Ragnarok

kinds of metal, stones, earth, trees, diseases, animals, birds, poison, snakes. The thin child tried to imagine this oath-swearing. Frigg was pictured in the ur-book, tall, stately, imperious, crowned, with very long pale hair, flowing in the wind. She wore a tight chain-mail shirt, a seemly skirt and incongruous Grecian thonged sandals. Did she set out in her chariot, or was she on foot? The thin child had a literal, visual imagination, that was how she was.

She saw the goddess in the chariot, rushing through the sky, calling out to the clouds, which were Ymir’s brains, to the forked rods of lightning, the hailstones and snowstorms and floods, begging them not to hurt her son, and the thin child imagined those entities pausing a moment in their rushing, flinging and burning to acquiesce, to hold off. But the thin child also saw the goddess walking. Mostly she was travelling down steep paths around high craggy mountains, the landscapes of the early fearful stone chaos from which the German book said men had first made gods and frost-giants, Hrimthurses. The goddess in a shimmer of gold light spoke fearlessly to all these inordinate forms and beseeched them not to harm her son. And again, there was a moment of quiet, and a stillness of agreement. The goddess rushed down to the roots of the mountains, the dark underground caverns where dragons and great worms gnawed the roots of the World-Ash, and spoke to the beasts, and not only to the beasts but to the shining walls of the caverns, to millstone grit and basalt, to veins of iron and tin and lead and gold and silver that were intricately threaded in the stones. She spoke to the boiling pits of red lava and the flowing steaming pumice. To sapphires, diamonds, opals, emeralds, rubies. The thin child, in an ecstasy of imagination, heard all these inanimate things whisper and grate and rustle, and promise. Everything was part of one world, and it would not hurt Baldur the Beautiful.

Sometimes the thin child imagined the beasts in ordered rows, as they were going into the Ark, or in the early days of creation. Sleek, hairy beasts with snarling lips and rending canine teeth. Black panthers, spotted leopards, striped hyenas, padding lions, tigers burning bright with hot eyes, prancing jackals and of course the wolves, the grey wolves, the stalkers, the allies of the imagined enemy. They all promised, and with them the Bandar log – the howling monkeys – the duck-billed platypus with its lethal tooth, the bears on the ice and in the jungle, with friendly faces that belied their malice, all these promised, along with the predators of the hedgerow, weasel, stoat, badger, ferret, shrew. The creatures who promised bore no relation to the bunny rabbits and sweet squirrels who listened to the divine teacher in the clearing in the woodlands. They were ruthless, red in tooth and claw, hunters and hunted, both at once, but they paused to promise and the goddess breathed more calmly and went on her way. Birds promised, eagles, hawks, kites, jays and magpies, along with bats hanging like folded leather in the caverns, with small mouths that drank blood.

The thin child spent a tremulous time imagining the snakes. She had once seen the cast skin of an adder, with its diamond head. They opened their fangs, and hissed and promised, adder and bushmaster, krait and cobra, the biting snakes and the spitting snakes, the rattlesnakes and the great constricting snakes of the jungle, boa constrictor and anaconda. And there were the sea-snakes, coiling and flashing in the oily sea, and the water predators, muggers and alligators, and then the fish, smooth sharks and gleeful killer whales, giant squid and stinging medusas, and the shoals of tunny and cod. The line stretched out to crack of doom; things promised that could hardly be thought of as harmful, oysters and earwigs, anemones in woods and on coral reefs, grass even, all the hundreds of kinds of grasses. All the harmless-looking or enticing plants that were killers, deadly nightshade, sooty purple, laburnum with dangling sharp yellow blossoms, the gaudy death-cap, the horse mushroom, and the fly-agaric.

Between the trees and the animals Snorri listed diseases. How do you swear a disease to harmlessness? The thin child suffered dreadfully from asthma. Because of this disease she lay in bed and read encyclopaedias and Asgard and the Gods. She imagined the asthma which inhabited her as an alien creature, it was true. It was pure white and flimsy, it spread its parasitic body through her desperate lungs, her spinning brain, it was like roots working their way into stonework, it was a relative of the boa constrictor and the strangling fig. She had to learn how to sit, how to lie, how to hold her ribcage to accommodate its grip. She imagined Frigg speaking urgently to it – do not hurt my son – and the brief moment when it let go, to promise. She imagined the fiery faces of measles and smallpox, hot and greedy, nevertheless promising. Measles had taken over the sack of her skin and broiled there. Chickenpox had burst through her, boiling up in pustules. But they promised Frigg. Not to harm her son.

Everything was held together by these agreements. The surface of the earth was like a great embroidered cloth, or rich tapestry, with an intricately interwoven underside of connected threads. She walked through the fields to school, in spring and in summer. There were borders of flowers round the wheatfields, full of scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers, great white moondaisies, buttercups, cowslips, corn buttercups, lamb’s succory and thorow-wax. Broad-leaved spurge, red hemp-nettle, shepherd’s purse, shepherd’s needle, corn-parsley. In the long grass in the meadow were milkmaids, orchids and knotgrass.

Under the earth worms were busy, millipedes ran, springtails flourished, all kinds of beetles dug burrows and laid eggs. Maggots and caterpillars squirmed; some were eaten by fledglings and harvest mice, some changed miraculously into butterflies, white and gold, umber and purple, bright blue, pale blue, mint-green, spangled with stripes and frills and eyes on black velvet. Up out of the corn came skylarks, spiralling and singing. Plovers tumbled overhead, crying, peewit, peewit. She had bird books and flower books, the thin child, and noted them all, tree sparrow, bullfinch, song thrush, lapwing, linnet, wren. They ate and were eaten, it was true, they faded and vanished as the earth turned, but they came back at the solstice, and always would, whereas Baldur was doomed to die, for all the promises. If her father did not come back, he would never come back.

There is no record of Frigg having asked humans not to harm her son. Maybe they were always helpless when faced with the gods. Maybe they did not count or were in some other story. They were not woven into the gloss and glitter, the relief and shadows of the tapestry.

The thin child knew the promise could not hold. Something, somewhere, must have been missed, must have been forgotten. Stories are ineluctable. At this stage of every story, something must go wrong, be awry, whatever the ending to come. It is not given, even to gods, to take complete, foolproof, perfect precautions. There will be a loophole, slippage, a dropped stitch, a moment of weariness or inattention. The goddess called everything, everything, to promise not to harm her son. Yet the shape of the story means that he must be harmed.

The gods celebrated the cohesion of earth, air, fire, water and all the creatures in and on these elements. They celebrated as they might have been expected to, with fighting and shouting. They had a kind of playground scuffle in which everyone ganged up on one unarmed victim, only in this case the centre of the scuffle was Baldur the beautiful, Baldur the victim, standing there peaceably, mildly proud of his invulnerability. They threw things at him, all kinds of things, everything they could. Sticks, staves, stones, flint axe-heads, knives, daggers, swords, spears, even in the end Thor’s thunder-hammer, and they watched with delight as these things wheeled gracefully like harmless boomerangs and returned to the throwers. The more returned, the more they threw, thicker and faster. This was a good game. It was the best game ever invented. The gods laughed and smiled and threw, and threw again.

An old woman came to see Frigg who was in her palace, Fensalir. Frigg does not appear to have wondered who she was or where she came from. She was just an old woman like any other old woman, indeed an archetypal old woman. If you looked hard at her she was almost too perfect, the web of wrinkles over her face and neck, the intricate folds of her long cloak over her dark dress, a kind of icon of old-womanhood. If she looked at you – even if you were the queen of the Ases – you could not hold her cold grey gaze, but you knew you needed to speak to her, she shimmered with your need to speak to her, almost as though only your need held her shape together. She was Loki the shapeshifter of course, putting out waves of glamour. So Frigg asked, as he needed her to do, what they were all doing in the fields of Asgard, crying out and whooping?