Ragnarök

Hel

Nine days and nights Hermodur rode the eight-legged horse through the kingdom of death, along valleys and ashen paths where there was no light, only grey on grey, solids and shadows, and no sound except the steady tread of the horse hooves. He came to the river, Giöll, which surrounds Hel’s home, and is spanned by a golden bridge. This was kept by a giant porter, Mödgud. She stopped Hermodur and asked him why he was there. His single horse, she said, made more noise than all the dead who had earlier ridden across. And his colour was wrong. Too much blood.

Hermodur said he was seeking his dead brother, Baldur. Mödgud told him that Baldur had ridden over the bridge not long ago. And whether he alarmed her, or whether she pitied him, she let him cross the bridge and ride on in the dark towards Hel.

* * *

The halls were surrounded with an iron fence, hugely high. Hermodur rode along it, and came to no gate, though he did come to a cavern with a gatekeeper, a monstrous dog, or maybe a deformed wolf, whose jaws dripped blood, whose fangs gnashed, who growled perpetually, hackles high. His name was Garm. Hermodur stared at this snarling creature. He was not here to fight. He turned Odin’s horse and spoke to it quietly, backing off. Then he set Sleipnir to jump, and Sleipnir rose up and over the iron fence, and landed surefooted on the other side, in Hel’s inner city. There was a noise of grinding and boiling, from the cauldron Hvergelmir, where the dragon Nidhøggr feasted on bad men. Hermodur rode on. The dead stood silently along his road and stared at him, with the red blood running in his cheeks, with his living breath moving in his chest and throat. They were all grey, the dead. They had two expressions – one of impotent rage, and one of mild vacancy. There was no light in their dull eyes. They stared.

Hermodur came to Hel’s hall. He dismounted, and went in, leading Sleipnir, whom he was not about to lose. It was a rich hall, hung with gold and silver hangings, and in spite of that sparkle it was dull and foggy and grey. The great hall did not exactly hold its shape. Hermodur felt it as a narrow tunnel, closing on him: as a vast cavern, stretching away into the distance.

Hel was there, seated on her throne, with her black dead flesh, and her livid white flesh, sombre and stern. She was crowned with gold and diamonds, which sparked with light, and then disappeared, like quenched flames. Baldur was next to her, seated on a rich throne, with his wife beside him, and a sumptuous dish of glassy fruits, untouched, before him. His bright face was blanched. His golden beaker of mead was untouched.

Hermodur bowed to the queen of Hel, and said that he had come to beg for Baldur’s return to Asgard. Gods and men, and all creatures, were helpless with grief, and needed the young god to bring back their liveliness, their power to hope. Most of all, said Hermodur, the goddess Frigg had asked him to beg Hel for Baldur’s return, for she could not live without him. To this, Hel replied that mothers throughout time had learned to live without their sons. Every day young men died and came quietly over her golden bridge. Only in Asgard could they die in battle every day, as a game, and live again to feast in the evening. In the hard world, and in the world of shadows, death was not a game.

But this death, said Hermodur, had diminished the light of the world.

So, said Hel. It is diminished, then.

Baldur sat listless and said nothing. Nanna leaned against his shoulder, but he did not embrace her.

‘Tell Frigg,’ said Hel, Loki’s child, hurled out of Asgard, ‘tell Frigg that Baldur may return if every being, every creature, in the heavens and on the earth and in the ocean and under the earth, weeps freely for him. Can she save him through grief, who could not protect him through love? If there is one dry eye, anywhere, Baldur stays here. As you see, he is honoured among the dead, and he is the chief guest at my table.’

Hermodur knew that he must take back this message. He knew also the shape of this story. But then, he thought, Frigg’s fierce will, and the ferocity of her love, and the power of her voice, may twist the shape of the story, and free Baldur to ride back over the bridge, where no man rode back. So he bowed his head, and Baldur opened his pale mouth and held out the magic ring, Draupnir, which Odin had put by his corpse. ‘Hermodur should take it back to Odin,’ he said mildly. ‘Hel is full of gold and silver. We have no need of this.’

Then the Ases sent out messengers, young gods and wise birds, horsemen and runners, with one message to the whole web of Midgard, living and lifeless, warm blood, cold blood, sap and stone, that they should weep Baldur out of Hel’s power. Dark Hödur wept in his forest lair. Cattle and sheep stood stolid and bellowed and snorted and wept. Howling monkeys and rambling bears brushed tears from their eyes; vipers and rattlers hissed and were still while the tears welled. Stalactites and stalagmites dripped; geysirs mingled warm tears in the boiling steam; the surfaces of boulders and outcrops sweated tearwater, as they do when they come from frost to warm weather. There was steam in the forests and the meadows from dripping leaves; the surfaces of apples, grapes, pomegranates, snow-berries and dewberries were slippery with weeping. The sky itself was full of thick cloud which was made of tears, and wept. Under the salt surface, in the kelp forest, the creatures crowded on Rándrasill wept salt into salt, crown-of-thorns and purple squid, otters and slugs, whelks and winkles, made drops of salt water run into salt water. The lidless eyes of fish and the eyes of whales deep in blubber brimmed water into water and the sea level rose. So also did all quiet pools and rushy fountains, and even stone horse troughs inside which red threadworms wept for the brightness that was gone. Water climbed inside Yggdrasil’s channels and dripped from the soggy leaves onto the damp bark and the wet ground. The gods wept in their gold palace, even finally Frigg, who had been stony and tearless in her great grief. Tears lay like a veil on her face, a sheet of water like those that brim in the flooded grass round rivers that have burst their banks. The earth and the sea and the sky were one thing, which wept as one thing.

Except. Not the mistletoe, this time. Not anyone or anything forgotten through the negligence of the messengers of the gods. Something, or someone, encountered in a dark, dry, rocky hole in a black desert. The diligent messenger went in bravely through the weeping rockface, into lightless tunnels – still wet – and came at last to a black hole, stuffy, not damp, in which something vast huddled and swayed. Who was the messenger? Someone close to Frigg, maybe Gna her handmaid, a horsewoman who rode out over the world at her behest. The thing in the black hole made a sound like dry leaves, like tinder, its garments rustled and swirled. It was dry as a dry bone in a dry place, and its face was a dry bone face, black as its wrappings, with cavernous eyeholes and a lipless mouth full of black teeth. This, Gna thought, was some mountain giantess. She approached – quietly – and said she was come to ask the cave’s inhabitant to weep with the rest of the world, with the whole world together, so that Baldur might return to the land of the living and bring his light with him. She said, ‘Who are you, mother?’

‘Thöck’ said the dry voice inside the dark bones.

The voice ground out:

‘Thöck must weep with dry eyes

Over Baldur’s ending.

Neither in life nor in death did I have

need of him.

Let Hel hold what she has.’

Gna found herself out on the trail through the mountains. Everything dripped. She rode back dejected, and told Frigg that something called Thöck would not weep.

‘Thöck’, said Frigg, ‘means darkness, the dark. I do not believe your dry giantess was a giantess, any more than the old woman with the mistletoe was an old woman.’

The spring of the world was gone. There was a rainbow but it was watery and incomplete, patches of hectic colour here and there in the thick cloud, which never seemed to lift. The tides, swelled by tears, were irregular and unpredictable. Things on the earth drooped in their wetness which would not quite dry. Yggdrasil had stains of mould and decay. Rándrasill was scraped bare, in places, by rasping tongues licking up tearwater. A kind of sloth was at the heart of things.

The gods decided that Thöck was Loki in disguise. They blamed Loki for what he had done – the use of the mistletoe – and for many things he had not had a hand in, Baldur’s bad dreams, the wayward weather, too much wet, too much scorching, dark days, too much wind. He was an enemy and they decided he was the enemy. They would take revenge. They were good at revenge.