Ragnarök: The End of the World in Norse Mythology
Ragnarök is the end of the world in Norse mythology. The poem Völuspá and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda tell how a killing winter comes, wolves swallow the sun and moon, and Odin, Thor and other gods die fighting giants and monsters. Fire burns the world and it sinks into the sea. Then a green new earth rises.
The poem that tells it, Völuspá, "the Wise-Woman's Prophecy" (Bellows translation), has the seeress recall "nine worlds I knew, the nine in the tree" (st. 2), the frame of our guide to the nine realms of Norse cosmology. The other main sources are the poem Vafþrúðnismál and Snorri's Gylfaginning, chapters 51 to 53. Stanzas follow Henry Adams Bellows' 1923 translation (other editions number some differently), and chapters follow Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur's 1916 translation of Snorri.
What happens at Ragnarök, in order
Snorri's sequence, from Gylfaginning 51 to 53:
- Three winters of war: brothers kill each other for greed.
- Fimbulwinter, the "Awful Winter": three winters in a row with no summer between.
- Wolves swallow the sun and the moon, and the stars vanish.
- Earthquakes break every fetter. The wolf Fenrir runs free.
- The Midgard Serpent, Jörmungandr, comes ashore and the sea floods the land. The ship Naglfar floats loose.
- The sky splits. Surtr and the sons of Múspell ride out in fire, and the bridge Bifröst breaks under them.
- Heimdallr blows the Gjallarhorn, Odin rides to Mímir's well, and the world tree Yggdrasil shakes.
- Gods and giants meet on the plain of Vígríðr. Odin, Thor, Freyr, Týr and Heimdallr fall.
- Surtr throws fire over the earth, and the burned world sinks into the sea.
- The earth rises again, green. A few gods survive or come back, and two humans, Líf and Lífþrasir, repeople the world.
What does Ragnarök mean?
Ragna means "of the gods," from regin, the ruling powers. Rök means fate or final reckoning. So the old form means "the fate of the gods." Völuspá's refrain uses ragna rök (st. 44), as do Vafþrúðnismál and Baldrs draumar.
"Twilight of the gods" comes from a different word, røkkr. One Eddic line has it: in Lokasenna, stanza 39, Týr tells Loki that his son the wolf will lie in fetters until ragna røkkr. Snorri used the -røkr form throughout his Edda. The Icelandic-English Dictionary of Cleasby and Vigfússon (1874) called the twilight reading "no doubt merely a corruption" of rök, possibly born from that Lokasenna line.
Bellows notes that the same confusion produced German Götterdämmerung, the title of the last opera in Richard Wagner's Ring cycle (libretto printed by Schott, 1876, in the Bavarian State Library's digital collections). Brodeur calls it "the Weird of the Gods": weird means fate.
The signs: Baldr's death and Fimbulwinter
In Völuspá the end begins with a death. The seeress sees "Baldr, the bleeding god" and "his destiny set" (st. 32), then Loki bound in the wet woods with his wife Sigyn beside him (st. 35). (Our article on Baldr and the death the gods could not undo tells that story.) In Baldrs draumar, a dead seeress tells Odin no one will wake her again "Till Loki wanders loose from his bonds, / And to the last strife the destroyers come" (st. 14).
Snorri keeps the order tidy. Loki lies bound "till the Weird of the Gods" (Gylfaginning 50). Asked what tidings there are of Ragnarök, Snorri's narrator answers with weather: "The first is this, that there shall come that winter which is called the Awful Winter" (ch. 51). There "shall be no virtue in the sun." Three such winters come with no summer between, after three winters of war. Völuspá gives that war its famous lines: "Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered, / Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls" (st. 45).
The Old Norse name, fimbulvetr, is also in Vafþrúðnismál, where Odin asks a giant who among men will live through "the mighty winter" (st. 44). So Baldr's death starts the slide, but Snorri never calls it a sign. The first sign is the cold.
The monsters break loose
The wolves and the sun. Sköll chases the sun and Hati Hróðvitnisson the moon (Gylfaginning 12); at the end "the Wolf shall swallow the sun" and the other takes the moon. Völuspá traces them to a giantess in Ironwood who "bore the brood of Fenrir" (st. 40). More in our post on Sköll and Hati, the wolves that hunt the sun and moon.
Fenrir. The earth shakes, "all fetters and bonds shall be broken and rent," and the wolf goes free, lower jaw on the earth and upper jaw against heaven: "he would gape yet more if there were room for it." Our Library entry on Fenrir covers his binding.
Jörmungandr. The Midgard Serpent "stirs in giant wrath" and comes ashore, and the sea floods the land. His feud with Thor runs through our article on Jörmungandr, the world serpent.
Naglfar. In the flood a ship floats free, made of dead men's nails. Snorri warns, straight-faced, that whoever dies with untrimmed nails adds material to it. The giant Hrymr steers. In the manuscripts of Völuspá, though, a ship comes from the east with Múspell's people "and Loki steereth" (st. 51, in Brodeur's rendering of the stanza as Snorri quotes it; Bellows emends it to a ship from the north carrying the people of Hel). Snorri's own prose has Loki lead all of Hel's company.
Surtr and the sons of Múspell. The sky is "cloven" and the fire-folk ride out. Surtr goes first, fire before and behind him, his sword brighter than the sun: "The sun of the battle-gods shone from his sword" (Völuspá 52). Under them Bifröst breaks, as Snorri warned it would (ch. 13). See our profile of Surtr, the fire giant who ends the world.
Heimdallr blows the Gjallarhorn and wakes the gods. Odin rides to Mímir's well, and "Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high / The ancient limbs" (Völuspá 47).
The last battle on Vígríðr
Everyone meets on Vígríðr, a field Snorri says is a hundred leagues wide each way. Odin rides first, with a golden helmet, a mail-coat and his spear Gungnir. The pairings, in Snorri's order:
- Odin and Fenrir. "The Wolf shall swallow Odin; that shall be his ending." Vafþrúðnismál agrees: "The wolf shall fell the father of men" (st. 53).
- Víðarr and Fenrir. Odin's silent son sets one foot on the wolf's lower jaw, in a shoe made of all the leather scraps people have ever cut from their shoes, seizes the upper jaw and tears the wolf apart. In Völuspá he drives a sword to its heart instead (st. 54).
- Thor and Jörmungandr. Thor kills the serpent, walks nine steps and falls dead from its venom: "Nine paces fares the son of Fjorgyn" (Völuspá 56).
- Freyr and Surtr. Freyr falls because he gave his good sword to his servant Skírnir.
- Týr and Garmr. The hound bound before Gnipa's cave, "the greatest monster," and Týr kill each other.
- Heimdallr and Loki. They kill each other.
The last two pairings are Snorri's alone; Völuspá never names them, and we cannot tell where he found them.
One grim detail: in Vafþrúðnismál, Odin in disguise asks what Odin whispered in Baldr's ear on the pyre (st. 54). Only Odin could know, and the giant sees who his guest is.
The world burns and sinks
"Then straightway shall Surtr cast fire over the earth and burn all the world" (Gylfaginning 51). Völuspá gives it the most famous stanza in the poem:
The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down from heaven are whirled;
Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.
(Völuspá 57, Bellows)
Snorri's questioner assumes that now "dead are all the gods and all the champions and all mankind" (ch. 52). He is told otherwise.
The new world
The seeress looks again: "Now do I see the earth anew / Rise all green from the waves again" (Völuspá 59). Unsown fields bear crops, "all ills grow better, and Baldr comes back" (st. 62).
Snorri names the survivors (ch. 53). Víðarr and Váli live, untouched by sea and fire, and settle on Iðavöllr, where Asgard stood. Thor's sons Móði and Magni bring the hammer Mjöllnir. Baldr and Höðr, the brother who killed him, return from Hel. They find in the grass the golden game pieces the gods once owned. Vafþrúðnismál names the first four of them (st. 51).
Two humans, Líf and Lífþrasir, hide in Hoddmímir's wood through the fire, live on morning dew, and repeople the world. The sun, before the wolf takes her, bears a daughter who rides her mother's road (Vafþrúðnismál 47; Gylfaginning 53).
There is a judgment of sorts. The best place is Gimlé, Völuspá's hall "Roofed with gold" where "the righteous rulers dwell" (st. 64). Oath-breakers and murderers wade rivers of venom on Náströnd, the Corpse-Strand (Gylfaginning 52). Our guide to death and the afterlife in Norse mythology sets these beside Valhalla and Hel.
The poem does not end in peace. In its last stanza the dragon Níðhöggr flies with corpses on his wings, and the seeress sinks into the earth (st. 66). Bellows thought the stanza may be misplaced. It reads like a door left open.
Ragnarök in stone
Viking Age carvers knew parts of this story. Each identification below is a scholarly reading of an uncaptioned picture: likely, not proven.
The Gosforth Cross, Cumbria. A 4.42 m sandstone cross, dated to the early tenth century by Historic England's record for the high cross in St Mary's churchyard, Gosforth. A figure at a beast's jaw "is identified as Vidar avenging the death of his father, Odin." Another face is read as Heimdallr with his horn and a bound Loki with Sigyn. The cross also carries a crucifixion.
Thorwald's Cross, Andreas, Isle of Man. Manx National Heritage's iMuseum entry for its replica of Thorwald's Cross describes the original fragment (Manx Cross 128): Odin, a raven on his shoulder, stabs at Fenrir with his spear as the wolf grips him in its jaws. The other face shows a figure with cross and book, a fish and a trampled serpent. Manx National Heritage dates it to around AD 950.
The Ledberg stone, Östergötland, Sweden. A runestone nearly three meters tall (Ög 181), raised by Bisi and Gunna in memory of Bisi's father, Þorgautr. The County Administrative Board of Östergötland says its pictures are believed to come at least partly from the Ragnarök myth and to show, among other things, the Fenris wolf.
Where the story comes from, and how old it is
Völuspá survives in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda (GKS 2365 4to), which Bellows dates "as early as 1300," and in Hauksbók (AM 544 4to), of about the same date, with the stanzas in a different order. Snorri, who died in 1241, quotes most of its Ragnarök stanzas. Read him in Brodeur's 1916 Prose Edda or Finnur Jónsson's 1907 Old Norse Snorra Edda, and the poems in Hildebrand and Gering's Old Norse edition of the Elder Edda.
The core is older than the books. The tenth-century skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir used it in his memorial poem for King Hákon the Good. In our translation of Hákonarmál, stanza 20 (Finnur Jónsson's Heimskringla): "Unbound, the Fenris wolf will run over the homes of men before so good a king comes to his empty place."
Christian influence is the harder question. Iceland turned Christian around 1000, and Christians wrote every manuscript. Bellows judged the Völuspá poet a believer in the old gods, yet saw "evidences of Christian influence." The clearest is stanza 65, found only in Hauksbók. In our translation: "The mighty one comes to the great judgment, strong, from above, he who rules all." Bellows thought it "probably spurious" and the hint of Christianity "unavoidable," though not certain. The late "Short Völuspá" in Hyndluljóð has a similar unnamed one, "a greater than all," and then: "Few are they now that farther can see / Than the moment when Othin shall meet the wolf" (st. 45).
One clue cuts both ways. Cleasby and Vigfússon note that the fire-realm's name, Múspell, also appears in Old Saxon and Old High German Christian poems as a word for Judgment Day. Shared old idea or borrowing? The evidence does not settle it. What is safe to say: the wolf who kills Odin was carved in stone in the 900s, and the full sequence we read is its thirteenth-century written form.
Frequently asked questions
What does Ragnarök mean?
Ragnarök means "the fate of the gods," from Old Norse ragna, "of the gods," and rök, "fate." The popular "twilight of the gods" comes from the form ragnarøkkr, used once in Lokasenna and throughout Snorri's Prose Edda. The 1874 Cleasby-Vigfússon dictionary called that form a corruption.
Who survives Ragnarök?
Snorri's Prose Edda names the gods Víðarr and Váli, Thor's sons Móði and Magni with the hammer Mjöllnir, and Baldr and Höðr, who return from Hel. Two humans, Líf and Lífþrasir, hide in Hoddmímir's wood through the fire and repeople the earth.
Who kills Odin and Thor at Ragnarök?
The wolf Fenrir swallows Odin, and Odin's son Víðarr kills the wolf in revenge. Thor kills the Midgard Serpent, Jörmungandr, then walks nine steps and dies from its venom. Freyr falls to the fire giant Surtr, while Týr and the hound Garmr, and Heimdallr and Loki, kill each other.
Is Ragnarök the end of everything?
No. The old world burns and sinks, but Völuspá and Snorri both describe a new earth rising green from the sea. A few gods and two humans survive, and fields grow without sowing.
Is Ragnarök real history?
No. Ragnarök is a myth told as a prophecy, not a record of any event. What is historical is the evidence that people believed it: tenth-century crosses carved with Odin and the wolf and with Víðarr's revenge, a tenth-century poem that mentions Fenrir running loose, and Icelandic manuscripts from around 1300.
When does Ragnarök happen?
The sources give no date. Völuspá is a seeress's vision of the future, and Snorri tells it in the future tense. The signal is a sequence, not a year: three winters of war, then Fimbulwinter with three winters and no summer, then the wolves take the sun and moon.
Ragnarök shows the gods as their believers saw them: strong, doomed and brave anyway. To meet the gods who fight on Vígríðr one by one, start with our guide to the Norse gods and goddesses. And if the wolf who swallows Odin is the figure that stays with you, you will find him in our Fenrir wolf jewelry.