Ragnarök

Loki’s House

Loki had a house in a high place, an eyrie on a cliff overlooking a wild waterfall, Franang, which hurled itself into a deep pool, which overflowed into a rushing stream. His house was simple: it had one room, with four great doors opening in every direction. Sometimes, in the form of a falcon, he perched on the rooftree and looked with eagle eyes in all directions for the chase he knew would come. The house was sparsely furnished; there was a great fire in the centre, under the chimney, and tables, on which the trickster spread things he was studying. Odin had acquired knowledge in danger and pain, and at the cost of an eye. Odin’s knowledge was the knowledge of the forces that bound things together, and of the runes that read and controlled those forces. Treaties were inscribed on his straight spear, torn from the living Ash. This spear both kept the peace and upheld the rule of the gods, who, we have seen, were themselves often referred to, by men, with words that meant bonds and fetters. Odin controlled magic, a form of knowledge that controlled things and creatures, including the societies of gods and men. Odin dealt death at a distance to those who displeased him. He interrogated the Norns, and the dead, and the powers under the earth, in the interests of the Ases and the Einherjar. His vengeance was fearful, and the sacrifices made to him were fearful. Culprits and enemies had their bleeding lungs torn out through their ribcages, making them into ghastly ‘blood-eagles’, twisted and dripping. No creature could meet his one eye. All lowered their gaze.

Loki was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and worked in the world. He was neither kind nor gentle, not anyway when he inhabited the world of myth. In the world of folktales he was a fire demon, mostly benign, providing warmth for hearths and ovens. In the world of Asgard he was smiling and reckless, a forest fire devouring what stood in its path.

In his falcon shape he hunted small creatures and brought them back and spread their brains and lungs on his table so that he could study the forms lurking in the intricate shapelessness of their mass of spongy air-cells, the branching veins, the slits for their roots. Brains, too, amused him. He liked the twining convoluted lumps, white inside, grey outside, and the fissures running between the lobes. A sacrificed man was a cross, a simplified tree. A lung, a brain, was complexity run wild, an unholy mess in which a different kind of order might nevertheless be discerned.

He collected other things which also seemed at first glance formless. A wing feather was regular, hooked plumes sprouting orderly from the spine of the quill. But down – duckdown, swansdown with matted or floating wisps – down was intriguing, there were rhythms and repetitions lurking in the puffed threads.

He studied, most of all, fire and water. Fire was his element but he also changed himself into a great salmon and threaded his way swiftly through the crash of the waterfall, across the eddies of the deep pool, over its lip into the rushing river, which parted round a great stone, and joined again, twisting and bubbling.

You could read the future in columns of smoke, or leaping points of flame, red, yellow, blue-green, never still but holding their shape. Why did the smoke rise smooth and fast in a straight column and then quite suddenly divide into fantastic swirling, more and more turbulent? Why did the water flow smoothly towards the rock, so you could see the fine lines of bubbles smooth in it, or let them run over your shining scales, pink and silver? And then, suddenly, the water round the rock would divide every which way, frothing and spinning in curves and curlicues, occasionally gathering and spinning round sudden whirlpools. The water grew wilder like the smoke, and in many ways resembled it. Loki wanted to learn from it – not exactly to master fire or water, but to map them. But beyond the curiosity there was delight. Chaos pleased him. He liked things to get more and more furious, more wild, more ungraspable, he was at home in turbulence. He would provoke turbulence to please himself and tried to understand it in order to make more of it. He was in burning columns of smoke in battlefields. He was in the fury of rivers bursting their banks, or the waterwalls of high tides throwing themselves over flood defences, bringing down ships and houses.

He was reckless and cunning, both. He swam in his waterways seeking out hiding places for when the gods came, gravel patches against which the great still fish, scaly and glittering, would not stand out, deep channels along which he could slide towards the sea, churning pools where ripples and sucking obscured the view.

He thought like the gods, to forestall them. If he were a god, and he knew that his enemy was fish-shaped and rapid, how would he trap him? He began, with long strips of twisted linen threads, to make a net that would go across the outlet from the pool, and which would entangle the big fish. He got interested in this, and invented several new kinds of knots, and a kind of drawstring for pulling round the struggling fish. That would get it, he thought, and noticed that his fire was suddenly smoking fiercely – a strong, regular flow of smoke, going up and up, and then breaking up into whirling. This was a sign that the pursuit had found him, and was on its way, riding the clouds. He dropped the fishing net hastily into the fire – which sputtered blue and bit into it. Then he became a bird and flew to the waterfall where he became a salmon and swam down deep.

* * *

The gaggle of gods, with their flying horses, goat-drawn and even cat-drawn chariots, rode the north wind and broke into the house through all four doors. They looked around: the trickster was not there. One observed that he had recently been there, for the hearth, and the ashes in it, were warm. A very clever god, Kvasir, who was known for making poetry, stepped forward and studied the hot ashes. They were made of wooden logs and bracken tufts, which still held the grey ghosts of their shapes, though when they were touched they would fall into shapelessness. Lying over these burned plants was an ashen pattern, a regular pattern, a pattern of squares and diamonds, and threads and knots. Kvasir scrutinised the knots, told the others to touch nothing, and found Loki’s store of linen threads. This was the phantom of a clever trap for fish, Kvasir told the gods. A new one could be put together, after scrutinising the forms of the knotting. So he squatted down, nimble-fingered, and made a new net.

The gods slunk out to the waterfall, carrying the fishnet. The fish heard their tread, and sank to the gravel, moving nothing but his gills. The gods stood round the deep pool and cast the net into it. They could see nothing, for the surface bubbled with turbulence. The fish moved his fins to shift the gravel, and half bury himself, and the cast net went over him. He thought about how he would get out of this, and considered making a dash for the pool lip and the open stream. But they would see him, they were sharp-eyed. Maybe, he thought, he could do what salmon did, and surprise them by making a wild leap up the falling water, and swim away, upstream. He was, he was sure, cleverer than all the gods put together and that was not saying much, said the trickster to himself in his proud mind, fanning the gravel. Kvasir however had the idea of weighting the net and dragging it across the floor of the pool, held by Thor on one side, and all the other Aesir on the other. So they did this, moving slowly and resolutely, and they felt the net hit and pull against a solid body. So they pulled the cunning strings and drew him up fighting, the sleek and lissom fish with furious eyes. He was limp until they had him at the rim, and then made a great muscular leap, and would have got away if Thor had not put out a vast hand and gripped him by the tail. The fish struggled. The thunder god held on, revenging himself for countless taunts and teasing tricks. They wrapped him in the copy of his own burned net, and carried him back to Asgard.

The word for gods is also the word for bonds, and Loki, like his son Fenris, was bound. They took him to a cave and set up three flat stones, and bored a hole through each one. They brought his family to see his defeat – not the inordinate family from the Iron Wood, but his faithful wife Sigyn, and her two sons, Wali and Narwi. They said the shapeshifter should see shapes shifted, and they turned the young man, Wali, into a snarling wolf, who immediately set upon his brother and tore him limb from limb. Then the smiling gods killed the wolf – Odin plunged his great spear, Gungnir, into its guts. Laughing, they took the bloody entrails and sinews of wolf and man, and used them to bind Loki, between the three stones – one under his shoulders, the second under his loins, the third under his knee-joints.

Loki stirred in the dripping web, thinking perhaps that he could still become a fly, or an earwig, and creep away. But the gods sang runes to the bonds of flesh, and they became iron and gripped.

The storm goddess, Skadi, blithe and mocking, brought a vast snake, spitting poison, and caged it on the cave-roof over Loki’s face, so that the poisonous spittle dripped endlessly onto him.

There he should stay, the gods said, satisfied, until Ragnarök.

His wife crept up with a great dish, in which she caught the poison. It was said that whenever she had to take this dish away, to empty it, the prisoner writhed in his bonds, and this was what humans felt as earthquakes.

The gods laughed at the pair of them.

But they knew Ragnarök was coming, the thin child thought. The Fenris-Wolf was bound, and Jörmungander was made into a bond, clasped round the earth under the sea. Hel was inside her palisade. Wolves and snakes infested the mind, but were kept within limits. As the snake circled the sea, the sky-wolves circled the heavens, always pursuing Day and Night, Sun and Moon, never catching them, never relenting.

In Asgard and the Gods Ragnarök came hard upon the binding of Loki, as though there were no meaningful events to be recorded in the gap between. The book explained that ‘Ragnarök means the darkening of the Regin, i.e. of the gods, hence the Twilight of the Gods; some however explain the word Rök to mean Judgement, i.e. of the gods’. The Twilight is particularly pleasing, though etymologically wrong, it appears – it is Ragnarök, judgement or destiny (ragna is the genitive plural of Regin). Ragnarøkkr would indeed mean twilight of the gods, but it is, we are told, a misreading.

The thin child was baffled by the placing of the death, darkening, judgment, or twilight of the gods in the story book she had. Part of the delight and mystery of this book was that everything was told several times, in different orders and in different tones of voice. The book opened with a kind of headed catalogue of the gods, with their deeds and fates. Ragnarök has its place in this list, appearing as early as page 16, summarised poetically. But it is retold in a more naturalistic form at the end of the book, with emotions and judgments, and it is retold again in a verse translation of the Völuspa, or Wöluspa, the Lay of Wala, at the very end of the book, incantatory and chilling. It is told in the present tense, a prophetic vision of the future, seen as though it was Now. The thin child became an onlooker at the death of the world, every time she read these different tellings of the tale. Even Baldur’s bad dreams were a foreseeing of the disasters of Ragnarök. It felt different from Christian accounts of the end of things, with the undead god returning to judge the quick and the dead. Here the gods themselves were judged and found wanting. Who judged? What brought Ragnarök about? Loki, waiting to be found, waiting to be trapped, waiting to be bound, was described as knowing that his torment was the beginning of the time of Ragnarök. He would be tortured until Ragnarök came. No one, the thin child thought to herself, had any doubt that Ragnarök was coming, neither the gods, nor the wolves, nor the snakes, nor the shapeshifting trickster. They were transfixed, staring at it, like rabbits with weasels, with no thoughts of averting it. The Christian God condemned sinful men, and raised up the ‘good’ dead. The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. Not clever enough, and bad. The thin child, thinking of playground cruelty and the Blitz, liked to glance at the idea that gods were bad, that things were bad. That the story had always been there, and the actors had always known it.