, will tremble, and all the trees and even the mountains will fall to the ground. The stars, too, will disappear, leaving nothing but a black void in the heavens. The wolves Skoll and Hati, who have hunted the sun and the moon through the skies since the beginning of time, will at last catch their prey. It will be an age of swords and axes brother will slay brother, father will slay son, and son will slay father. Mankind will become so desperate for food and other necessities of life that all laws and morals will fall away, leaving only the bare struggle for survival. This winter shall last for the length of three normal winters, with no summers in between. The biting winds will blow snows from all directions, and the warmth of the sun will fail, plunging the earth into unprecedented cold. Someday – whenever the Norns, those inscrutable spinners of fate, decree it – there shall come a Great Winter (Old Norse fimbulvetr, sometimes Anglicized as “Fimbulwinter”) unlike any other the world has yet seen. The Fate of the Gods Ragnarok (Franz Stassen, 1920) Without further ado, here’s the tale itself: The word “Ragnarok” comes from Old Norse Ragnarök, “ Fate of the Gods.” In an apparent play on words, some pieces of Old Norse literature also refer to it as Ragnarøkkr, “Twilight of the Gods.” The event was also occasionally referred to as aldar rök, “fate of mankind,” and a host of other names. We’ll explore some of those ramifications below. For the Vikings, the myth of Ragnarok was a prophecy of what was to come at some unspecified and unknown time in the future, but it had profound ramifications for how the Vikings understood the world in their own time. When Norse mythology is considered as a chronological set of tales, the story of Ragnarok naturally comes at the very end. Ragnarok is the cataclysmic destruction of the cosmos and everything in it – even the gods. “Battle of the Doomed Gods” by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1882) Book Review: Neil Price’s The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.Who Were the Indo-Europeans and Why Do They Matter?.The Swastika – Its Ancient Origins and Modern (Mis)use.The Old Norse Language and How to Learn It.The 10 Best Advanced Norse Mythology Books.The Vikings’ Conversion to Christianity.
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