Ragnarok by A.S.Byatt

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Ragnarök: The End of the Gods is A.S.Byatt’s contribution to publisher Cannongate’s myth series, which includes writing from Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman and Karen Armstrong. While Atwood and Pullman chose to re-imagine various myths, Byatt tells the Norse myth as it always has been, but within the supporting narrative framework of a young girl reading Asgard and the Gods by Wilhelm Wagner during an evacuation to the country side while England cowered under the Blitz in WW2. The ‘thin child’ reads about the Norse gods, their doings and their undoing, and Byatt’s audience read the stories alongside this only slightly fictionalised version of the writer in her childhood, watching Asgard unfold in her mind and her imagination. 

Byatt stays true to the traditional telling of the Norse myth, the end of the days of the great Norse gods, where their world is destroyed after a series of battles, natural disasters and eventual complete submersion under ‘the black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things’. But Ragnarök is not a morality tale in any way - Byatt does not place the laws of humans on the gods – they are above and beyond any social laws familiar to humans: all id and no ego. In their world there is much chaos, greed, fear and loathing. Loki the trickster never thinks twice about causing harm, never considering the furthest reaches of the consequences of his actions. The gods will do as they please: ‘Ragnarök,’ writes Byatt, is ‘the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed’.

In a recent piece for The Guardian, Byatt explains myths as existing ‘as a basic understanding of human nature… [T]hey shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible.’ Has Byatt written an allegory for our world in Ragnarök? It seems impossible that she has not – and yet all she has done is tell a set of ancient Norse myths that have existed for centuries. But, she writes, ‘if you write a version of Ragnarök in the 21st 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 …but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.’ And that sounds very similar the foolishness of Loki and his clan as told by the Norse canon.

Byatt claims she wanted to write about the ‘end of our Midgard … not to write an allegory or a sermon’ and most of the time she has achieved this successfully. There are instances when Ragnarök feels like a lecture but there’s just no denying the power of Byatt’s prose – the richness of her language makes the Norse myth almost hyper-real, especially when seen through the heightened perspective of a nervous young child far from home and afraid of the terror and death around her. Tales of love and terror will always ring true in a time of confusion - ‘there was a war on,’ thinks Byatt’s ‘thin child’, ‘Possibly there would always be a war on.’