Ragnarok
;)
was the doom of the Germanic gods. After a terrible winter lasting three years, a final battle would he fought between the gods and the frost giants on the Vigrid Plain. On the side of Odin and the gods were ranged the 'glorious dead' who had fallen in battle and were taken to live in Valhalla; while with the fire god Loki and the frost giants fought the 'unworthy dead' from Hel (the Germanic netherworld), plus the fearsome wolf Fenrir and the sea monster Jormungand. There was nothing that the chief god Odin could do to prevent this catastrophe. His only consolation was the foreknowledge that Ragnarok was not the end of the cosmos. After he had been killed by Fenrir, Thor had been overcome by Jormungand, and most of the other gods had died in the mutually destructive encounter with the frost giants, a new world was destined to 'rise again out of the water, fair and green'.
Before the battle two humans, Lif and Lifthasir, had taken shelter in the sacred tree Yggdrasil and they emerged after the carnage was over to repopulate the earth. Several of the gods also survived, among them Odin's sons Vidar and Vali, and his brother Honir, Thor's sons Modi and Magni, who inherited their father's hammer, and Balder who came back from the dead.
Ragnarok held a great appeal for the Vikings, whose onslaught on wester Europe is still the stuff of legend. Once they understood the effectiveness of the standhogg, the short, sharp shore-raid against the richer lands to the west and south, then, as Alcuin remarked in the eighth century, 'no one is free from fear'. In 793 the British offshore monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked and St Cuthbert's church was spattered with the blood of the monks. 'Never before in Britain,' Alcuin lamented, 'has such terror appeared as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen.' But for the Vikings it was like Ragnarok, 'an axe-age, a sword-age'. It was a rehearsal for the 'wind-age and wolf-age before the world is wrecked'. Although Christianity did eventually come to the Germanic peoples of northern Europe, their preoccupation with a cosmic catastrophe did not fade altogether. The Last Judgement exercised their minds during the Middle Ages. It may well have been that behind the Nazis resolve to fight on in World War Two lay a folk memory of Ragnarok.