Ragnarok

The End of the Gods

A.S. Byatt

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781847679659
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. Struggling to make sense of her new wartime life, she is given a copy of a book of ancient Norse myths and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, Byatt's mesmerising tale - inspired by the myth of Ragnarok - is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.

Frigg

The goddess Frigg set out to make every thing on the earth, in the air, in the ocean, swear not to harm Baldur. In Asgard and the Gods, the German editor quoted Snorri Sturluson’s Icelandic Edda. Frigg, the thin child read, received solemn promises that Baldur should not be harmed by fire and water, iron and all kinds of metal, stones, earth, trees, diseases, animals, birds, poison, snakes. The thin child tried to imagine this oath-swearing. Frigg was pictured in the ur-book, tall, stately, imperious, crowned, with very long pale hair, flowing in the wind. She wore a tight chain-mail shirt, a seemly skirt and incongruous Grecian thonged sandals. Did she set out in her chariot, or was she on foot? The thin child had a literal, visual imagination, that was how she was.

She saw the goddess in the chariot, rushing through the sky, calling out to the clouds, which were Ymir’s brains, to the forked rods of lightning, the hailstones and snowstorms and floods, begging them not to hurt her son, and the thin child imagined those entities pausing a moment in their rushing, flinging and burning to acquiesce, to hold off. But the thin child also saw the goddess walking. Mostly she was travelling down steep paths around high craggy mountains, the landscapes of the early fearful stone chaos from which the German book said men had first made gods and frost-giants, Hrimthurses. The goddess in a shimmer of gold light spoke fearlessly to all these inordinate forms and beseeched them not to harm her son. And again, there was a moment of quiet, and a stillness of agreement. The goddess rushed down to the roots of the mountains, the dark underground caverns where dragons and great worms gnawed the roots of the World-Ash, and spoke to the beasts, and not only to the beasts but to the shining walls of the caverns, to millstone grit and basalt, to veins of iron and tin and lead and gold and silver that were intricately threaded in the stones. She spoke to the boiling pits of red lava and the flowing steaming pumice. To sapphires, diamonds, opals, emeralds, rubies. The thin child, in an ecstasy of imagination, heard all these inanimate things whisper and grate and rustle, and promise. Everything was part of one world, and it would not hurt Baldur the Beautiful.

Sometimes the thin child imagined the beasts in ordered rows, as they were going into the Ark, or in the early days of creation. Sleek, hairy beasts with snarling lips and rending canine teeth. Black panthers, spotted leopards, striped hyenas, padding lions, tigers burning bright with hot eyes, prancing jackals and of course the wolves, the grey wolves, the stalkers, the allies of the imagined enemy. They all promised, and with them the Bandar log – the howling monkeys – the duck-billed platypus with its lethal tooth, the bears on the ice and in the jungle, with friendly faces that belied their malice, all these promised, along with the predators of the hedgerow, weasel, stoat, badger, ferret, shrew. The creatures who promised bore no relation to the bunny rabbits and sweet squirrels who listened to the divine teacher in the clearing in the woodlands. They were ruthless, red in tooth and claw, hunters and hunted, both at once, but they paused to promise and the goddess breathed more calmly and went on her way. Birds promised, eagles, hawks, kites, jays and magpies, along with bats hanging like folded leather in the caverns, with small mouths that drank blood.

The thin child spent a tremulous time imagining the snakes. She had once seen the cast skin of an adder, with its diamond head. They opened their fangs, and hissed and promised, adder and bushmaster, krait and cobra, the biting snakes and the spitting snakes, the rattlesnakes and the great constricting snakes of the jungle, boa constrictor and anaconda. And there were the sea-snakes, coiling and flashing in the oily sea, and the water predators, muggers and alligators, and then the fish, smooth sharks and gleeful killer whales, giant squid and stinging medusas, and the shoals of tunny and cod. The line stretched out to crack of doom; things promised that could hardly be thought of as harmful, oysters and earwigs, anemones in woods and on coral reefs, grass even, all the hundreds of kinds of grasses. All the harmless-looking or enticing plants that were killers, deadly nightshade, sooty purple, laburnum with dangling sharp yellow blossoms, the gaudy death-cap, the horse mushroom, and the fly-agaric.

Between the trees and the animals Snorri listed diseases. How do you swear a disease to harmlessness? The thin child suffered dreadfully from asthma. Because of this disease she lay in bed and read encyclopaedias and Asgard and the Gods. She imagined the asthma which inhabited her as an alien creature, it was true. It was pure white and flimsy, it spread its parasitic body through her desperate lungs, her spinning brain, it was like roots working their way into stonework, it was a relative of the boa constrictor and the strangling fig. She had to learn how to sit, how to lie, how to hold her ribcage to accommodate its grip. She imagined Frigg speaking urgently to it – do not hurt my son – and the brief moment when it let go, to promise. She imagined the fiery faces of measles and smallpox, hot and greedy, nevertheless promising. Measles had taken over the sack of her skin and broiled there. Chickenpox had burst through her, boiling up in pustules. But they promised Frigg. Not to harm her son.

Everything was held together by these agreements. The surface of the earth was like a great embroidered cloth, or rich tapestry, with an intricately interwoven underside of connected threads. She walked through the fields to school, in spring and in summer. There were borders of flowers round the wheatfields, full of scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers, great white moondaisies, buttercups, cowslips, corn buttercups, lamb’s succory and thorow-wax. Broad-leaved spurge, red hemp-nettle, shepherd’s purse, shepherd’s needle, corn-parsley. In the long grass in the meadow were milkmaids, orchids and knotgrass.

Under the earth worms were busy, millipedes ran, springtails flourished, all kinds of beetles dug burrows and laid eggs. Maggots and caterpillars squirmed; some were eaten by fledglings and harvest mice, some changed miraculously into butterflies, white and gold, umber and purple, bright blue, pale blue, mint-green, spangled with stripes and frills and eyes on black velvet. Up out of the corn came skylarks, spiralling and singing. Plovers tumbled overhead, crying, peewit, peewit. She had bird books and flower books, the thin child, and noted them all, tree sparrow, bullfinch, song thrush, lapwing, linnet, wren. They ate and were eaten, it was true, they faded and vanished as the earth turned, but they came back at the solstice, and always would, whereas Baldur was doomed to die, for all the promises. If her father did not come back, he would never come back.

There is no record of Frigg having asked humans not to harm her son. Maybe they were always helpless when faced with the gods. Maybe they did not count or were in some other story. They were not woven into the gloss and glitter, the relief and shadows of the tapestry.

The thin child knew the promise could not hold. Something, somewhere, must have been missed, must have been forgotten. Stories are ineluctable. At this stage of every story, something must go wrong, be awry, whatever the ending to come. It is not given, even to gods, to take complete, foolproof, perfect precautions. There will be a loophole, slippage, a dropped stitch, a moment of weariness or inattention. The goddess called everything, everything, to promise not to harm her son. Yet the shape of the story means that he must be harmed.

The gods celebrated the cohesion of earth, air, fire, water and all the creatures in and on these elements. They celebrated as they might have been expected to, with fighting and shouting. They had a kind of playground scuffle in which everyone ganged up on one unarmed victim, only in this case the centre of the scuffle was Baldur the beautiful, Baldur the victim, standing there peaceably, mildly proud of his invulnerability. They threw things at him, all kinds of things, everything they could. Sticks, staves, stones, flint axe-heads, knives, daggers, swords, spears, even in the end Thor’s thunder-hammer, and they watched with delight as these things wheeled gracefully like harmless boomerangs and returned to the throwers. The more returned, the more they threw, thicker and faster. This was a good game. It was the best game ever invented. The gods laughed and smiled and threw, and threw again.

An old woman came to see Frigg who was in her palace, Fensalir. Frigg does not appear to have wondered who she was or where she came from. She was just an old woman like any other old woman, indeed an archetypal old woman. If you looked hard at her she was almost too perfect, the web of wrinkles over her face and neck, the intricate folds of her long cloak over her dark dress, a kind of icon of old-womanhood. If she looked at you – even if you were the queen of the Ases – you could not hold her cold grey gaze, but you knew you needed to speak to her, she shimmered with your need to speak to her, almost as though only your need held her shape together. She was Loki the shapeshifter of course, putting out waves of glamour. So Frigg asked, as he needed her to do, what they were all doing in the fields of Asgard, crying out and whooping?

The old woman said they were hurling weapons at Baldur, and that nothing could harm him. She remarked humbly that someone of great power must have persuaded everything not to harm Baldur.

And Frigg said, as she must, as the tale required, that it was she, his mother, who had called everything not to harm him, and had been heard by everything.

‘Everything?’ said the old woman.

‘Well, I noticed a young shoot on a tree to the west of Valhall. It is a thing called mistletoe. I was past it before I saw it, and it was barely alive, with no strength, too young to make a promise.’

And yet, the thin child thought, she must have been worried at some level, or how would she have remembered this insignificant plant at all?

And then, the old woman was simply not there at all. Maybe she never had been. Frigg’s huge effort had tired her. Her eyes were dazzled. She listened to the wild shrieking of the happy gods.

Loki went for the mistletoe. Mistletoe is a feeble killer. It attaches itself to the boughs and branches of trees and sends fine threads like blind hair-worms into the rising columns of water which the leaves on the tree suck up and breathe into the air. The mistletoe has no branches and no true leaves: it is a tangle of waxy stems, with strange key-shaped protrusions and whitish gluey berries with black seeds visible through the translucent flesh, like frogspawn, the thin child always thought, seeing the lumpish globes of the mistletoe dense on bare branches in winter. Little twigs of it were pinned to lampholders and over doorways at the turn of the winter, and you kissed one another under it because it was evergreen and clinging, it represented constancy and perpetual liveliness. Next to the holly in which it was sometimes wound, it seemed ghostly, almost absent. The holly was shiny and scarlet and prickly and strong. The mistletoe was soft, floppy, a yellowish colour that was like dying leaves. The thin child had been told about it in Nature Study. She had been warned against eating it: it was poisonous, she was told, though she was also told that birds fed on it and scattered it about by cleaning its glue from their beaks on the bark of branches, and leaving the seeds with the glue.

It could spread over a tree like an overcoat and suck the lifewater from the wood, so that the remaining corpse was a dry prop for the grey-gold fronds.

It was mystical to the druids, she was told, but she could not find out what they did with it. It was associated with sacrifice, including human sacrifice.

Loki tore it gently from its foothold in an ash tree. It squirmed a little in his facile fingers. He stroked it. It made its hosts put out thickets of fine, sickly twig-masses, witches’ brooms they were called, and Loki stroked and stroked his fleshy bundle, and pulled, and made hard, and spoke sharp words to it, until he had not a clump but a fine grey pole, still a little luminous, like the round pale fruit, still a curious colour like snakeskin or sharkskin rather than bark, but a pole, which he twirled in his clever hands until it balanced like a javelin and had a fine, fine point like a flint arrow.

Loki, now again in his own bright form, stepped soundlessly into the hurling and howling throng of the gods, avoiding the missiles, aimed or returning. He turned the mistletoe spear in his hand, telling it to keep its shape. He found the one he was looking for, standing apart at the edge of the crowd, his hood pulled over his dark face. This was Hödur, Frigg’s other son, as swarthy as Baldur was golden. He had slipped second out of the womb, his eyelids sealed, like a blind kitten. They remained sealed. He was dark to Baldur’s day, night to his sunlight. They needed each other. Because he had never seen, he had his own ways of moving around Asgard, feeling for pillars, measuring steps, holding his shadowy head sideways and listening to space. If Baldur asked him what it was like not to see, he would answer, how do I know, since I have never seen. Loki, seeing him now, saw that his head was down, slightly slanted, listening to the uproar of which he was not part. What was it like, inside that skull? Caverns of blackness, or grey thick cloud, or enclosed shining lights? Loki always wanted to know everything, and might have asked, but now he was bent on mischief. For its own sake, because he alone knew how to stop the singing.

‘Why do you not join in the games?’ he asked Hödur. ‘It is a wonder to see Baldur, calm and smiling, in a hail of sharp stones and pointed arrows that turn away from him, and fail. You should play your part.’

‘I have no weapon,’ said Hödur. ‘And, as you well know, I cannot see to take aim.’

‘I have here a sleek and princely spear,’ said smiling Loki. ‘And I can put my hand over yours, to guide your aim. And then, you will have played your part.’

So he took the blind god by the hand, and led him to the front of the crowd. He put the lance in his hand, and closed his own quick fingers over those dark ones.

‘Baldur is over there,’ said Loki, pointing with the spear itself. ‘His breast is bare, he is smiling, he is waiting for your stroke.’

And he raised the other’s arm to shoulder height, and drew it back, and loosed his own grip, and said ‘So, now. Throw now.’

And Hödur let the hood slip from his dark head, and threw it back, and hurled.

The mistletoe spear hit Baldur’s breast and ran through him.

Baldur fell. Blood blossomed and he choked.

Hödur cast about in the sudden silence for Loki. A gnat buzzed by his ear. The shapeshifter was off.

The grief of the gods was appalling. They broke down. They could not speak for weeping. Most affected of all was Odin: gods did not fall dead, and when the loveliest and gentlest god could be killed in a game, worse still was on the way. For a long time the assembled gods stood stupidly, unable to touch the body, or to move it. The bright hair ruffled in the light wind. Dark Hödur stood alone, listening to the sobbing. The thin child closed her eyes and tried to imagine the inside of his head and failed.

Frigg was a mother and also a power. She had set her will to making her son invulnerable, and what had been waiting for him had mocked her. Terrible in grief and rage she refused to be mocked, to be defeated, to accept this end. If he had gone down to the underworld there were powers there who could be bargained with, pleaded with. Even cold Hel would be moved by the fury of Frigg’s grief, greater, Frigg knew, than that of any other mother for any other son. This could not be done to her, as it should not have been done to him. The story ran one way, but she would twist it, turn it back on itself, shape its end to her will.

‘Who amongst the Ases’, she asked in a voice hoarse with sobbing, ‘will ride down to Hel and plead with its ruler to send back bright Baldur to Asgard?’

And Hermodur, the watchman, stepped lightly forward, and said he would go. Then Odin said he must ride there on eight-legged Sleipnir, swiftest of horses, leader of the Wild Hunt, Odin’s own horse. So Sleipnir was led forward and Hermodur sprang lightly into the saddle, and spurred him on, and they leaped out of the gate of Asgard and headed for Ginnungagap.

The gods could not punish Hödur for slaying his brother, as this had been done in the Thing, a sacred space. But they banished him, beyond Asgard, into the dark forests of Midgard, where he lurked, hiding in the daytime, ranging at night, armed with a great sword given to him by the savage wood demons. The thin child wondered if Frigg mourned this other son, or cared to think how he must feel; did she know how he had been tricked into throwing the mistletoe? The story went ineluctably on, casting a bright light on some things, leaving others, like Hödur, in thick shadow.

Baldur’s funeral was one of the brightest, most brilliant parts of the story. His body was carried to the beach, richly dressed, and put on board his huge ship, Hringhorni, with its high curved dragon prow, and its long lean body made of pitch-black planks. There on the beach the ship was set on rollers and piled high with precious things, gold from Valhalla, beakers, pitchers, shields, hauberks, halberds, encrusted with precious stones, wrapped in silks and furs. Food was brought, flesh from the golden boar, wine in sealed vessels. Odin came with the ring, Draupnir, the dripper, a magical arm ring from which, every n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by A.S. Byatt
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• A Note On Names
• A Thin Child In Wartime
• The End Of The World
• Yggdrasil: The World-Ash
• Rándrasill
• Homo Homini Deus Est
• Asgard
• Homo Homini Lupus Est
• Jörmungandr
• Thor Fishing
• Baldur
• Frigg
• Hel
• Loki’s House
• The Thin Child In Time
• Ragnarök
• The Thin Child In Peacetime
• Thoughts On Myths
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements