Ragnarök Explained: What It Is and What Actually Happens

Most apocalypses are about the end. Ragnarök is stranger than that. The Norse gods knew exactly how they were going to die, in what order, and at whose hands, and they walked toward it anyway. That has stuck with me since I was a kid. Here is what actually happens, told the way the old poems tell it.

Quick definition first. Ragnarök is the prophesied end of the world in Norse mythology. The word is usually read as the doom of the gods, or the fate of the powers. It comes to us mainly from two texts: the poem Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, where a dead seeress is summoned to recite the future to Odin, and the Prose Edda, written down by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson around the 1220s. Everything below comes from those two.

The thing to hold onto is that this is a prophecy. It hasn't happened. The gods live their whole lives knowing it's coming, which is what makes the myth so heavy. Keep that in your back pocket, because it matters at the end.

The signs come first

Ragnarök doesn't start with the battle. It starts with a death that breaks everyone's spirit.

Baldr, the brightest and best-loved of the gods, is killed. Loki engineers it, and then he blocks Baldr from coming back from the dead. With Baldr gone, the light goes out of the gods, and the world starts to slide.

Then comes Fimbulwinter. Three winters in a row with no summer in between. The cold doesn't break, the sun gives no warmth, and people turn on each other. Brothers kill brothers. Old loyalties rot. The Völuspá describes an age of axes and swords where no man will spare another. Society falls apart before a single god lifts a weapon.

The chains start to snap. A rooster crows in three different worlds at once. The wolves that have been chasing the sun and moon across the sky finally catch them and swallow them whole, and the stars go dark.

The bindings break

Everything the gods spent ages locking away gets loose at the same time.

• Fenrir, the giant wolf the gods chained as a pup, breaks his bonds. His jaws open so wide they touch the sky and the ground at once.
• Jörmungandr, the serpent so long it wraps around the whole world, rises out of the sea and floods the land, spitting venom into the air.
• Loki, bound under a cave with a serpent's poison dripping on his face, finally tears free and turns to lead the enemies of the gods.
• Surtr, the fire giant, marches up from the burning world of Muspelheim with a sword brighter than the sun.
• The dead sail in on a ship called Naglfar, built from the untrimmed nails of corpses.

Heimdall, the watchman, sees them coming and blows the Gjallarhorn. Every god hears it. They arm up and ride out to a field called Vígríðr to meet the end they were always promised. They know they're going to lose. They go anyway.

Who kills whom

This is the part everyone half-remembers, so here it is straight. The big duels of Ragnarök are mostly pairs, and almost every one ends with both fighters dead.

Odin and Fenrir

The Allfather rides at the wolf. For all his wisdom, all the eyes and ravens and sacrifices, Odin loses. Fenrir swallows him whole. Then Odin's son Vidar steps in. He wears one strange thick shoe, made over ages from every scrap of leather ever trimmed off a boot, and he plants that foot on the wolf's lower jaw, grabs the upper jaw, and tears Fenrir apart. Vidar avenges his father and walks away alive.

Thor and Jörmungandr

Thor and the world-serpent have hated each other for a long time, and this is where it ends. Thor kills the serpent with Mjölnir. Then he takes nine steps back through the flood of its venom and falls down dead. The strongest of the gods beats his oldest enemy and dies of the wound in the same breath.

Týr, Heimdall, and Freyr

Týr, the war god who once lost a hand to bind Fenrir, fights the hound Garm and they kill each other. Heimdall and Loki, watchman and traitor, finish their long feud by killing one another. Freyr faces Surtr the fire giant. Freyr gave away his great sword long ago for love, so he fights with what he has, and the fire giant cuts him down.

And then Surtr does the thing the whole prophecy has been building toward. He flings fire across the nine worlds. Everything burns. The land sinks into the sea. The myth says the stars themselves vanish from the sky.

And then the world comes back

Here's the part most people skip, and it's the part that hooked me for life.

The earth rises again out of the water. Green. Fed by waterfalls, with fields that grow grain no one had to plant. The fire didn't end the story. It cleared the ground.

A few gods are still standing. Vidar and Vali, Odin's sons. Modi and Magni, Thor's sons, and Magni picks up his father's hammer. Baldr comes back from the dead at last, and his brother Hodr with him, and the two of them sit together in peace. They find the old golden game pieces of the dead gods lying in the new grass and talk over everything that happened.

Two humans live through it too. Líf and Lífthrasir hid inside a wood called Hoddmímir's Holt while the world burned, lived on morning dew, and step out into the new world to start the human race over. A new sun, the daughter of the old one, climbs into the new sky.

So is Ragnarök the end of the world? Yes and no. It's the end of that world. It is also, in the same prophecy, a beginning.

Why modern stories love the part after

Look at where the big stories have gone lately. God of War sends Kratos into a Norse world that is already waiting on its own Ragnarök, and the whole arc is about whether prophecy has to come true. Marvel ends one Thor film by letting Asgard burn on purpose. The pull is the same every time. The interesting question isn't the fire. It's the morning after the fire.

That's the exact question I wanted to live inside, so I built a book around it.

Pantheon: The Elemental Artifact opens after the end. In its world, Ragnarök already happened, and the old gods didn't go quietly into a green rebirth. They cheated. They forged unnatural pacts to survive the fire, then locked themselves away from the world they'd failed. Ages pass. Then a revered goddess is murdered, attacks follow, and the same kind of cataclysm starts to gather again.

The ones who have to stop it are three young gods from rival houses who have no reason to trust each other. Vidar from the Norse line, Asha from the Mesopotamian, and Aurora from the Greco-Roman. They get thrown together to find out what really happened to the murdered goddess, and what they find threatens everyone.

It's a signed first edition, 174 full-color pages, collecting issues #1 through #5, with art by Willi Roberts and letters by Lydon White. It funded at 147% on Kickstarter from 103 backers before a copy was printed, and it carries a cover quote from John Bucher, Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. If the Norse prophecy left you wondering what the gods would do with a second world, this is the book I wrote to answer that.

The Norse poets understood something most apocalypse stories miss. The end is never really the point. It's what you build on the ashes that tells you who you were.