In
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. Ragnarok 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 Voluspa, or Woluspa, 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 Ragnarok. 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 Ragnarok 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 Ragnarok. He would be tortured until Ragnarok came. No one, the thin child thought to herself, had any doubt that Ragnarok 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 child, 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
RAGNAROK
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.
They needed to survive until the spring. Until the days at last grew longer and the sun would melt the snow and the ice, and the wind would die down, and skins could be in the air without being frostbitten.
The shortest day came, and the humans danced, stamping, in the snow, and made bonfires, to greet the turn of the year.
But the year did not exactly turn. The sky became a paler grey, that was all, and the earth and air and water stayed icy.
They began to use things that could not be replaced. The pig’s throat was slit and it was butchered and frozen and roasted. Those hens that did not lay were strangled and plucked and boiled and were not replaced because most chicks died. Feeding the sheep – and the horses and donkeys – became hard – very hard – because of the ruined crops and the frozen fields. Courage became endurance, and soup was needed too much to be fed to the dying.
Outside, in the perpetual twilight, wolves howled and padded. They were hungry and angry.
This, they thought, was how it would be when the Fimbulwinter came. The fat sun was dull red, sullen, like embers. She gave little light, and what there was was ruddy or bloody. They longed in their bones and their brains for clear light, for a warm wind, for buds, for green leaves. The winter stretched into another year, and another. The seas froze: icebergs clashed by the coasts, and floated into the bays. This was, they began to understand, not a likeness of the Fimbulwinter, but the thing itself.
They became raiders. They overran each others’ housesteads, howling and roaring, slaughtering the weak and emptying the meagre stores. They drank what mead there was, swallowed the wine as though there was no tomorrow, which they began to believe was true. Hungry creatures, hungry men, will eat anything. The battle- winners feasted among the dead bodies, which were being torn at by creeping, crouching beasts. They gripped each other and fell about the fire, fornicating with whomever was to hand, with whatever was to hand. They bit and
