Hi, I'm Mike Rugnetta. This is Crash Course Mythology.
Last week we looked at Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and Islamic apocalypse myths.
And today we're gonna look at one apocalypse myth, one we've all been waiting for. The battle for the ages, the war to end all.
The inspiration for no fewer than 11 metal bands, according to Encyclopedia Metallum.
That's right. It's the Norse apocalypse.
Ragnarok.
Battles, earthquakes, fire, blood, a giant wolf, groaning dwarves, and Loki, who is the worst.
That is, until he's not.
Because he dies. Oh! Spoiler alert!
In many versions of the norse myths
Ragnarok is the conclusion of one Loki story that we've already covered.
You might remember a few weeks ago when we talked about the beloved god Baldr and his brother Hodr,
How Loki tricked Hodr into killing Baldr by throwing a dart made of mistletoe and then
Loki disguises himself as a stubborn frost giant lady in order to prevent Baldr from escaping the underworld
Eugh, the nerve. That's where we left the story last time.
While Loki may have succeeded in getting rid of Baldr his pleasure is short-lived.
When the rest of the Aesir, the Norse gods of the sky, figure out they've been duped they fly into various rages,
Loki gets scared and poof! Amscrays outta Asgard's way.
The rest of the Aesir form a posse to bring Loki to justice.
Loki decides to hide out in a cave near Frananger Falls.
If anyone comes by he can just transform himself into a salmon and hide in the churning water at the bottom of the waterfall.
And sure enough the Aesir posse shows up. Loki turns into a fish and dives for safety.
This is when Kvasir, the wisest of all the Aesir, pulls a Sherlock holmes and notices a burned fishnet in the remains of Loki's fire.
"Fish..." he says to himself.
Why would Loki be thinking about fish?
So the gods make a new net, Thor uses it to drag the nearby water
And Loki is caught.
The Aesir decide to not kill Loki, but to punish him and boy, do they ever!
First they find Vali and transform him into a wolf, then wolf Vali eats Loki's son Narvi,
then the gods take Narvi's entrails and use them to tie down Loki inside a cave
while Skaði, goddess of skiing, hangs a snake from a stalactite above Loki's head,
positioned so its venom will drop bit by bit,
right onto Loki's face, for eternity.
Somehow Loki's wife Sigyn arranges to stay with her husband
where she sits and uses a wooden bowl to catch the snake venom
But even so whenever she gets up to empty the bowl a few drops land right on Loki's face.
Rinse and repeat, except with snake venom, for eternity.
Or as Crossley-Holland put it, "That is how things are and how things will remain... Until Ragnarok."
This is actually where the timing gets a little complicated.
The story of Ragnarok is obviously very old, but it was originally told as a prediction.
This is how the world will end, later.
In theory, Loki is still tied up in that cave somewhere, like, right now, trying to get snake venom off of his face.
So the Ragnarok myth, it's less a story of something that already occurred and more like a script for something that's yet to come.
According to myth we'll know that Ragnarok is nigh because first we'll have Fimbulvinter.
Three long winters, all in a row.
Cold, bitter, unending winters that make people hungry,
and then angry and then fight and kill each other.
Brothers killing brothers, sisters killing sisters, whole families turning against one another.
Like when you're on vacation and everyone skips lunch.
Civilization crumbles. Buildings are destroyed through war and neglect,
Humanity itself deteriorates and people become like wolves to each other.
And then, when nearly all of the people have killed each other and those who are alive are acting like beasts,
the mythological wolves Sköll and Hati will come out and eat the sun and the moon.
The stars will fade and everything will go dark and cold
and there will definitely be no more smorgasbords.
Boy Norse howdy! Things haven't even Gotten going yet, because now the earthquakes begin.
We've talked about apocalyptic earthquakes before, the kind that topple trees and crumble mountains,
but these are earthquakes will also cause the Earth itself to shift,
and guess what, to break the bonds keeping Loki and his giant monster wolf son Fenrir in captivity.
And once Loki is free, the myth tells us, three roosters will crow,
waking the giants, the warriors of Valhalla, and the dead of single-hockey-stick Hel, the place.
Meanwhile Loki's other son, Jormungandr, the Midgard serpent, will churn through the seas as he heads toward the plain of Vígríðr.
Newly free and awake, Loki will lead his monstrous sons and all the minions of Hel to march on Asgard and challenge the Aesir.
He'll be joined by the giants, led by Surtr who carries a flaming sword.
As this terrible force marches across the Bifrost towards Asgard, the great rainbow bridge will collapse behind them.
Heimdall, who sees further than any other god, will spot Loki coming and sound the Gjallarhorn in warning.
The all-father Odin, seeing the impending battle, will turn to his trusted adviser Mimir for advice
but when giants are marching and your rainbow bridge is in pieces and Fenrir and the Midgard serpent are loose... A pep talk isn't really gonna help.
And so the Aesir will gear up for battle alongside the Einherjar, 800 of the most honorable Dead Warriors from Valhalla.
The Aesir and the Einherjar will follow Odin to the plain of Vígríðr to face Loki's onslaught,
perhaps best dealt with in the Thought Bubble.
the battle begins and quickly turns into a collection of heroic duels.
The fight doesn't go well for anyone. Tyr and Garmr kill each other in battle,
Thor defeats Jormungandr but not before the dying serpent spews venom all over the thunder god and Thor falls, poisoned.
Even Loki and Heimdall fight so savagely that they slay each other,
which I guess means someone else will have to be the worst now? Anyone have any nominations?
As for Odin, he attacks with his mighty spear, Gungnir
But Fenrir seizes Odin in his mighty jaws and swallows the all-father.
With Odin consumed an unlikely hero arises: Odin's son Víðarr and his great magic shoe.
Víðarr's mythical shoe is made up of all the thrown-away scraps of all the shoes that have been made since the beginning of time.
It is huge and indestructible.
And so Víðarr stomps his mythic shoe down of Fenrir's bottom jaw,
grabs the wolf's top jaw and rips his head apart;
Guitar solo.
The end of the battle comes when Surtr, leader of the giants, finally defeats Freyr.
He turns, with his flaming sword sets all the worlds aflame.
According to one version of the story,
Asgard and Midgard and Jotunheim and Niflheim will become furnaces -
places of raging flame, swirling smoke, ashes, only ashes.
The Einherjar will die, men and women and childre in Midgard will die,
elves and dwarves will die, giants will die, monsters and creatures of the underworld will die,
birds and animals will die. The sun will be dark and there will be no stars in the sky.
The earth will sink into the sea.
Thank you, Thought Bubble.
Okay, so look, Ragnarok doesn't end well.
The world has been destroyed by flames and all the people and all the gods are dead and everything is darkness.
Except in this end of the world story there is a silver lining.
Because the worlds are consumed by flames what remains is water,
and as we've seen in creation stories, water has some pretty impressive generative powers.
Accordingly, "The earth will rise again out of the water, fair and green.
The eagle will fly over cataracts, swoop into the thunder and catch fish under crags.
Corn will ripen in fields that were never sown."
But hold on, it gets even better.
It turns out that not all of the gods perished in the massive inferno.
Odin's sons Víðarr and Vali and Thor's sons Magni and Móði survive the fire.
They make their way to the plain of Iðavöllr,
where they're joined by Baldr and Hodr, who have come back from the world of the dead.
Hoenir and the children of Vili and Ve round out a new pantheon.
The best part is what happens when these new gods gather together.
They sit down and they talk, telling the stories that only they know,
the same stories of the Norse gods that we are talking about right now.
In the grass of Iðavöllr they find some of the treasures of the Aesir,
including Mjolnir and special golden chess boards and their pieces.
In a recent retelling of the Ragnarok story by Neil Gaiman, these pieces are the characters from the myths:
Loki and his children, the frost giants and Surtr.
Gaiman ends the story writing: "Baldr will smile like the sun coming out, and reach down, and he will move his first piece.
There's a lot to unpack in the Ragnarok myth.
Starting with whether or not it's really a reflection of the pre-Christian Germanic tradition.
You probably noticed a lot of similarities between the Christian story of the apocalypse:
from the blowing of the horns to the earthquake and the fire...
But more importantly the most beautiful and beloved of the gods, in this case Baldr, returns from the dead.
Our main sources for this story, the Eddas, were written down well after Christianity
became dominant in Northern Europe and Iceland.
Were the original myths influenced by Christianity?
Well, it depends upon which scholar you ask.
Interestingly, unlike some of the other apocalypses,
this one is a beginning as well as an end.
The Christian and Zoroastrian stories also establish the beginning of a new age,
but Ragnarok, even though it's clearly set in the future,
prefigures a renewed world that looks a lot like the old one.
In Gaiman's retelling we almost have the feeling that Ragnarok has happened,
even if we're specifically told its events are in the future.
The idea that the end of the world can also be the beginning of the world isn't unique, though.
In Hindu mythology the fourth age, also known as the Kali age,
sees humans afflicted by corrupt rulers and all the social order upended.
As in the Norse story, the world will be consumed first by drought and then by fire,
followed by a storm lasting many years, and the rebirth of a new world here on Earth.
The cyclical nature of the Hindu myth as well as the twisting of time is expressed this way:
"A day of Brahma, born from the lotus, lasts a thousand periods of four ages;
a night, when the world is destroyed and made into a vast ocean, is of the same length.
and at the end of the night, Vishnu, unborn, having awakened, takes the form of Brahma in order to create,
as it has already been told to you.
This Indian apocalypse story and Ragnarok are both oddly hopeful.
They explain that destruction is necessary for creation.
Unlike the apocalypse of the Bible's book of revelations, they don't promise a new world only for the righteous,
but a rebirth for everyone!
You get a rebirth, and you get a rebirth, and you get a rebirth!
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
Check out our crash course mythology tote tote bag and poster available now at dftba.com
Thanks for watching and related, but unrelated, one of those 11 Ragnarok fans is a flute metal band.