Ragnarok

characters – the point is a pleasurable and satisfactory foreseen outcome, where the good survive and multiply and the bad are punished. The Grimms thought their collected fairy tales were the ancient folk religion of their German ancestors but there is a difference. Hans Andersen did not write impersonal fairy stories of this kind, or not often – he wrote nuanced stories with characters, personalities and feelings in them, authored stories, works of the imagination. I felt he was trying to frighten or hurt me as a reader. I still think he was.

Myths are often unsatisfactory, even tormenting. They puzzle and haunt the mind that encounters them. They shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible. The numinous, to use a word that was very fashionable when I was a student. The fairy stories were in my head like little bright necklaces of intricately carved stones and wood and enamels. The myths were cavernous spaces, lit in extreme colours, gloomy, or dazzling, with a kind of cloudy thickness and a kind of overbright transparency about them. I met a description of being taken over by a myth in a poem my mother gave me, W.J. Turner’s poem ‘Romance’.

When I was but thirteen or so

I went into a golden land,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Took me by the hand.

My father died, my brother too,

They passed like fleeting dreams.

I stood where Popocatapetl

In the sunlight gleams.

I dimly heard the master’s voice

And boys far-off at play –

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had stolen me away.

I walked in a great golden dream

To and fro from school –

Shining Popocatapetl

The dusty streets did rule.

I walked home with a gold dark boy,

And never a word I’d say,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had taken my speech away.

I gazed entranced upon his face

Fairer than any flower –

O shining Popocatapetl

It was thy magic hour:

The houses, people, traffic seemed

Thin fading dreams by day;

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

They had stolen my soul away!

I recognised that state of mind, that other world. The words in my head were not Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, but Ginnungagap, Yggdrasil and Ragnarok. And in later life there were other moments like this. Aeneas seeing the Sibyl of Cumae writhing in the cave. ‘Immanis in antro bacchatur vates.’ Or Milton’s brilliant Snake crossing Paradise, erect upon his circling folds.

When Canongate invited me to write a myth I knew immediately which myth I wanted to write. It should be Ragnarok, the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed. There were versions of this story in which the world, which had ended in a flat plane of black water, was cleansed and resurrected, like the Christian world after the last judgment. But the books I read told me that this could well be a Christian interpolation, and I found it weak and thin compared to all the brilliant destruction. No, the wolf swallowed the king of the gods, the snake poisoned Thor, everything was burned in a red light and drowned in blackness. It was, you might say, satisfactory.

I found it harder than I had expected to find a voice for telling the myth that was not vatic, or chaunting, or admonitory in the wrong way. The civilisation I live in thinks less and less in terms of raw myth, I think, and the idea of many other writers in the Canongate series has been to assimilate the myths into the form of novels, or modern stories, retell the tales as though the people had personalities and psychologies. There is also a particularly interesting retelling of the stories by the Danish novelist Villy Sorensen, published in Danish as Ragnarok. En gudefort?lling and in English as The Downfall of the Gods. Sorensen grew up, he says, in the world influenced by the Christian teaching of N.F.S. Grundtvig, who argued in his Northern Mythology (1808) that the war between the Norse gods and the giants was ‘the fight of the spirit against the baser side of human nature – as culture’s perpetual fight against barbarity’. The followers of Grundtvig believed that the ‘new world’ depicted in a poem in the Elder Edda as arising after the catastrophe of Ragnarok – which was named Gimle – was an analogy of the Christian Second Coming, the new heaven and the new earth foretold in Revelation. Sorensen suggests, as did the German scholars who wrote Asgard and the Gods, that because the tales were written down by Icelanders who were already Christian, their interpretations and forms may have been influenced by Christianity. The Danes thought in terms of Ragnarok followed by Gimle after their defeat by the Prussians in 1864, and Sorensen’s version is part of a Scandinavian attempt to rescue the myth from the Germanic (and eventually Nazi) connotations involved in the history of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung.

Sorensen’s way of rescuing and retelling the Norse myth is to humanise it as a battlefield between power and love, with Loki – both god and giant – as a central and conflicted figure. Sorensen’s Valhalla is human and domestic. His gods have feelings, doubts, psychological problems. He ends, not with Gimle, but with the end of the world – he has chosen, he says, between Ragnarok and Gimle, and aroused great anger amongst religious Danes by doing so. What he does, in a very interesting way, is precisely what I felt prohibited from doing.

I tried once or twice to find a way of telling the myth that preserved its distance and difference, and finally realised that I was writing for my childhood self, and the way I had found the myths and thought about the world when I first read Asgard and the Gods. So I introduced the figure of the ‘thin child in wartime’. This is not a story about this thin child – she is thin partly because she was thin, but also because what is described of her world is thin and bright, the inside of her reading and thinking head, and the ways in which she related the worlds of Asgard and Pilgrim’s Progress to the world and the life she inhabited.

The war might well have destroyed the thin child’s world. She built her own contrary myth in her head. Even if – indeed when – she herself came to an end the earth would go on renewing itself. The fair field was full of flowers,