Ragnarök

Baldur

The thin child considered Baldur the beautiful. He was a god who was doomed to die – in the book this was what was told about him. The figure in the painting of Jesus talking to the animals, all white gentleness and golden radiance, was also a god who was doomed to die. This god would come back to judge the quick and the dead. Or so she was told. Asgard and the Gods had explanatory paragraphs in which its scholarly German author discussed solar myths and vegetation myths. The sun went into the dark at the winter solstice. Plant life shrunk to its roots under the earth, hard as iron, as they sang in the carol, water like a stone. The stories celebrated the return of spring, the sun high in the sky, leaves bursting out, grass new and bright green.

Baldur went, but he did not come back. The thin child sorted in her new mind things that went and came back, and things that went and did not come back. Her father with his flaming hair was flying under the hot sun in Africa, and she knew in her soul that he would not come back. She knew it partly because of the things tangibly unsaid when the family at Christmas raised small glasses of cider, and drank to him, and the hope that next Christmas he would come back. There were stories that ended, instead of going in circles and cycles, and the story of the beautiful god was one of those, and she found it grimly satisfactory. Though her readings and rereadings at all times of the year gave it a kind of eternal recurrence. The story ended, but she began it again.

These gods, she understood, were apprehensive gods, fearful gods, right from the beginning. Asgard had defensive walls and sentinels on watch. There was an expectation of doom. There was the lovely Idun, who lived in a green bower amongst the strong branches of Yggdrasil, and gave the gods the golden apples of youth and strength. One day, the story went, for no reason, she disappeared from the tree. The branches of Yggdrasil hung sapless and withered where she had balanced and smiled. No birds sang. The well Odrörir in which the water of life, cold and dark, was watched by the Norns, had sunk and was stagnant.

Odin sent his raven, Hugin (which means thought), to find out where Idun was. The great bird circled, and went down into the dark, into the land of the dark-elves, where he spoke to the dwarf-lords – Dain, whose name meant dead, and Thrain, whose name meant stiff. They were sleeping deeply and could not be roused, but muttered of destruction, darkness, threats and endings. The raven returned with riddling words. The skies were sinking to Ginnungagap. Things were falling apart. Torrents of airs tumbling and swaying. Idun was under the roots of the drooping Ash in the lair of an ancient giant, Narfi, the father of black Night. The gods went and found her there, shivering and speechless. They wrapped her in a white wolfskin, which covered her brow, so that she could not see the living branches from which she had fallen, and she was comforted. The gods questioned Urd, the Norn, standing by the brim of the cauldron of wisdom. What had changed? Had time and death ambushed them? Were they themselves changed? Idun, shivering in her pale pelt, ancient Urd in her flimsy black drapes, seemed like the drowsy dwarves, sodden with sleep. They could not answer, but wept, floods of tears, brimming in their eyes, splashing on their hands. The huge teardrops, one after the other, swollen and then bursting, were like mirrors in which the questioning gods saw only their own anxious faces. Everything was at once sluggish and slow, and speeded up, rushing to some ending.

Bright Baldur too was seized by sleep. He was sluggish, as winter-sleepers are, who cannot wake, who slide backwards into somnolence and dreams. He dreamed of the wolf with his bloody mouth, breaking free of the magic rope that bound him, snapping the sword in his gullet between his vast jaws. He dreamed of the Midgard-serpent, lapped around the world, unknotting her coils and rising above the waves, spitting poison. He dreamed of Hel and her dark halls, her living-and-dead face, her pale crown, the beaker she had prepared for him when he should come to sit down at her side. Most dreams, the thin child knew, are wispy and thin, can be torn away by a determined sleeper, can be reduced to a peepshow or puzzle in which the dreamer is a looker-on, not threatened. But there are gripping dreams of real terror, more real than the world the dreamer wakes to, thick, suffocating, full of hurt and hurt to come, in which the dreamer is the victim of ineluctable harm.

She had dreams of that kind in this wartime. They were sometimes foolish. She dreamed again and again that ‘the Germans’ were secreted under her metal bedstead, sawing steadily through the legs, so they could grasp her and carry her off. She knew they were there, even when she woke and knew it was absurd. Bus stops and cafés had posters of grey helmets crouched under benches and tea-tables, listening in, waiting to pounce. If they came, the world would end, but she did not, waking, imagine them coming.

She dreamed also that they had taken her parents and tied them up in a hollow in the middle of a dark forest, the Ironwood. They lay, her parents, bound and helpless amongst dead bracken and mulch. The shadowy grey-helmeted Germans moved purposefully about, doing things with metal and ropes which she could not understand. She herself was hidden above the rim of the bowl, looking down on the terrified prisoners, not even wanting to know what the Germans were about to do. What was fearsome, the thin child understood, was to have helpless parents. It was a chink in the protective wall round her, so she believed, conventional childhood. She dreamed what she did not know, that her parents were afraid and uncertain. She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.

She asked herself who were the good and wise Germans who had written Asgard and the Gods to collect ‘our German stories and beliefs’. Whose was the storytelling voice that gripped her imagination, and tactfully suggested explanations?