the sky was full of birds, the tangled bank hid a world of struggle, water was alive with swimming and wriggling things. The death of the gods is a linear tale, with a beginning, a middle and an end. A human life is a linear tale. Myths proceed to disaster and maybe to resurrection. The thin child believed in the eternal recurrence of growing things, and in weather.
But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness. Every day I read of a new extinction, of the bleaching of the coral, and the disappearance of the codfish the thin child caught in the North Sea with a hook and line, when there were always more where those came from. I read of human projects that destroy the world they are in, ingeniously, ambitiously engineered oil wells in deep water, a road across the migration paths of the beasts in the Serengeti park, farming of asparagus in Peru, helium balloons to transport the crops more cheaply, emitting less carbon whilst the farms themselves are dangerously depleting the water that the vegetables, and the humans and other creatures, depend on. I wanted to write the end of our Midgard – but not to write an allegory or a sermon. Almost all the scientists I know think we are bringing about our own extinction, more and more rapidly. The weeds in the fields the thin child sees and thinks of as eternal are many of them already made extinct by modern farming methods. Clouds of plovers do not rise. Thrushes no longer break snails on stones, and the house sparrow has vanished from our gardens. In a way the Midgard Serpent is the central character in my story. She loves to see the fish she kills and consumes, or indeed kills for fun, the coral she crushes and bleaches. She poisons the earth because it is her nature. When I began working on this story I had a metaphor in mind – I saw the death-ship, Naglfar, made of dead men’s nails, as an image for what is now known as the trash vortex, the wheeling collection of indestructible plastic in the Pacific, larger than Texas. I thought how it had grown from the plastic beakers Thor Heyerdahl was distressed to find floating in the empty ocean, on his Kon-Tiki voyage in 1947. But I wanted to tell the myth in its own terms, as the thin child discovered it.
I have said I did not want to humanise the gods. But I always had in mind the wisdom of that most intelligent thinker about gods, humans and morality, Ludwig Feuerbach. ‘Homo homini deus est’, he wrote, describing how our gods of Love, Wrath, Courage, Charity were in fact projections of human qualities we constructed from our sense of ourselves. He was talking about the incarnate god of Christianity, a God in man who to Feuerbach was a man made god. George Eliot translated The Essence of Christianity fluently and flexibly, and its influence is strong in her work. But there is a sense in which the Norse Gods are peculiarly human in a different way. They are human because they are limited and stupid. They are greedy and enjoy fighting and playing games. They are cruel and enjoy hunting and jokes. They know Ragnarok is coming but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story. They know how to die gallantly but not how to make a better world. Homo homini lupus est, wrote Hobbes, man is a wolf to man, describing the wolf inside, Hobbes who had a grim vision of the life of men as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Loki is the only one who is clever and Loki is irresponsible and wayward and mocking.
Deryck Cooke, in his splendid study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I Saw the World End, shows how intelligently Wagner constructed his character, Loge, from the available sources of the myths. Wagner’s Loge is, Cooke says, the god of fire and the god of thought. The Loki of the old myths is only half a god, and possibly related to the giants and demons. It is probably a false etymology that connects the Germanic fire spirit Logi with the Loki of the Eddas, but Wagner’s Loge is both a solver of problems and the bringer of the flames that destroy the World-Ash. As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in Chaos – his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is, the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The myths
Boyer, Regis, ed. and trans., L’Edda Poetique. (Paris: Fayard, 1992) In French; with useful scholarly essays.
Magee, Elizabeth, selec. and ed., Legends of the Ring. (London: Folio Society, 2004) This large collection includes translations of parts of the Prose Edda by Jean L. Young, and some felicitous translations of The Mythological Poems of the Elder Edda by Patricia Terry.
Sturluson, Snorri, Edda, ed. and trans. Anthony Faulkes. (London: Everyman, 1987)
Stange, Manfred, ed., Die Edda. (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2004) In German; a lively version.
Wagner, W., Asgard and the Gods, adap. M.W. Macdowall, and ed. W.S.W. Anson. (London: 1880)
Writings on the myths
Armstrong, Karen, A Short History of Myth. (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005)
Boyer, Regis, Yggdrasill. La religion des anciens Scandinaves. (Paris: Bibliotheque historique Payot, 1981, 1992) Authoritative and imaginative.
Cooke, Deryck, I Saw the World End. A Study of Wagner’s Ring. (London: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1976) This unfortunately posthumously published and uncompleted study of Wagner’s operas is full of interesting ideas and information about the myths and Wagner’s use of them.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing. (New York: Anchor Books, 1956) Die Geburt der Tragodie was first published in Germany in 1872.
O’Donoghue, Heather, From Asgard to Valhalla. (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 2007) Studies both the myths and later literary uses of them.
Sorensen, Villy, Ragnarok (1982), in Danish; trans. Paula Hostrup-Jessen, as The Downfall of the Gods. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Steinsland, Gro, Norron Religion. (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2005) A beautifully illustrated and interesting study which should be available in English.
Turville-Petre, E.O.G., Myth and Religion of the North Holt. (London: Weidenfeld and
