Gone Medieval - Ragnarok & The End of the World

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

It's time. Winter has come, and the giant wolf has swallowed the sun.Today, Matt Lewis holds our hand as we experience the end of the world, known to the Norse people as Ragnarok.He's joined by Eleanor Barraclough to explore the intricate prophecies, mythic battles, and the ultimate destruction and rebirth of the nine realms. This is the final episode in our series on the Norse Mythologies and ties together the previous explorations of Norse creation myths, gods like Odin, Thor, and Loki, and their influence on the mortal world, and how the Vikings envisioned the end of everything and the hope that followed.MOREMonsters of the Medieval ApocalypseMedieval ApocalypseGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis, King Gilfi is played by Eric Nolan. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with gone medieval. In Asgard, I have heard many tales of creation of Odin and the gods, or Thor and Loki, and how we mortals might reach Valhalla. Now we must hear of the end, of Ragnarok, which is the end of all things, of the gods, of mortal of Asgard and of the earth. This is how it will happen. Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis.

This is the final part of our special series on Norse mythology. We've heard how the world began, met Odin and the pantheon of gods with Eleanor, got to know Thor and Loki a little bit better, and considered the effect the Norse gods had on those mortals who believed in them. If you haven't heard the previous four episodes,

you can listen to them all now, but it's time to close. the circle of our story. As King Guilfee has told you, this is about the moment that we'll see the destruction of the nine realms and everything within them. This is the culmination of our series and I'll be joined by the fantastic Eleanor Baraklough to find out precisely how the Vikings believed it would all end, why they had an apocalypse story and how the threat of Ragnarok affected them. And we'll also consider whether there was any hope in the story. For now, let's hear how the Vikings described the death of the gods and the destruction of the world.

In the halls of Asgard, where I sought answers from the three kings and my guide Gangliri, I heard the terrible tale of doom that turned my blood to ice. The king spoke of a time when Loki would be bound deep in the earth, a venomous snake above him to drip poison on his face. Loki's wife, Seagern, would stand by her husband with a bowl to catch the poison. Each time the bowl was full, Seagern would be forced to leave to empty it. In those moments, the poison would drip into Loki's face, and he would ride and trash against the venom so that the whole earth trembles and shakes. Here, the king said, Loki would remain bound until the weird of the gods. This term was one unknown to Gangliri and I as we listened, and he asked the king

what they could tell us of the weird of the gods. With somber faces, the kings warned us that the story of this time was one of destruction, but they agreed to tell us what they knew. The weird of the gods will be preceded by the awful winter. There will be warnings that the awful winter is coming. There will be three winters during which battle shall rage all over the earth, when brother shall kill brother in Greece. Still brother in greed, the legends say.

Brothers shall strive and slaughter each other. Own sisters' children shall sin together. Three days among men, many a horde them. An axe age, a sword age, shields shall be cloven, a wind age, a wolf age, air. Following this, there will be three winters in a row with no summer in between them. Snow will drive in from all corners of the world. Great frosts will gnaw and chilled winds will bite. The sun will offer no warmth in those times.

Then shall come the awful winter. A giant wolf shall swallow the sun, causing much fear. Another wolf shall eat the moon, and the stars shall vanish from the heavens. Then shall the earth shake so violently that trees shall be torn up. clags will fall into ruin and all bonds and fetters shall break. Do you remember Fenris Wolf, the son of Loki bound deep in the earth? And the Midgard serpent, another son of Loki who was cast into the ocean. The bonds holding Fenris Wolf shall shatter and he shall be let loose upon the world.

The sea shall gush forth onto the earth as the mighty Midgard serpent rises up and onto the land. Then a great ship named Nagalfar shall appear, steered by the giant Himir. The ship is made from the nails of the dead, so be warned that if you should die with long nails, you will contribute greatly to the construction of this ship, which both gods and mortals should prefer to be unfinished for as long as possible. Fenris wolf advances with gaping mouth, stretching from the ground below to heaven above, Fire shall rage in his eyes And blaze from his nostrils

As he devours the earth and the sky At the side of venerous wolf Shall be the Mithgard serpent Spitting venom into the air and water The sons of Moosebell ride Led by Surtur Who guards the way into the primordial Fire Realm of Moosebell

They ride over the bifrost The bridge that connects the realms And it shall shatter behind them In a wide field known as Vigradir. They will all gather. Fenris Wolf, the Midgard serpent, Sertrter and his army, the giant Himmir and Loki, who has also been freed from his bonds, all of the champions of hell. Loki's daughter also join them and follow Loki. When this happens, in Asgard, Heimdahl will summon all the gods with a mighty blast on his horn. Now shall the world three

Ictersil tremble, for nothing in heaven or earth will be without fear. Odin and the gods put on their armor, take up their weapons and ride out to the field of Egridir to give battle. Freyre shall fight with Surtr, a close contest before Freer finally falls. The fearsome dog Garmin, the greatest monster in all the world, will be unleashed and faced here. Each shall kill the other. Thor will defeat the immense, Midgard's serpent but only strides away victorious for nine paces before he falls down dead because of the venom the serpent spat at him. Odin will face Fenris and a wolf will swallow Odin with his great jaw.

This is to be the end of the Alfather. Then Vidar will step forth to fight Fenris wolf and he shall place his boot on the wolf's lower jaw. Vidar's boot is made from all the scraps of leather thrown away by mortals across time. so to help the gods in this final battle, we mortals must throw these scraps away to help make Vidar's boot large and heavy. Reaching his hand into the mouth of Fenris wolf, Vidar tears out his gullet.

Loki shall fight Heimdam, and they will each kill the other. Then Sir Tur will cast fire over the earth and burn all the world. For it is written, the sun shall be darkened, earth sinks in the sea, Sea, glide from the heaven and the glittering stars, smoke wreak rages and reddening fire,

the high heat licks against heaven itself. It will come to pass when the world is burned, and when the gods, the champions and all mortals have perished. Ragnarok is not quite the end of all things. Eventually, the earth shall emerge from beneath the oceans and it will be green, lush and fair. Vidar and Valley shall remain and will live at Ida Plain, where Asgard had been. The sons of Thor shall come here with the hammer, Muldner, and Baldir and Haudu shall follow. They will all sit and speak of the things that befell the world.

The son shall have borne a daughter to walk in her mother's footsteps. Two mortals shall have survived the fires of Sertr. They will be called Leaf and Leaf Drasir. The morning dew shall be their food, and their offspring will people the earth anew, as the prophecies tell us. Leaf and leaf tracier, these shall lurk hidden in the halt of Hodmimir. The morning do's their meat shall be, thence are gendered degeneration. There is much here to frighten us all. It is a complex story of the end and of the beginning.

Fortunately, there is one wiser than I to. help us understand this doomed vet. Eleanor, you've come back to us at the end of days. You've come back to finish the world for us. I'm back. It's all going to go down now. I would say it's nice to see you, but we kind of need this episode not to end because the world is going to come to an end.

Let's just keep talking, right? How long can people last? Exactly. That's it. For the rest of our lives, we will be talking to each other and therefore overt Ragnarok. It's going to be fine. For the sake of humanity. Yes.

We're going to do this, the unending episode of Gone Medieval. Wonderful. Right, so the end of days. I guess first things first, Ragnarok, where does that word come from and what does it mean? Oh, it's a good word, isn't it? So, yeah, so Ragnarok, there are two forms of the word. Let's start with etymology. Everyone loves a bit of etymology. Ragnar, easy. It means of the gods. Two versions of the word that appear in our source material. So if it's just Ragnarok, as we know it, then Ruk is sort of fates, destinies, something like that. but Snorri Stotlinson, our friend who we have met before, author of the prose edda, and also one of the edict poems in the poetic edda, both those 13th century texts from Iceland that we are so grateful to. There's one of those called Locke Sennar, where Loki basically tips up and starts making fun of everyone and being extremely rude.

But they use a variant of that Ragnar Rukker, which is very slightly different. And it means pretty much twilight of the gods. And obviously that's the one that's picked up by Wagner and his ring cycle. It's also picked up by, is it Douglas Adams? You've got the tea time of the gods, one of the Dirk gently ones. So yeah, it's either the fates of the gods or the twilight of the gods. Either way, doesn't sound good for the gods, really, does it? No, it doesn't.

And before we get into the meat of what Norse mythology tells us will happen at the end of the world, it seems like the Norse people are as obsessed with as the rest of humanity have always been, I guess, with stories of the apocalypse, how everything is going to end, how we're all going to die. Yeah, I think that's, I think it's a very human thing. And it comes back to something we touched on, you know, the idea of the beginning and the end of the world, it's something almost that's so beyond our ken. We can't, we can't really conceptualize of it. So what do we do? We make up stories about it. And the, the, the, the, the story. the better, which is lucky for us because this one is definitely a weird one. Yeah. And do you think there's anything that makes this distinctively Norse, the story of Ragnarok as compared to other apocalypse stories? Is there something particularly Norse about the way the world is going to end at Ragnaroff?

Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I mean, it's very bloody. It's very dramatic, which feels very Norse in the sense they are excellent storytellers. It's full of giants and gods. So again, you know, very much along the... the Norse brand lines there. I wonder as well, though, so, you know, our, obviously, sort of our main sources, and we can talk more about those, I'm sure, but our main sources, textually speaking, both from 13th century Iceland. And so I wonder, it's been suggested that maybe there's

something quite distinctively Icelandic about how Ragnarok is conceptualised. You know, it's this idea of the ice and the fire and the ground shaking like an earthquake and the sky's darkening overhead, almost like a volcanic eruption. So I wonder whether, you know, we can at least invite the possibility that it's not just Norse, but it's a Icelandic take on that myth. And I guess for people in Iceland, that combination of fire and ice and the ground shaking is part of life. So they experience these things all of the time. So it's easy to hang stories around the things that you know. Yeah, exactly that. And they know. And they know. the danger of that. It's not like there's a volcano going off every week, but certainly there is,

I mean, there is an amazing, oh my goodness, there's a, I'm going to totally get the dates wrong now, but the first major volcano that probably went off in Iceland once the settlers had arrived. So they start arriving towards the end of the 9th century. I think, I think, don't quite be on this, but I think the first volcano, the big one, goes off around 900 or so. And there's a really, fabulous, incredible discovery that archaeologists have made within the last, I don't, five years, 10 years, which is under the larvae fields that were formed during this volcanic eruption going off, they found what seems to be a cave where people are going to make offerings to maybe some sort of fire being to stop another volcano going off. And so you really do get a sense that it's like,

oh, we know how dangerous this stuff can be. You know, some say the world will end in, you know, fire, some say in ice. Well, you know, in Iceland you've got the delightful possibility of both, possibly at the same time. Yeah. And we should talk a little bit about our sources. As we did at creation point, we talked a lot about the poetic edda and the prose edda coming from 13th century Iceland, so written by Christians by that point. Are they the same sources that we would use?

for Ragnarok, or do we have any other sources around this? Do we have more archaeology to bulk out Ragnarok for us? Yeah. No, so we, so our main sources are once again, Snorri Stadlinson, poets, politician, saga, with his prose edda, which he writes as a handbook for aspiring poets. You really need to know the mythological stories. And then the poetic edda, which is very much that anonymous collection of mythological and legendary poems collected in the manuscript, Codex Regis.

the King's Codex. Those are our main ones, but there are some other ones. So if we're thinking particularly about the archaeology, actually, we can go to England for that one. So there's the Gothforth Cross in Cumbria. It's still there. You can still see it. And it's carved, I think it's sort of very early 10th century probably. It's carved with Christian imagery. So it's got Christ on the cross, for example. But it's also got Norse pagan imagery. on there and some of that is very much to do with Ragnarok. I think it's got Loki bound, you know, as sort of Sagan, his wife is holding this bowl over to stop the poison dripping into his mouth from this snake that's been suspended above. We've got Hame Dathler holding his horn, blowing his horn.

We know he does that at Ragnarok. But we've also got an image of what people think is Vidar, who's Odin's son, who is conceived and born specifically to avenge his father at Ragnarok, stepping with a big boot into the mouth of this toothy beast, which is probably the Fenrirs wolf, or Fenrir. We'll talk about that, I'm sure, because that's a very important part of the end of days. And do we need to be aware of, particularly with those 13th century Icelandic sources, of the Christian influence on the idea of the end of the world, because there is this idea that,

I mean, it feels when you read the story of Ragnarok in the Prozeder, for example, it's cataclysmic, everybody's going to die, everything's going to end, beat, but some people survive. So there is that kind of sense of,

it's not actually the end of everything, there is this idea of rebirth and continuation. Is that some Christian influence work in its way in, or has that always been part of the Norse mythology, Don't we know? We just don't know. We don't know. Certainly there is a likelihood. There's, funnily enough, when I say a dragon doesn't feel like the most Christian thing to be sort of comparing it to, but you write at the end of Vosbao, this prophecy of the serious poem, the beginning and the end of the world. She ends with this image of, it's beautiful, this shadow dark dragon flying over the dark moon hills and it's got corpses and its talons, which feels very sort of pagan Norse. but it has been compared to imagery in the book of Revelation, for example.

So yeah, this sense of rebirth, who knows? We just don't know. But certainly if you are talking about source material that comes from 13th century Iceland where most people have been at least nominally Christian for a good couple of centuries, you know, it would be, I think it would be more surprising if you don't have some Christian inflections somewhere in there. It almost has a hint of kind of Noah in the Ark about it, doesn't it? That there is a story that it will feel like the world is going to end, but there will be some survivors and there will be this sense of renewal.

Yeah, exactly. I suppose the question there is sort of, does Nora in the Ark and other stories like that speak to a more general sense in sort of the human storytelling, you know, throughout cultures, throughout mythology, of, you know, basically not everything is rubbish. You know, this sense like, okay, you know, So this idea of apocalypse is not the end of all times. It's not like the opposite of the Big Bang. Apocalypse is this unveiling. It's this sense of the end of things, but often the start of new things. And you see that in cultures all around the world. So it might be that humans are just more optimistic than sometimes we give ourselves credit for.

Yeah. And I think it's also something very human about the awareness that everything has a life cycle. Yeah. That, you know, everything lives and dies and something will follow it, you know, for us it's our children or something like that, you know, that there is a sense of continuity, even if it's not exactly the same as it was. Yeah, I think very strongly that, yeah. And so the story of Ragnarok, listeners will have heard a bit of that in the introduction. It has a whole lot of moving parts that all seem to depend on a lot on each other, and on pulling together lots of the earlier myths, like lots of stuff have been tucked away

just to wait for Ragnarok and it all comes out on this moment, this final day kind of thing. could you give us a kind of a quick recap of what will happen at Ragnar, perhaps starting off with what is the thing that kicks it off? What begins the path towards Ragnarok? Well, okay, so I could be really annoying and saying it can go all the way back. We could take it back to the killing of Emir and so, you know, there are all sorts of of points where the end might be said to begin. But in terms of if we're going for that cinematic, right, okay, the scene. is set, it's coming. The first thing you hear is that rooster crowing, which is, I think,

it's really eerie, you know, so a rooster will crow in the three worlds, so of Asgard, where the gods live, Yottenheim, where the Yutner or the giants live, and then in hell, the realm of the dead, the underworld. And so that, that is the sort of clarion call. It's about to go down here. And so then, and this is, as you say, there are lots of moving parts, and that's a beautiful way of describing it, because most of this we can take from both Snorri and from Volus Bao and other poems, but there are some inconsistencies. There's some bits where we have to kind of smooth the edges of the narrative, shall we say. So then, in hell, Garmer, this hellhound, possibly Fenrir, possibly not. It breaks free from its chains. And then we're told that the sun turns. turns black and the earth starts to tremble. And then the god Haimdathler, that big horn, you know, that he seems to be on the Gosphoth cross from Cumbria. He blows his horn to warn everyone that Ragnarok is on its way. And then it gets gruesome because this ship, Nagelphar, starts to appear. And I just, oh my goodness. So it's, it's, Nagelfar is carrying an army of,

you know, giants and monsters, the undead and the dead that are now undead. And they are, It's sort of captained by Loki, who has also broken free from his chains. And the meaning of Nagelfar is, well, it starts to get quite got gothic, right? So Nagel means nails. Far is like a vessel, a moving thing. But Nagel, it's, okay, it might be metal nails. But Snorri tells us that it's human nails. And this ship is made from the nails of the dead.

And so Snorri puts in a note, he says, this is why you've always got to cut the nails of the dead, because otherwise you're going to bring about Ragnarok quicker, because that ship is going to be finished quicker. And there is this sense throughout that Ragnarok can't be averted, but we still have agency in all the moments leading up to it. And, you know, we can explore that later. So Nagelfar is approaching. And then the fimbledr begins. And the fimbledwetter means monstrous or awful, terrible winter. And it's basically a sort of a nuclear winter. It's a three-year winter without a summer in between. Human starts to fight. Brother starts to fight brother. There's a brilliant stanza. This is it from

Boluswap. This is about this bit. So I can give it to you. It's been an old Norse and then a translation. So it says, Breidder, my brother, my sisternga, sylvum spila. Hart are in hemi, horde, horde, hermichel, skag-old, skan. old, skildi eriklovnir, wind old, varg-old, out of the world's steypisk, mun engi mother oathrum firma. That translates us, brother will fight brother and be his slayer, sisters' sons will violate the kinship bonds, it'll be hard in the world. Sort of, sexiness abounds and kind of, like, hoarder abounds, sort of not having a lot of sex, you shouldn't be having a bounds, let's try and think of another word for that.

axe age, sword age, shields are cleft asunder, wind age, wolf age, before the world plunges headlong and no one will spare another. And so it's all going down, right? And then there's a big battle in this valley. And then this awful giant creature appears, Soirthir, the fire giant. And he's got this burning, flaming brands. And he's burning all the worlds with it. And then Igrazil, the world tree, starts to burn. And at that point there's this huge battle and, you know, the gods and the giants who are killing each other and all these monstrous beings and it's really horrible. But then, exactly as you say, it is cyclical. It's not hopeless. So after Sertr's flames have gone out, some of the gods return. So Balder, the beautiful god, the one who ends up accidentally being killed by his brother Herder, he comes back. And so does his brother Herther, which I really like, because I always feel he gets a bit of a raw deal. Vidar, who is Odin's son, the one who we saw on the Gosphoth cross with his big boot

stepping into the mouth of the Fenris wolf. He comes back. Thor's sons, Magny and Murthy, they come back and then it's this idea that the gods will play sort of with golden gaming pieces and there's this new world called Gimli, like shining one. So yeah, there's a cyclical idea here but exactly as you say, is this original? We don't know. heard in an earlier episode about how there is a sense that maybe Loki is to some extent possibly but possibly not kind of coordinating all of this, that he sort of plays a part in Baldur's death as an effort to get himself chained up because the prophecy requires him to be released from chains before Ragnarok can come. So there is a sense that Loki could maybe be driving

some of this. There is also then a sense that everybody has their own opponent at Ragnarok, don't they? So that battle that we're talking about when Serta comes, which you know, you can think about maybe the Marvel film, Ragnarok, and you can think of Serta turning up with his flaming sword and setting fire to everything. But Loki will arrive with

the army of all of the enemies of the gods essentially, and everyone that has gone to the halls of Valhalla will turn out to fight for Odin and the gods. But it feels like everybody has their own rival, the person that they have to fight, that they were destined to be locked

into a fight at Ragnarok with. Can you give some bit of detail about who, who ends up fighting who and what happens to them all at that battle? Yeah, and that word destined is really important, I think, because it is. It's this moment of reckoning between these different components. So Freer, the god of fertility and growth, he fights Sertr, the fire giants, and he's killed.

He fights him without his sword because he's given it to his servant, skier, and that's a different story, but not good at this point. Thor and Jormengander, the world serpent, they kill each other. Now, they've got beef, they've got history. So there's another, you know, you may have touched on it, but where Thor goes fishing with an ox head as bait with a giant, and he accidentally catches Yormengander, the world serpent on the edge of his fishing hook, pulls so hard that his foot goes through the bottom of the boat. We know that, because also sometimes that appears on sort of picture stones from, you know, the time, from the Viking. age. So obviously it's going to be Thor and Yormengander, the rematch. And they kill,

well, Thor kills Yormengander and then manages to walk nine steps before Yormengander spuse poison all over him and Thor falls down dead there. Odin, obviously, it's got to be Fenrir, it's got to be that, that wolf. And we should sort of remember that Loki has actually fathered these three monstrous creatures. So Fenrir, Yormingandand, and also hell, this sort of half-corps, half-living human who presides over, you know, the place of the same name, the underworld. So Odin fights Fenrir. Fenrir kills Odin, but then, you know, Vida, his son comes with his big leather boot and prizes Fenrir's jaws apart and therefore avenges his father. So, you know, honour is satisfied there. Yes, Norrie says that Loki fights

Haimdathler, or Heimdathl with the horn. Tier in, I think one version, is said to fight Garma, that hellhound, who's freed from its bonds. So, yeah, exactly as you say, there are all these set pieces between different figures who, in some ways, you might say, represent some different sides of the ideological coin. Yeah, I was going to ask, how much can we read into the very specific pairing offs that we get? you know, there is Thor who is the god of the weather and, you know, lots of things that humans would want to pray to and to have good weather, good, you know, lack of storms, good crops and all of those kinds of things, is fighting against the midgard serpent who is kind of

encircling the world and is this monster who is out there in the sea, kind of on the edge of everything. And it's almost like the core of human experience is fighting with the edges of the world. Yes. Am I reading too much into all of this, or are those pairings meant to signify something? So I love the idea that they are and I love that specific one that you say. I think probably we can't be too prescriptive about it. And also we always have to remember what source material have we got and what other versions of this story might have been told. But yeah, certainly I mean, if you think, for example, if Freer, the god of fertility in life and growth is fighting surter, this idea and particularly coming back to Iceland where volcanoes, I mean, obviously we know volcanic ash can be. sort of nice for growing things later on, but certainly at the moment where the larva is covering your fields and you've been trying to grow crops and, you know, put your animals out to pasture, it's very much the absence of life. And so I do, yeah, I think the pairings are interesting, but yeah, there's some that I can't quite think of how they would work quite so well ideologically.

So shouldn't push it too far. But yeah, I do like that. I do like that idea. I think there is something very dramatic about these set pieces. Yeah. And what part do do the giants play? Because Serta actually comes from that kind of primordial before the creation of the world place of fire, doesn't he? But he kind of leads

an army across the bifrost and destroys the bifrost as he comes. And do the giants kind of joining on their side as well? Loki's obviously quite often connected to the giants and the giants are frequently the enemies of the gods. Yeah, exactly. So there is definitely that sense of

you know, on one side, for the most part, are the gods. And on the other side are the Yadner, the giants and sort of the other sort of, it's similar like humans and gods sort of on one side. And then the beings that are not that on the other, yes. But I think it's always important to remember that, well, you know, Odin, all the gods, they're descended from the giants. We have, you know, intermarriage between gods and giants often. So it's not, just, you know, yeah, sort of Loki, who's, one of his parents is a giant at least, there's definitely that, but also Frey has married a giantess, and Yerther marries a giantess.

And so it's, I don't know, I sometimes I wonder whether maybe that is partly, in Snorri's case at least, trying to make that logical framework that just makes everything a little easier to understand. But yeah, who knows? certainly there's aspects of that. Yeah. And is there a part for humans to play during Ragnar Rock? I mean, we've heard that, you know, why you should get your fingernails cut when you die because you don't want to be part of that fingernailship.

Yeah. But is there a sense that, you know, if hell who is controlling the realms of the dead is fighting for the enemies of the gods, I'm trying not to say goodies and baddies all the time here, but if hell is fighting on that side, is she bringing people back from the dead to fight for her and is Odin drawing on all of those warriors that he's gathered in Valhalla to fight on his side? So is there an element of human against human here, too? Yeah, exactly. I think so obviously we hear at the beginning, you know,

when brother will fight brother and the bonds of kinship will be broken, there's very much this sense of social chaos. And that's really important. So I think it's, yeah, it's exactly as you say, it's not goodies and baddies. There's something much more complex and much more interesting going on. I can't remember how much hell is said herself to play apart in that there are things that come out of hell, but Loki is very much leading that charge.

And it's, yeah, exactly as you say, on the side of the gods, you have the Ayn Haria, these like the chosen ones who feast at the hall, Odin's halls of Valhalla each night, waiting to be his warriors at Ragnarok. One version says that they are among the ones that come back to life after Ragnarok has passed.

Having said that, though, shout up to Freya, because she also has a hall, folk vanger, and she takes the other half of the chosen dead warriors. So it's not just Odin's bag. It's just Odin tends to get the praise for that particular side of it.

Which I'm sure would make Odin very happy. Yes. Oh yeah. He probably was putting about the rumours in the first place. Yeah. I don't think I'd have got on with Odin. I think he's an absolute creep. Oh, I genuinely don't feel I should be saying that.

Odin is lovely and please don't come and do bad things to me. This is the thing, right? You spend enough time. doing Norse mythology, and I spend a lot of time working within that world. You stop seeing it as entirely fictional. It's very, very hard to maintain that distance. And I think that is worth saying that with the source material as well, although it is, yeah, textually speaking, 13th century, post-conversion,

you always get the sense that these gods have not entirely disappeared. And, you know, there were runic inscriptions from later on again that very much mention the gods. And it's like, well, let's not be pissing anyone off. You know, let's just, let's just keep everyone. Hedge some bets. Exactly. Let us hedge those bets. Exactly that.

And it's interesting that you say that you feel kind of drawn into these. Because surely that the point of them, as we mentioned with the creation stories, these are meant to be told dramatically around the fire while everyone is getting drunk after dinner. and you need it to be entertaining. So this is a story that is full of stories of wolves chasing the sun and the moon across the sky. We've got a ship made out of dead people's fingernails. We've got the sky cracking open and we've got giant walls and snakes coming out. And we've almost got, as you said before, the gods and the good successful warriors versus kind of everybody else and everything else in the universe.

And surely all of that is just driving towards making this a brilliant story to tell that we're, really, really engage people. And it's still engaging you in 2025 into believing that some of this could be real. Yeah, exactly. And look, oh, God, can you just clip that bit, put that out, like, Eleanor thinks it's all real. She talks to Odin at night. Let's see. Well, I'm glad you said that not me. I don't have to say that. No, but exactly. And there's a reason for Marvel comics and Marvel films. And, you know, the sheer, I don't know, the scale of the, the creative afterlives of these myths, going down the centuries all the way into the present day. You know, it doesn't disappear and there is a reason for that. It's absolutely brilliant stuff.

Yeah. Do we have a sense about what Norse people thought or how they engaged with the stories of Ragnarok? You know, is it prophecy? Is it a myth? Is it allegory for what may be going on in the world at any given time that, you know, the end of the world isn't necessarily the end of everything? Do we know how they thought about it or how they engaged with it? This is it. It is really hard to tell. And I don't know if we went back to a particular point in, say, the Viking Age and picked a particular location, whether we would really know even then, you know, I think there is going to be such a spectrum of beliefs.

And I don't know, it's like any of this stuff. and it's very difficult to quantify belief and meaning at the time, let's alone hundreds of years later. So I don't know. I think it's telling that Snorri says, and this is why you should cut the fingernails of the dead before you bury them, you know, or, you know, somewhere else, I think it's Snorri again, he says, and this is why, you know, the off cuts of sort of leather boots when you make boots or shoes, they are used to make Vythar's giant boot that's going to help, you know, rip apart Fenrir, the wolf. Yes, so you kind of says, you know, you should make sure you throw away all those

offcuts of leather because they'll be collected up to make these boots that are going to help at Ragnarok. So cut fingernails, throw away scraps of leather. Exactly. And of course, you sort of coming, you know, we don't want to kind of become too abstract, but, you know, at what point does belief become superstition? What point does superstition become folk memory, you know, so it might well be that in the 13th century, still doing all that. And maybe Snorri's just saying, well, and this is why we tend to do that. And then, but maybe he's saying, and this is why you should do that. So it's quite difficult to tell. So going back tortuously again to your original question and trying to remember exactly what you say.

It's like, what's it like prophecy, allegory. Yeah. Is it kind of, is it prophecy? Is it mythology? Is it allegory? Yeah. Maybe all of the above. All of the above and none of the above. Let's just cover every single base we can. We just don't know. Yeah, because I guess we've also got to think that everybody's engagement with this will be individual as well. It's impossible to say how everybody, as you say, across centuries and across a whole diaspora will have engaged with this story. It will have meant different things to different people, I guess. Yes, exactly, and at different times. And so again, going back to, well, I mean, even my own experience of this, I have been. When you talk to Odin?

When I talk, so, right, okay, so I'm going to be completely yours. I would talk to Freya and Frey and Tear. Those are my, those are my favourite. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be talking. I'm going to tell Odin, you don't like him. Well, no, don't tell him. Don't tell him. Genuinely, a little bit more.

Can you tell us? I've had so much caffeine today. I'm going to be talking to Odin as soon as and so. But no, but say, but it is interesting. I've been in one form or another sort of engaged with sort of Norsema maybe more than anything else since I was a teenager, since I was an undergraduate. And the forms in which I engage with it sort of as a sort of specialist in this material change and they continue to change over the time and sort of the creative elements need, the bits

that piqued my interests, they change over time. So I think even within an individual, and this is me, you know, who's very much sort of coming at it from the point of view of, you know, not living in the Viking Age or being part of this culture. I think there is just something about it that is very hard for, I say, to shake, but for humanity to shake. This is good stuff. It's a bit like the Greek and the Roman stuff. There is a reason that it just keeps going.

It's great. Yeah, yeah. And just the ways in which Ragnarok is going to happen, we talked about kind of Idrisil, the World Tree, is going to suffer, that there's going to be this long winter, that this Serta is going to turn up with fire to destroy everything. Does this maybe speak to a Norse concern about the fragility of the natural world? Anxieties about climate, about famine. We often hear that Vikings go traveling to look for better farmland and things like that. Does this really relate to their connection with

the land and their fear about the insecurity of that connection? It would be sort of foolish if it didn't in some levels because, yeah, we are dealing with an insecure. unknowable world that might sort of flip on you suddenly in a couple of bad winters and there's nothing left. I think, so there've been some really interesting studies in the last, you know, few years looking at whether there are specific events that might be connected to, you know, at least the origins of some of what Ragnarok is. So one example, well, one example I mentioned already, this first big volcanic eruption that goes off in Iceland, the possibility that people are sacrificing to some fire being under the earth. That's absolutely what's going on there.

It's, please don't go off again. We know we are living in quite a freaky world in some way. You know, this, when they came over from the British Isles from Norway, they didn't have volcanoes and earthquakes in that way. But the other big one, so in the sort of first decades of the sixth century, there's some very big volcanic activity. And it looks like this had sort of impact all over the world and there is in a lot of source material from all sorts of different cultures. But it looks like it was also there in Scandinavia. And you know, you imagine this big dark cloud that comes over, you know, the lack of summers. It looks possible that there was depopulation or at least there's quite a few settlements that are abandoned during that time.

And so it's not, it's definitely not beyond the realms of possibility that the origin, of that insecurity and the trauma of what happens when the world turns on you and you suddenly, you know, everyone around you is dying of famine and there's social breakdown. That's all going on and that makes its way into the mythology because how do humans process information and how do they keep that information passed down the generations? It's through storytelling and mythology is sort of the ultimate form of storytelling. Yeah, I mean, it occurred to me then when you were talking there. I saw a parallel in kind of Game of Thrones when you've got old nan telling stories about the long winters and things like that to Bran.

And he just doesn't understand it because she's lived through this in the past and she's recounting all of these tales and he doesn't get it. And she's kind of calling you sweet summer child one day you'll find out kind of thing. And maybe there's an element of that. You know, you ran the storytelling people about what you might have experienced in the past or what you have a cultural memory of. and warning people that it's going to come again. Because everyone likes a good scary story. Yeah, exactly that. It's something I've done some research on this, actually,

which I don't know where I'm not going to bore you with, but I was looking at, you know, volcanoes specifically in Iceland. And what you find is that, so there are some big ones that went off early in the 20th century. And anthropologists went and spoke to people who had experienced them for themselves, but also, you know, the generation after that, the generation after that. And what do they remember and how do they deal with the fact that they are still living in the shadow of an extremely active volcano that's about to go off? And the people

who lived at the time, they're like, this was awful. You know, people died. You know, our farms were wiped out. This is terrible. But with that, stories that are sort of heroic and larger than life and sort of the start of legends are also being transmitted. So it's like, you know, farmer, Grimmer from this farm who let down from the lava fields and managed to save all his sheep or something like that. What you find a couple of generations later is that people are saying, we don't really like to think about that. If you don't mind not talking about it, we would really appreciate that. Okay, we know it's not extinct, but we would like to believe it's extinct.

And we can't. So it's that idea. Humans can't really imagine something until it's happening. And until that point, the world feels like it's going to. to go on like it always did, you know? And I think that exactly as you say, that transmission of cultural memory, that transmission of mythology is part of not just a warning, but it's, it's, yeah, well, maybe it is a warning, but certainly going back to your original question, it's that sense of, it's that strong recognition of the fragility of the world and the

fragility of life, but also the possibility that things can get better as well. Which interestingly brings us back to that whole Ragnarok idea of rebirth, doesn't it? And that study of people living in the shadow of volcano almost exactly plays into that. You know, it will feel like the end of days, but it will recover and it will come back. And maybe the end of days will come again, but there will be rebirth after that. It's sort of the requirement for hope in the face of all of that fear. Yeah, I think so. I think that's a really important point.

it's something that sort of the drama and the, you know, the larger than life, almost cartoonish sometimes nature of these myths aside, there is a very strong set of human messages that I think are, yeah, that go beyond the, oh, isn't this fun, look, a giant world serpent spitting poison at Thor, which is great, don't get me wrong, love it. But there is this sense of there are, there are deeper core messages that need to be passed on. The form in which that takes, I always think is quite interesting. There's this idea of, there's a fatalism, a fatalistic approach to this material that I think we also, I don't know, fate is a really important part of Norse culture.

And also sort of other Germanic culture, so there's a saying in Old English, the language that the Anglo-Saxons spoke. around the same time as we get the Viking Age, you know, and it's weird bit full of Rade, so, you know, fate is inflexible or fully inexorable. Fate is going to happen. There's a lovely line actually from one of the edict poems, Skirniss Mal or Furskina, like the journey of Skirness. Actually, Freya's, Frey, so his servant who Frey then gives this sword to and therefore Frey doesn't have it at Ragnarok. But he says something like, you know, there are a choices than simply sobbing for anyone who wants to get on with things in life. And then, you know, he goes on to say, you know, on one day, you know, in the past, my lifespan was shaped

and all of my days laid down. And the idea there, the message is that, yes, fate is fixed. And, you know, on a mythic scale, that's Ragnarok, but, you know, we can also apply that to all our lives. But fate is also, you know, beyond our reckoning. It's unknowable. And you do the things that you need to do because it's every moment that leads up to that final moment that counts. And I think that is very much. So that is that is also the message of Ragnarok, I think. And I think that is, there's, you know, which also kind of ties into, you know, that very famous, you know, there's another edict poem Halvimal, sayings of the high one,

that to be spoken by Odin, it's the idea of a person's name or reputation living beyond their lifetime. So it's the one that is Dea Fe, dea friend, day a self-exammer. So the cattle die, kin die, the self-two dies. But the one thing that never dies is sort of the memory of a good person.

And that I feel, yeah, so when we come back to that point in Ragnarok, where things are coming back, you know, it is sort of almost the fulfillment of that, but it's not like if all the gods came back to life, it would almost be cheating. So it's not that. It's just, so maybe, you know,

coming back to what we were talking about at the beginning, how influenced is this by sort of Christian ideas of rebirth? Maybe not as much as we might think, you know, that cyclical sense of the fulfillment of fate is actually possibly important. Yeah, and listening to you talk about that, it becomes easy to understand why that kind of story with, yes, hardship and a disaster, but with hope at the end of it, would appeal to a group of people who are living in the most inhospitable places on Earth, you know, on the very edges of the world, living a really fragile existence underneath volcanoes when you don't know if crops are going to grow this year. Yeah. It becomes easy to understand why these stories would appeal to those specific people.

Yes, yes. There is a grimness about Norse culture and a grim, a humour with it, but yeah, you know, you can't get away from that. There is a grimness in the sagas, in the mythology, you know, lightness as well, humanity, sort of, yes, humour, but, and exactly as you say, this is not, you know, what's it, is it Camus, who talked to the tender indifference of the world. I always think that's very appropriate when you're looking at, well, I mean, sort of nowhere in that part of medieval world was, you know, a box of chocolates, I don't know, plate of roses, whatever it might be, you know, life was hard. But exactly as you say, there is something about living in sort of the margins of what can be still seen as being sort of medieval European, northern European culture with its, yeah, it's, its ability just to, yeah, flip. And, you know, and that's not just Iceland, of course, that's, you know, you go further afield, you go from Iceland, keep going west to Greenland, that's even more extreme.

And there, they did have their version of Ragnarok, you know, that was a part of the North world that comes to an end. And mysteriously, but also in parts, possibly not. not entirely pleasantly. You know, we see the limits of what can be done there when everything does start to tip. So, yeah, I think, I think, yeah, maybe there is something quite nawse about it, to go back to an earlier question of yours, in that sense, too. Yeah, yeah.

Are there any versions of Ragnarok that we know of that don't see any renewal that are literally the end of everything? It sort of depends on when you, I'll say end. end the source material. You know, it's, so, for example, with Volusbao, if you cut it off a few stanzas earlier, yeah, it's just like the end of the world. Everything goes black, you know. And that's the difficulty of not knowing, or I think not knowing the original version.

That's not the right thing actually to want to know because there may well not have been an original version. And this comes back to this idea that this material, is passed down and it's shaped and it's retold and things are added and things are taken out or there might be one version of it in this country or this part of a country and a different version that's related but different. So who knows? Yeah, maybe. Maybe in one part of the North world it is very much, you know, screen face to black. And then in another, it's the dragon comes over the hill carrying corpses, but there are new people down in the fields playing, you know, Kneffetafel with golden pieces.

You know, that's the lovely thing. Or it might also be farm specific. You know, there's one version. You know, it's a bit like, I don't know, you tell fairy tales now, the sort of fairy tales that are collected by the Brothers Grimm. Well, you know, Cinderella, the version of it that they collect is very different to the version that ended up in the Disney film. So it's possible that that is also true of Ragnarok.

and there are versions that, shall we say possibly, are more or less suitable for children or other audiences. You know, maybe when you're out in the middle of the North Atlantic on a ship and a storm is blowing and everything is dark and feels very terrible, maybe you want the version where everything almost ends up okay again. Yeah, and I quite like the idea that this could also be down to a storyteller judging audience, you know, if the audience are playing ball and they're being really engaged, you're giving a bit of hope at the end. But, you know, if it's not going quite so well,

or they're not being very responsive, if you just leave them with fade to black, roll credits, everything, everyone's going to die and that's the end of it. Good night, I'm off. Exactly. Thank you very much. And just to leave us on the, on the hopeful note, hopefully, do we get a sense of what the world will be like after Ragnarok? Well, it's described as this word gimia, which means sort of like bright or glit. Yeah, it's not. entirely clear. Again, it depends.

You know, there is a version where it's the survivors or those who are rebirth, find the gods gaming pieces in the meadows where they used to play. And it's basically a sort of not quite a repeat. You know, but I think it's quite, you know, if we're trying to imagine what that looks like, I think we are given a lot of room to imagine that version for ourselves. And I think it is, there are enough mixed messages coming in. that it makes it hard to form that picture. And so I think it is a reminder of that slightly tricksy nature of the source material,

but also possibly a reflection of the reality at the time when these stories were being told. Yeah. And given the Norse love for ideas of destiny and things like that, it's quite striking that they kind of leave what will happen to all of this new round of gods and beings to the imagination. We've got very detailed account of what is going to happen. happen from the beginning of time to Ragnarok. And it's almost like Ragnarok becomes the death of destiny, the death of fate, because people will be around and gods will come back. But we don't

know what's going to happen then. Yes. And I think that's a really good way of looking at it. It's curious because there's often, you know, the question of, well, when is Ragnarok? Has it already happened? Or is it in the future? Is it now? You know, it's not clear from the way the source material tells it. So maybe that is the way to look at it exactly as you say. It's that point where, yes, we're sort of freed from fate, maybe. I don't know. Maybe that's too extreme.

Yeah, or maybe that's just a story for another night. There we go. It's like, yes, you can now leave the fire, go and find your little beds and curl up for the night. Yeah, come back tomorrow to hear a little bit more. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that with this, Eleanor. It feels really fitting that you began this series with the creation of the world, and you've bought it all to an end for us, although they left us with a little bit of hope to.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you very, very much. And I will forever now know you as Eleanor Odin Hater. I'm just going to call you that from now on. No, no, no. I like to think of myself. Given that I topped and tailed this, I'm like the Cirrus from Voluspao. Right?

Let's give me a bit of credit. And I'm probably in dialogue with Odin. And, you know, we're all having a lovely time in a cup of tea. And I definitely do not hate Odin. Okay, very important to put that out there. Okay, I won't tell him what you said about him then. But thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

I've really enjoyed this. It's such a pleasure. Thank you. I hope you found that as interesting as I did. This is fittingly the end of our series. If you've missed any of it, take a look back through the last four episodes in our feed to travel through creation,

the gods and human connections to the mythology to help offer some context for the end. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts

and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free, head over to history hit.com forward slash

subscribe to sign up now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.