What is Ragnarok and do you think it’s actually going to happen?

The question is similar to asking Christians or Muslims whether or not they believe in the “End Times” or Hindus if they believe in the end of the Kali Yuga. The answer isn’t just a “yes” but more of a “how do you mean that?” That’s much like us in Asatru. When you ask “Do you believe in Ragnarok?” You’ll likely hear someone ask you “What do you mean by Ragnarok?”

Ragnarok means the “Final Doom of the Gods”

Ragnarok is described in a poem called the Voluspa (the Prophesy of the Volva/Seeress) where the Seeress describes a coming doomsday where the world ends, humanity is destroyed and the Gods die in battle against their enemies. Odin gets eaten by the Fenris wolf. Thor is poisoned by the World Serpent. Freyr is roasted by Surtr (who then burns the entire world). Loki and Heimdall kill each other in battle.

Afterwards, the world is reborn with new and returned Gods and new people, and it’s actually even better than the world that came before.

It’s pretty harrowing stuff, at least, according to the poem.

Heathens don’t all agree as to what Ragnarok is.

As you can imagine, we don’t all agree in our interpretations of what Rangarok is. We shouldn’t be expected to either. As a religion that has no centralized dogma and no punishments for “wrong belief,” multiple interpretations are inevitable. These interpretations break down in three basic groups.

• Literal
• Hermeneutic
• Metaphorical

Some people believe Ragnarok literally happened, or that it literally will happen.

It’s not common in the Norse Pagan community, but some do think that Rangarok is literally true. That is to say, the poem accurately describes a prophecy of factual events that either happened sometime in the past or will happen sometime in the future.

They also might interpret the poem more metaphorically, as we will see later, but in a way that still preserves the idea of the Ragnarok as the “end times.” So instead of a literal wolf devouring the moon, it’s an atomic blast blotting out the sky. The difference between this and a full metaphorical approach is that this approach still regards the Ragnarok as fundamentally factual in nature. It is describing “facts” in a poetic or prophetic way.

This is similar to how some people interpret prophecy from the Bible. There are whole branches of Christianity that come from someone’s interpretation of the Book of Revelations. The base assumption is that the text is describing a set of factual events either experienced or yet to come, in a way that must be interpreted.

Some people study the Ragnarok to figure out what it would have meant to the people who originally wrote or spoke the poem.

Some Heathens, usually reconstructionists, will look at Ragnarok like an artifact. Imagine if in 1000 years after roads as we know them disappeared, someone found a STOP sign, and the STOP had faded away after years of wear. It’s just a red octagon. What did this red octagon mean? Maybe it was a powerful magic symbol of some kind?

To decipher what something might have meant, we look for context clues in the surrounding literature, history and culture that might tell us more about the object. Most people who look at the Ragnarok story this way do not take it literally, and many have come to the conclusion that the Ragnarok was likely not taken literally, if even people had heard the poem at all.

Ragnarok is Christian nonsense!

This interpretation rejects the story of Ragnarok entirely as an invention of Christian scholars who wanted to make it look like the time of Paganism had come and gone. That the Gods died and that a new God was coming to take their place.

The problem is that there is nothing to indicate that this poem or story in particular was invented by Christians, or which parts were invented by Christians. We also don’t know why they would have invented the parts that they invented. Instead of making the project of interpreting Ragnarok easier, rejecting it as Christian nonsense makes it more difficult and brings up a lot more questions than answers.

For example, how did we decide that Ragnarok is Christian but not, say, the Havamal? How do we know that one is Christian corruption and the other one isn’t?

We also see from comparative Indo-European myth, there are some echoes of Ragnarok in some Hindu and Buddhist stories–but they have their own ways of interpreting those stories too. Rather than dismissing the whole thing as Christian fan-fiction, we assume that a poem describing some kind of “Rangarok” was around in pre-Christian times, and was at least popular enough to survive in some fashion into the Christian period.

Now, it could be that Rangarok in particular made it through because it describes the doom of the Gods, and that was a story that was particularly amenable to the purposes of the new Christian religion. Which doesn’t mean that the poem wasn’t around, but more like it may not have been as important as we make it today.

Ragnarok as a Metaphor

Ragnarok can also be applied as a metaphor. What’s it a metaphor for? Could be that it is a metaphor for the social upheaval that came with the coming of the new Christian order of Europe. The old ways were fading and a new form of worship was becoming popular and people needed a way to understand why it was happening.

Ragnarok could also be a metaphor for the passing of the cycle of the seasons. Where the world dies and is reborn each and every year.

There are so many things Rangarok could be a metaphor for. Even in your own life.

Mythology is not Historical Fact

And now we get to the real point here. Mythology is not historical fact.

For most Pagans, our Mythology is not meant to be a catalogue of historical facts.

We will try to “stay in our lane” here, but we do want to get into some comparative studies here to help us along. Our relationship to the stories about or Gods is fundamentally different from a religion like Christianity or Islam whose faith follows a very particular timeline of events.

In Christianity, these events are the ones surrounding the life and times of Jesus. For Islam, their faith follows the events of the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad.

Time is intimately relevant to these faiths because both claim that the faith is grounded in historical fact. For Christians, it is a historical fact that Jesus lived, died and was reborn. For Muslims, it is historical fact that Muhammad lived, received the Holy Qu’ran from Allah and then died and ascended to Paradise. These are, to them, real people who did real things.

But for Pagans, our stories don’t follow any particular timeline.

When did Ragnarok happen? In the future? In the past? Is it always happening? There is no reference. When did Thor catch the World Serpent during a fishing trip? When did Loki trick the dwarves? When did Tyr lose His hand? When did Odin lose His eye? When did Baldur die?  What year? What day? Did Thor catch the World Serpent before or after he traveled to the realm of Utgard-Loki?

These aren’t mysteries for us to puzzle over, nor are they problems to be solved for us. These questions are irrelevant. Because we do not require these stories to have actually happened.

Our Gods may have done none of the things that are attributed to Them in the stories.

We are a living tradition with a living mythology that continues to grow with us.

What is the difference, then, between a story about Loki and Thor wandering in the woods from a thousand years ago and a story you tell your kids about Loki and Thor wandering the streets of London today? The difference is us. The difference is the values we carry with us and the values we try to express in our stories. Myth and story, using our Gods as characters to teach about why the world is the way it is, is part of what we do.

The real Ragnarok is when we stop telling new stories.

In some ways, Rangarok has happened. We don’t tell new stories about the Gods. We keep turning back to the old ones. While those old ones tell us a lot about the people who told them originally, we need our own. We need our own living mythology where we can talk about things that are important to us.

In the end, instead of thinking about when or if the world is going to end, think about the world you’re creating through the stories you tell.