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    Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
    Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
    Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
    Ebook131 pages3 hours

    Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

    By A. S. Byatt

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    The Booker Prize–winning author of Possession breathes life into the Ragnorak myth through the novel of a young British girl during World War II.
     
    Ragnarok retells the finale of Norse mythology: a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. What more relevant myth could any modern writer choose?
     
    As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods—a book of ancient Norse myths—and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.
     
    War, natural disaster, reckless gods, and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that A.S. Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
     
    A Globe and Mail (Toronto) Best Book
     
    “A gorgeous, brilliant, and significant performance.” —Booklist, starred review
     
    “Byatt’s prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages—jewelled one minute, gory the next—a pleasure to get lost in.” —The Telegraph
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 7, 2012
    ISBN9780802194879
    Author

    A. S. Byatt

    A. S. Byatt is famed for her short fiction, collected in Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Her full-length novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer's Tale, The Shadow of the Sun and the quartet of novels including The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and soon to be completed by A Whistling Woman. She has also published es of critical work, of which On Histories & Stories is the most recent. She lives in London.

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      Book preview

      Ragnarok - A. S. Byatt

      RAGNARÖK

      Copyright © 2011 by A. S. Byatt

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

      First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh, Scotland

      Printed in the United States of America

      FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

      ISBN-13: 9780802194879

      Canongate

      841 Broadway

      New York, NY 10003

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      www.groveatlantic.com

      12  13  14  1510  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      RAGNARÖK

      The End of the Gods

      A.S. Byatt

      CANONGATE

      Edinburgh · London · New · York · Melbourne

      First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      1

      Copyright © A.S. Byatt, 2011

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 84767 064 9

      Export ISBN 978 1 84767 843 0

      Typeset in Van Dijck by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

      Falkirk, Stirlingshire

      Printed and bound in Great Britain by

      CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

      This book is printed on FSC certified paper

      www.canongate.tv

      For my mother,

      K.M. Drabble,

      Who gave me Asgard and the Gods.

      A Note on Names

      This story has been made from many stories in many languages – Icelandic, German and others. The names of the persons in the myth vary from telling to telling. Iduna is the same person as Idun. There are many ways of spelling Jørmungandr or Jörmungander. I feel happier using various spellings, rather than trying to achieve an artificial consistency. Myths change in the mind depending on the telling – there is no overall correct version.

      image_0003

      WODAN’S WILD HUNT

      A THIN CHILD IN WARTIME

      There was a thin child, who was three years old when the world war began. She could remember, though barely, the time before wartime when, as her mother frequently told her, there was honey and cream and eggs in plenty. She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke. Her elders told her not to do this, to avoid that, because there was ‘a war on’. Life was a state in which a war was on. Nevertheless, by a paradoxical fate, the child may only have lived because her people left the sulphurous air of a steel city, full of smoking chimneys, for a country town, of no interest to enemy bombers. She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds. Her mother, when they appeared, always said ‘black as ash-buds in the front of March’. Her mother’s fate too was paradoxical. Because there was a war on, it was legally possible for her to live in the mind, to teach bright boys, which before the war had been forbidden to married women. The thin child learned to read very early. Her mother was more real, and kinder, when it was a question of grouped letters on the page. Her father was away. He was in the air, in the war, in Africa, in Greece, in Rome, in a world that only existed in books. She remembered him. He had red-gold hair and clear blue eyes, like a god.

      The thin child knew, and did not know that she knew, that her elders lived in provisional fear of imminent destruction. They faced the end of the world they knew. The English country world did not end, as many others did, was not overrun, nor battered into mud by armies. But fear was steady, even if no one talked to the thin child about it. In her soul she knew her bright father would not come back. At the end of every year the family sipped cider and toasted his safe return. The thin child felt a despair she did not know she felt.

      THE ASH, YGGDRASIL

      THE END OF THE WORLD

      The Beginning

      The thin child thought less (or so it now seems) of where she herself came from, and more about that old question, why is there something rather than nothing? She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark. She told her own tales as she walked through the fields, tales of wild riders and deep meres, of kindly creatures and evil hags.

      At some point, when she was a little older, she discovered Asgard and the Gods. This was a solid volume, bound in green, with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt on horseback tearing through a clouded sky amid jagged bolts of lightning, watched, from the entrance to a dark underground cavern, by a dwarf in a cap, looking alarmed. The book was full of immensely detailed, mysterious steel engravings of wolves and wild waters, apparitions and floating women. It was an academic book, and had in fact been used by her mother as a crib for exams in Old Icelandic and Ancient Norse. It was, however, German. It was adapted from the work of Dr W. Wägner. The thin child was given to reading books from cover to cover. She read the introduction, about the retrieval of ‘the old Germanic world, with its secrets and wonders . . .’ She was puzzled by the idea of the Germans. She had dreams that there were Germans under her bed, who, having cast her parents into a green pit in a dark wood, were sawing down the legs of her bed to reach her and destroy her. Who were these old Germans, as opposed to the ones overhead, now dealing death out of the night sky?

      The book also said that these stories belonged to ‘Nordic’ peoples, Norwegians, Danes and Icelanders. The thin child was, in England, a northerner. The family came from land invaded and settled by Vikings. These were her stories. The book became a passion.

      Much of her reading was done late at night, with a concealed torch under the bedclothes, or with the volume pushed past a slit-opening of the bedroom door into a pool of bleak light on the blacked-out landing. The other book she read and reread, repeatedly, was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. She felt in her bones the crippling burden born by the Man mired in the Slough of Despond, she followed his travels through wilderness and the Valley of the Shadow, his encounters with Giant Despair and the fiend Apollyon. Bunyan’s tale had a clear message and meaning. Not so, Asgard and the Gods. That book was an account of a mystery, of how a world came together, was filled with magical and powerful beings, and then came to an end. A real End. The end.

      One of the illustrations showed Rocks in the Riesengebirge. A river ran through a cleft, above which towered tall lumps of rock with featureless almost-heads, and stumps of almost-arms, standing amongst thrusting columns with no resemblance to any living form. Grey spiked forest tips clothed one slope. Tiny, ant-like, almost invisible humans stared upwards from the near shore. Wraiths of cloud-veils hung between the forms and the reading child. She read:

      The legends of the giants and dragons were developed gradually, like all myths. At first natural objects were looked upon as identical with these strange beings, then the rocks and chasms became their dwelling-places, and finally they were regarded as distinct personalities and had their own kingdom of Jotunheim.

      The picture gave the child an intense, uncanny pleasure. She knew, but could not have said, that it was the precise degree of formlessness in the nevertheless scrupulously depicted rocks that was so satisfactory. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. She had noticed that a bush, or a log, seen from a distance on her meadow-walk, could briefly be a crouching, snarling dog, or a trailing branch could be a snake, complete with shining eyes and flickering forked

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