Tonight I am going to tell you the story the gods themselves were told — the one they carried all their lives, the way you might carry a letter you have read but cannot answer. It is the story of Ragnarok: the doom of the powers, the twilight of the gods, the end of the world. And before you pull the blanket higher, let me tell you the secret of it, the secret most tellings leave out because they stop too soon: this is not a story about an ending. It is a story about an ending with a morning on the other side — and about what brave hearts do in the meantime. The old poets knew both halves, and tonight you will have both halves. So: the whole end of the world, from the first whisper to the last green blade of grass. Are you comfortable? Then let us begin where the gods began — with a prophecy they went looking for, and rather wished they hadn't found.
It was Odin who asked. Of course it was Odin; asking was his whole nature. Troubled by dreams — Baldr's dreams, his shining son dreaming of his own death — the Allfather saddled the eight-legged horse and rode down the cold road to the borders of the dead, and there he woke a seeress from her grave: a volva, long dead, heavy with the knowledge the dead have. She rose unwillingly, complaining of the snow on her, and the rain, and the long years — the dead do not like to be woken, and she liked it less as the questions went on, for she saw quickly who the stranger was. And it was she — in the great poem, the first and greatest poem of the North — who unrolled the whole scroll for him: everything that had been, and everything that was, and then, refrain by tolling refrain, everything that was coming. The benches of Hel are decked for Baldr, she told him. The wolf is fed and growing. And at the end of all things — she told him how it would go, the whole order of battle, name by name, death by death, his own included. And then she said the line that tolls through the poem like a bell over water: 'Would you know yet more?' Odin would. He always would. That was his glory and his sentence: he rode home from that grave knowing the ending — and the rest of his long life, everything you have heard in every other story, was what a wise heart does between the reading of the letter and the arrival of the day.
For the seeds of the end were planted long before, and the gods had planted most of them with their own hands. Count them with me, drowsily, like counting sheep — dark sheep, but they file past all the same. There was the first war, when the gods speared and burned the witch Gullveig and could not make her stay dead, and the world learned that violence answers violence, generation after generation. There was the wall, and the builder cheated of his wage, and oaths broken in the sunlight by the very beings whose job was to keep them — the poem marks that day carefully, the day the gods' word cracked, and the crack, remember, ran forward through everything. There were the children of Loki, gathered up in fear: the serpent thrown into the sea — where it grew; the girl thrown down into the dark — where she reigned, and remembered; and the wolf-cub kept at home, fed by one brave hand, and then bound by a trick, and the trusting hand bitten off, and the wolf staked out on an island with a sword propping his jaws — where he howled, and grew, and hated, and waited. None of these things caused the end by itself. But the end, when it came, wore every one of them like rings on its fingers. The old poets were farmers as well as singers, and they knew exactly what they were saying: nothing in the last harvest was ever sown anywhere but in the gods' own fields.
And then there was Baldr. You know it; the gods' story turned on it as on a hinge. The best of them, the brightest, the one everything loved — killed at a game, by a blind hand guided by a jealous one, with the single sprig in all creation that had not sworn to spare him. The light of the world put out by a plant too young to promise. And when they sent to Hel to buy him back, and all creation wept — and one dry-eyed giantess in a cave would not — the gods understood at last, in their bones, what the seeress had meant: the machine was running now, and it would not be stopped by tears, because it had been built, gear by gear, out of their own oldest choices. They caught Loki; you know what they did in that cave, and what it cost the two boys who had done nothing; and if any doubt remained about whether the age of wisdom was ending, the sentence in the cave ended it. After Baldr, the poems change key. The gods stop adventuring. They start preparing. Valhalla fills faster; the einherjar drill harder; Odin's ravens fly farther and come home quieter. Everyone in Asgard now carries the letter. Everyone has read it. And the world below, sensing it the way animals sense weather, begins, ever so slightly, to spoil.
The end announces itself first in the human heart — the seeress was exact about this, and it is the most frightening stanza she spoke, so we will say it softly and move on. Before the sky breaks, she said, the bonds between people break. Brothers will fight and kill each other; kinsmen will betray kinsmen; it is hard among men — an axe-age, a sword-age, shields are riven; a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world goes headlong. No man will spare another. That is the true first battle of Ragnarok, little one, and it is fought in kitchens and market-squares long before any god draws blade: the great cold begins in the chest. And then — only then — it moves to the sky.
The Fimbulwinter. The mighty winter. Snow drives in from all four quarters at once — feel how wrong that is; snow should have a direction — frost that does not break, winds with knives in them, a sun that rises pale and gives no heat, like a lamp behind ice. And no summer after it. Winter, and then winter, and then winter again: three years of white with no green between them, and the world's larders emptying, and the last warmth going out of the ground like breath off a window. The old ones of the North, who knew exactly what one hard winter could do to a valley, imagined three, and shuddered, and put it at the head of the terrors — before the monsters, before the fire. Some of the wise say their grandfathers' grandfathers had lived a shadow of it, long ago, when a veil dimmed the sun for years and the crops failed and the great graves filled; and that Fimbulwinter is that old grief, remembered forward as prophecy. However that may be: when the third winter closes and no thaw comes, every being in the nine worlds knows the schedule has begun. And then the lights go out. The wolves that have chased the sun and moon since the first morning — you have always known they were back there, keeping the lights hurrying — the wolves catch up. Skoll takes the sun. Hati takes the moon. The good lamps of the world go into the dark gullets one after the other, the stars flicker and fall from their fastenings, and the world lies in the dark and the cold at once, holding its breath. Far away in that darkness, three cocks begin to crow — one gold-combed in Asgard, waking the heroes; one soot-red at the doors of Hel; one in the gallows-wood of the east, waking the giants. The alarms of the three worlds, answering each other across the night. And then the earth itself begins to shake.
It shakes because everything bound is breaking loose, all at once, everywhere. The mountains come apart at their roots and every fetter forged since the beginning snaps in the same hour — that is the sound of the last morning, a world-wide crack of chains — and out of a shuddering island in the east steps Fenrir, free. The old wolf, the wronged wolf, the wolf they fed and then tricked, comes on with his lower jaw scraping the earth and his upper jaw brushing the sky, so that his gape is simply everything, and fire pours from his eyes and nostrils. And the sea rises over every coast at one time, because his brother the World-Serpent is letting go — coil after coil coming off the drowned lands as Jormungandr writhes toward shore in his giant-rage, blowing venom over water and sky so the very surf comes in poisoned. The flood lifts a ship off its moorings in the country of the dead: Naglfar, the ship built since time began from the untrimmed nails of dead men — loosed at last, crewed by the hosts of Hel, and at the steering-oar, grinning, unbound, with the marks of the stones still on him, Loki. From the east over the flood come the frost-giants under old Hrym, shield-high. And in the south the sky itself tears open like cloth, and through the rent ride the sons of fire out of Muspelheim, and at their head is Surt, the black one, the oldest sentry in creation, who has waited at the world's southern edge since before the gods with a sword brighter than the vanished sun. Where his host crosses the rainbow, the old bridge — which has borne the gods' riding since the morning of the worlds — Bifrost cracks and comes down in coloured fire behind them, and no one is going home that way again. All the armies of the end converge on one appointed plain — Vigrid, a hundred leagues on every side; the field has been waiting under grass all this time, measured and ready — and there they form up in the dark: fire to the south, frost to the east, the sea's monster at the tideline, the dead in their ranks, the wolf before all. And they wait. Because the last courtesy of the old world is that both sides know the appointment, and the other side is coming.
Heimdall has seen it all begin — of course he has; seeing was his whole long life, the sleepless watchman with eyes that pierce a hundred leagues and ears that hear the grass grow; be glad of him now. He stands at the head of the broken bridge, sets the great horn Gjallarhorn to his lips — the horn kept ready beneath the world-tree for exactly this breath — and blows. One blast. It goes through all the worlds at once; nothing that lives fails to hear it; it is in the bones of every story you have ever been told about a horn at the last need, and every one of those horns is this horn's grandchild. In Asgard the gods meet in council one final time, quickly, with no illusions — and Odin mounts and rides alone, one last errand, down to Mimir's well: the Allfather bending over the water in the dark, taking counsel one last time from the head of his old friend, asking — what? The poem does not say. Perhaps only confirming the order of deaths. Perhaps asking whether anything at all might yet be done, and hearing the old, kind, terrible answer: nothing but to do it well. Then he rides back, and Valhalla empties. Five hundred and forty doors, and through each of them eight hundred warriors marching abreast — every hero harvested from every human battlefield since war began, the whole point of every valkyrie's ride and every hard choosing, the army a wise god spent the entire history of the world assembling for a battle he knew he would lose. They form up on Vigrid opposite the fire and the frost and the dead. At their head: Odin, in his gold helmet and his blue-grey cloak, with the spear that never misses; Thor at his side; one-handed Tyr; Freyr of the summer; Heimdall, come down from his post at last, for there is nothing left to watch; the whole shining company. The two lines of everything look at each other across the grass in the dark. And then the wolf howls, and it begins.
I will tell the great meetings one by one, as the seeress told them, because each is a whole story closing. Odin rides first — straight at Fenrir, spear up, the ravens torn sideways in the wind over him. The Allfather against the wolf his own fear made: he knew this appointment before the wolf was weaned, and he rides at it as if eager, because the last thing he can teach his army is how a wise king keeps a dreadful engagement. They close — the grey cloak and the grey gape — and the wolf's jaws, wider than the world by now, come together. And the wisest of the gods, the breath-giver, the well-drinker, the tree-hung rune-winner, the whisperer at the pyre, is gone. Just that. The poems spend no more words on it than I have, because there are none that help. But mark what happens within the very next minute of the world, because the Allfather had planted even this: Vidar steps forward. The silent son — the god who in all the noisy ages said almost nothing, and grew strong, and waited, and wore on one foot the thick strange shoe pieced together since time began from every scrap of leather men ever cut from their own shoes and threw away; the ones who threw the scraps were helping build it, the old ones said, and never knew — Vidar plants that shoe on the wolf's lower jaw, pinning it to the earth, takes the upper jaw in his two hands, and tears the swallower of his father apart. So the mightiest and most wronged of monsters dies in the same minute as his greatest wrong-doer and victim, and if there is justice anywhere in the last battle, it is that neither outlived the other by more than a breath.
Thor and the Serpent find each other in the smoke — you knew they would; they have been each other's weather since the fishing-boat, since the cat in the castle, since before either quite understood why. The last duel of the guardian and the girdle: the hammer against the coil that circles everything, thunder against undertow, and it is long, and it is close, and Thor wins it. Let it be said clearly on this last night as on every other: Thor wins. Mjolnir comes down out of the failing sky one final time and breaks the World-Serpent's skull, and the beast that ringed the drowned earth dies unringed, and for one moment, in the middle of the end of everything, the oldest fear in the sea is simply gone. And then Thor steps back from it, and the venom that soaked him in the killing does its slow work as he goes — nine steps he walks, one for each of the worlds he spent his life defending, and after the ninth he falls, and the thunder is over. His sons survive him; his hammer survives him; hold both facts; we will need them at the dawn. Elsewhere on the great field the other appointments are kept, each pair finding its own: Tyr, the one-handed, the god of oaths who once paid his hand into a wolf's mouth so a broken promise might hold, meets Garm, the blood-chested hound of the dead — the two of them kill each other, the hand-taker's kin and the hand-giver, accounts closed. Freyr, lord of the summer, meets Surt himself in the front of the fire — and dies for a sword he gave away for love long ago, on a morning when love seemed worth more than any Ragnarok; the poems have never once said he chose wrong, only that he paid. And Heimdall meets Loki. Of course: the watcher and the thing watched, the sleepless eye and the shape that slid past it a thousand times, the two old rivals who once fought as seals over a necklace in the sunlit days when their quarrels were almost games. Fire and vigilance go out of the world in one exchange, each on the other's blade, and with them ends the oldest cat-and-mouse in creation. And when the lines are spent and the great names are down, Surt straightens, and lifts the sword that has waited at the world's southern gate since before the first morning — and flings fire over everything. Over the field and the fallen, over the nine worlds together, over the roots and the branches. The ash Yggdrasil groans and wreathes in flame but — mark it — is never said to fall. Smoke goes up against the vanished stars. The burnt earth, its work done, sighs and sinks beneath the steaming sea, and the water closes over the age, and there is silence, everywhere, for the first time since the ice met the fire in the void before the beginning. If the old poem were a night sky, here would be the black between stars. Breathe with me a moment in the dark of it. Because now — now, little one — comes the part they built the whole poem to reach.
The seeress does not stop at the fire. The people who put her poem first in the great book did not stop there either, and no one who tells this story honestly has ever stopped there, and we shall not. She looks past it — 'I see,' she says, and you can hear the wonder come into the dead woman's voice — I see the earth rise again, green, out of the sea. A second time. The waterfalls come down white where the fires went up; the eagle is back on the crag, hunting fish along the bright water as if no age had ended; the fields sow themselves, unplanted, and grow. Before the wolf took her, the old sun — did you know this? the gods knew, it was one of the answers the giants kept for their best riddles — the old sun had borne a daughter, as bright as herself, and now the daughter rises and walks her mother's road through a clean sky, and the light on the new grass is a light no wickedness has ever used. And up onto a green plain called Idavoll — where Asgard stood, where the golden age was, before the first lie — come walking the survivors. For there are survivors. Vidar of the great shoe, and Vali; Modi and Magni, Thor's boys, carrying Mjolnir between them, taking turns at its weight — the hammer has outlived the storm, and Strength and Courage inherit it together. Hoenir is there, the quiet one from the world's first mornings, casting the omen-twigs in the sunlight, reading fates for a world that suddenly has good ones. And then — this is the verse the whole North waited for, the reason the poem exists — up from the world of the dead, unhurt, unhurried, blinking in the young light, come two brothers, side by side: Baldr, and Hod. The bright one, back from Hel at last, death's one great prisoner released now that death's kingdom has burned — and beside him, forgiven, his blind brother, the saddest tool a jealous mind ever used. They walk together. That one image — the murdered and the murderer's instrument, reconciled, walking on new grass — is the deepest thing the old North ever said about how the worlds should end, and how every quarrel should. And the young gods sit down together in the meadow, and they talk — the poem is tender here, it lets them simply talk — about everything: about the Serpent, about the wolf, about the old riddles of the Allfather, the way a family talks at the table after a funeral, sad and safe and together. And there in the deep grass their fingers find something small and hard and shining. The golden chess-pieces. The very ones the first gods played with in the meadow in the morning of the world, before the wall, before the witch, before the lie — lying in the new grass all this time, having survived the fire the way small precious things survive, waiting for the family to come home and take up the game. Nothing in all the poems — nothing, little one — is more hopeful than that: the toys of the golden age, found again by the children of the survivors.
And the people? You have been wondering about the people — this new green world with its kind light, and no one to stand in it and be glad. But the tree, remember, never fell. And deep in the wood of Yggdrasil, in some hollow of the trunk of the thing that holds all worlds together, two human beings had hidden themselves away when the winter came down: Lif and Lifthrasir, their names are — Life, and Life's-Yearner; the old language liked to say things plainly when it mattered. Through the winter, through the wolf, through the fire itself they slept sheltered in the tree, with the morning dew for their food, the way small things wait out great weathers. And when the light of the new sun came slanting green through the leaves, they woke, and climbed down, and looked at the washed world — and from those two come all the peoples of the new earth. Which is to say — lean close, because this is the oldest secret in the story, and the old ones told it with a straight face and meant it — from those two come you. All of this, by the old reckoning, has already happened. The wolf has already been and gone, and the fire, and the flood; the world you were tucked into bed in tonight is the second world, the green one, the morning-after one; the sun in your window tomorrow is the daughter, not the mother; and you yourself are the far-downstream child of the two who slept safe inside the tree while everything ended — which is why, perhaps, on the worst nights, something in you already knows how this kind of story goes: through, and out the other side, and into the light.
So that is Ragnarok — the whole of it, whisper to green morning, and now you know what the gods knew, and one thing more that they proved: that knowing the dark is coming is no reason not to build, and love, and set the table, and mend the wall, and tell the stories. Odin read the letter and answered it with a life. Thor took nine steps that were each a world. The sun, caught at last after all that running, had already made sure of a daughter. Everything ends, little one; the North was too honest to pretend otherwise, and I will not pretend to you either. But endings, in the oldest and truest telling we have, are how the grass gets new gods to sit in it and old games get found by new hands. So let the night be as dark as it likes. Somewhere past the far side of it, entirely on schedule, there is a green field, and a young sun, and laughter over golden chess-pieces, and two people climbing down out of a tree into the morning of the world. Sleep now, all the way down, and no dreams but green ones. The tree holds. The tree always holds. Goodnight.