Ragnarök: What the Poem Says and What Snorri Added

The end of the Norse gods survives in two main written sources. The first is Völuspá, the Prophecy of the Seeress, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda. The second is Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written in the thirteenth century. Snorri quotes Völuspá heavily, then explains it, expands it, and in places contradicts it. Quotations from the poems below are Benjamin Thorpe's translation unless noted. Snorri's prose is summarized from Jesse Byock's translation as cited in the Wikipedia article on Ragnarök.

A seeress speaks to Odin

Völuspá is spoken by a vala, a wandering prophetess, and her listener is Odin. She calls for silence from "all sacred children, great and small, sons of Heimdall." Then she remembers back to a time before earth and heaven, when there was only a chaotic chasm. She tells of the creation, the dwarfs, and the first humans, Ask and Embla. Then she turns on her listener. She knows where Odin sank his eye, in the well of Mim. He pays her in rings and a necklace, and she looks out over every world.

She keeps breaking off with a refrain. Thorpe gives it as "Understand ye yet, or what?" Ursula Dronke renders it "Do you still seek to know? And what?" It reads less like a question than a warning to a god who is about to hear about his own death.

The deaths that come first

Ragnarök has causes. In Völuspá the seeress sees "the hidden fate" of Baldr, Odin's son. A slender shoot of mistletoe is made into a dart, his brother Hödr shoots it, and Frigg weeps in Fensalir. The Lay of Vegtam covers the dread that comes before. Odin rides Sleipnir down toward Hel and chants a dead seeress up out of her grave. She tells him mead is already brewed for Baldr. When she recognizes him, she sends him away: no one will visit her again "until Loki free from his bonds escapes, and Ragnarök all-destroying comes."

Snorri supplies the prisoners. The gods bind the wolf Fenrir, and Tyr loses his right hand doing it. Gangleri asks why they did not simply kill the bound wolf. In Byock's translation, the gods respected their sanctuaries too much and "chose not to defile them with the wolf's blood," even though the prophecies said he "would be the death of Odin." Loki is bound on three stones with the entrails of his son Narfi, which are turned to iron. A snake placed by Skadi drips venom onto his face. His wife Sigyn catches it in a bucket. When she leaves to empty it, the venom reaches him, he convulses, and the earth quakes.

The signs

This is where the two Eddas start to diverge. Snorri says the first sign is Fimbulwinter: three winters with no summer between them. Before those come three winters of war, when greed sets brothers killing brothers. Völuspá never names Fimbulwinter. It has sunshine turning swart "for summers after" and all weather turning to storm, but what it dwells on is the breaking of kinship:

Brothers shall fight, and slay each other; cousins shall kinship violate.

Then comes the famous run: "an axe age, a sword age, shields shall be cloven, a wind age, a wolf age, ere the world sinks." The word Fimbulwinter does appear in the Poetic Edda, but in a different poem, the Lay of Vafthrudnir, where Odin asks which mortals will outlive it. The ordered sequence of winters survives only in Snorri.

Völuspá then has three cocks crow. Red Fialar crows in the bird wood, golden Gullinkambi wakes the heroes who sit with Odin, and a soot-red one crows in the halls of Hel. The hound Garm bays before the Gnipa cave and breaks his bonds. Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn, Odin speaks with Mim's head, and Yggdrasil trembles and groans.

One small oddity: in the Lay of Grimnir, Odin names a hound called Garm as the best of dogs. Snorri calls the Garm of Ragnarök the worst of monsters. No source says outright that they are the same hound.

The host from the east, the fire from the south

In Thorpe's Völuspá, Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the world serpent writhes, the eagle screams, and Naglfar is loosed. The next stanza has the ship come from the east carrying Muspell's people, "and Loki steers."

Snorri gives the helm of Naglfar to Hrym and puts Loki on the battlefield instead, leading Hel's own. He adds that Naglfar is made from the nails of the dead, that Fenrir's upper jaw reaches heaven while his lower jaw touches the earth, and that the serpent sprays venom over sky and sea. None of that is in the poem.

Surt comes from the south, and from his sword shines what Thorpe calls "the Val-gods' sun." Heaven is cloven. Snorri turns the split sky into a road. The sons of Muspell ride through it and cross Bifröst, and the bridge breaks. Everyone gathers on the plain of Vigrid, which the Lay of Vafthrudnir measures at a hundred rasts on every side.

Who fights whom

The poem names four fights. Odin goes against the wolf, and Frigg suffers her second grief. The first was Baldr. The "bright slayer of Beli," who is Frey, goes against Surt and falls. Thor fights the serpent. Vidar fights the wolf.

Snorri keeps all four and explains why Frey falls: he had given his sword to his messenger Skirnir. Then he adds two duels the poem does not have. Tyr and Garm kill each other, and Loki and Heimdall kill each other. In Völuspá, Garm only howls and runs, and Heimdall only blows his horn.

Thor's end is the same in both:

Nine feet will go Fiörgyn's son, bowed by the serpent, who feared no foe.

Snorri makes it explicit. Thor kills the serpent, the venom gets him, and he falls dead after nine steps.

Three ways to kill a wolf

Vidar's revenge is where the sources disagree most openly. In Thorpe's Völuspá, "he with his hands will make his sword pierce to the heart of the giant's son." Wikipedia's summary of the same stanza, citing Henry Adams Bellows's translation, gives him a spear instead. The Lay of Vafthrudnir mentions no weapon. It says only that he "his cold jaws will cleave." Snorri makes it a feat of strength: Vidar kicks his foot into Fenrir's lower jaw, grips the upper jaw, and tears the mouth apart.

The oldest witness is not a manuscript. The Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, dated 920 to 950, shows a man with a spear. One of his feet is on a beast's lower jaw and the other is against its upper jaw. The scene is usually read as Vidar and Fenrir, and it has both the spear and the foot, carved centuries before Snorri wrote.

The earth sinks, and rises

Völuspá ends the world in a single stanza: "The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall from heaven the bright stars." Hilda Ellis Davidson compared this sequence to Icelandic eruptions, especially Laki in 1783. Bertha Phillpotts argued that Surt began as a volcano demon, and his name survives in the Icelandic lava tube Surtshellir. Mathias Nordvig and Felix Riede have linked the myth to the volcanic winter of 536 to 550.

Then the seeress sees the earth rise again, green, with waterfalls and an eagle catching fish from the fell. The gods meet on Ida's plain and find in the grass the golden tables they played on at the start of the poem. Fields grow without being sown. Baldr and Hödr, the slain and the slayer, come back together. The Lay of Vafthrudnir adds more survivors. Vidar and Vali live in the gods' shrines, and Thor's sons Modi and Magni hold Mjollnir. Two humans, Lif and Lifthrasir, survive in Hoddmimir's holt by living on morning dew. The sun leaves a daughter to ride her mother's course.

Endings that do not agree

Two stanzas complicate the renewal. The first, found in the Hauksbók version of the poem, brings "the mighty one" who "rules o'er all" to a great judgment to establish holy peace forever. Scholars have read it as a Christian addition. The last stanza brings back the dragon Nidhögg, flying with a corpse on his wings, and then the seeress sinks down. The text does not make clear whether the dragon belongs to the new world or the old one.

There is also Odin's final question to Vafthrudnir: what did he say in Baldr's ear before the pyre. The giant recognizes Odin by that question and cannot answer it. Some readers take the whisper as a promise of resurrection. The text never says.

Twilight or fate

The name itself is disputed. Ragnarök combines ragna, "of the gods," with rök, a word that covers fate, origin, and cause. The form ragnarøkkr, "twilight of the gods," appears in Lokasenna and in Snorri. It was widely considered a folk etymology or a learned reinterpretation, made possible when Old Icelandic merged two vowel sounds around 1200. Wagner popularised the German form, Götterdämmerung, with his opera of 1876, and that reading stuck.

On the Skarpåker stone in Södermanland, a father mourning his son carved two lines in Eddic meter: "Earth shall be riven and the over-heaven." Sven B. Jansson notes that anyone who read the stone in its own time would have thought of Ragnarök.

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