Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

It's no big surprise that, when asked to retell a myth, Byatt chose the Norse story of the great, destructive battle that marks the end of the gods, Ragnarök. From Possession onwards, she's often mentioned her early fascination with the Norse myths, sparked off by a book she was given as a child.

In this book, she looks at the myth through the eyes of this earlier version of herself, "the thin child," growing up in rural Yorkshire during the war, and using her reading of the myths to deal with her rational and irrational fears about the war going on around her and the long absence of her father on active service. She adds further value to the myth itself through grown-up critical insights into the thinking of the 19th century German show more scholars who compiled her edition of Asgard and the gods, through occasional sardonic bits of characterisation, and — inevitably — the insertion of a huge amount of zoological and botanical detail. And of course she doesn't want anything to do with any silly medieval idea of Ragnarök as the end of the pagan age and the prelude to a Christian rebirth: this Ragnarök is a very 21st century one, with the Midgard Serpent turning into a colossal metaphor for human destruction of the planet. show less

When I heard about the Canongate Myths series where famous writers (like Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman and Ali Smith) re-imagine famous myths, I was intrigued. A while back I read Philip Pullman's The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ and liked it, so when I saw A. S. Byatt's Ragnarok for sale in the local secondhand-book-shop, I immediately picked it up.
Ragnarok is the story of the Norse gods, interwoven with the story of a little girl from the city living in the English countryside during the war. She is given a book of stories of the Norse mythology, and this work is in part a retelling of those stories, and the story of the little girl relating to those stories.
The work is short, but very good. I liked how it didn't only show more tell the stories of the Norse gods, but also of someone trying to make sense of them, someone trying to give them a place in her upturned life. This book is a little gem and highly recommended not only to lovers of mythology, but also to those who love great stories in general. Four out of five stars. show less

This is a remarkably good book, that I somehow failed to enjoy as much as I wanted or expected, but I think the failing is mine, rather than Byatt's, and reading my notes below, I'm puzzled that I liked and admired, rather than loved it (all-too familiar in my relationship with Byatt).

"The thin child in wartime"

The child is a semi-autobiographical version of Byatt herself. She is given a book of Norse legends, that she treasures. Those stories are retold through her eyes and thoughts, interspersed with snippets about her own life, told in a similar epic, mythical, Silmarillionish style, weaving occasional lines of liturgy and hymns into the prose (as myths weave into each other and ourselves). It dips in and out of myth, but the show more narrative pull is weak.

The parallels between the thin child's life and what she reads are clear (Ragnarok is the end of the world, and WW2 seemed as if it would be too), but mostly subtle.

Layers of myth and fictionalised biography

Image: Ragnarök by Collingwood. (Source)

She is a thoughtful child, with a vivid imagination and an analytical questioning mind, comparing the gods of legend with the Christian one she learns about at school and church.
"In the story told in the stone church a grandfatherly figure who resented presumption had spent six delectable days making things."

She notices that characters come in threes, that there are two ways to win battles ("to be surprisingly strong, or to be a gallant forlorn hope"), and rules in stories exist to be broken. She treats all myths, including Christianity, like fairy stories:
"These offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be."
The only thing alive in the church is the English language.

She has fun with the gods' quirks, especially Loki's mischievousness:
"Chaos pleased him... He would provoke turbulence to please himself and tried to understand it in order to make more of it. He was in burning columns of smoke in battlefields. He was in the fury of rivers bursting their banks, or the waterfalls of high tides throwing themselves over flood defences, bringing down ships and houses."

The war brings intellectual conflict, as well as more visceral fears, especially for her fighting father:
"She asked herself who were the good and wise Germans who had written 'Asgard and the Gods'"
and wondered how she could trust.
"The storytelling voice that gripped her imagination, and tactfully suggest explanations."

Byatt the storyteller

If young Byatt really thought as the thin child does, it's no wonder she became a storyteller.
"Part of the delight and mystery of this book was that everything was told several times, in different orders and in different tones of voice... It is told in the present tense, a prophetic vision of the future, seen as though it was Now. The think child became an onlooker in the death of the world... It felt different from Christian accounts of the end of things... Here the gods themselves were judged and found wanting."
And to show her erudition as well as her empathy, there is an essay about mythology at the back of the book.

Beauty within

The language is is rich, vivid and beautiful, especially when describing plants, animals and water ("The flung snake fell through the firmament in shifting shapes... her mane of fresh-fronds streaming back from her sharp skull, her fangs glinting."), but I expect that from Byatt.

It is bound, printed and laid out with a strong eye for aesthetics.

There are a few lovely pen and ink drawings to add to the images she conjures in the reader's mind.

Closing thoughts

I can't fault this at any level, other than that it disappointed me, or perhaps that my reaction disappointed me. Perhaps I shouldn't try:
"This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories."

Byatt and biography

Byatt is a novelist who loves the academic approach to biography, applied to fiction and semi-fiction. This passion is reflected in all four of her novels I’ve now read, with varying degrees of success. Less so in the short stories.

* The Children's Book, 4*. See my review HERE.
* Possession, 3*. See my review HERE.
* The Biographer’s Tale, 2*. See my very old review HERE.
* The Little Black Book Of Stories, 4*. See my very old review HERE. show less

Byatt, through the eyes of a christianity-raised child encountering Norse myths for the first time, writes a wonderfully evocative tale of enchantment and fascination with a grim and imaginative mythological cycle that she finds more exciting than stories about a milksop Jesus.

With a superb sense of poetic diction Byatt paints the inside of your skull with vicarious allure. Recommended.

Rating: 1* of five (p41)

"...Airmen were the Wild Hunt. They were dangerous. If any hunter dismounted, he crumbled to dust, the child read. It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control."

I have Byatted for the last time. I love the Norse myths, and this precious twitzy-twee retelling of them through "the child"'s horrible little beady eyes made me want to Dickens up all over the place.

I tried. I really tried. I read some of Possession. It was like having an estrogen drip placed directly into my testicles. I tried Angels and Insects and, horrified and repulsed, put it down (as in "down the crapper" down) even before I found out it was about brother/sister incest.

I think her writing is show more ghastly, I dislike the stories she tells, and I won't be coerced, shamed, convinced, asked, begged, guilt-instilled, or required to pick up any damn thing else this Woman-with-a-capital-W writes in this incarnation. show less

This retelling struck me as abstract and dry. I know some readers always find Byatt abstract and dry, but the intellectual quality of her writing is one of the characteristics I usually find most appealing. Here, however, it wasn’t effective—it sucked all the vibrancy out of what I find is an earthy mythos. Unlike others in the Canongate's The Myths series that I’ve read, Byatt didn’t “retell” the myth, but simply told the myth literally, under a thin veneer of a girl who, during World War II in the UK, likes to read Norse mythology. I’ve recently read Neal Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, and frankly it was far more enjoyable, if far less academic.

A.S. Byatt’s retelling of the Norse myth of the end of the world is an enjoyable read.

The Norse Gods are volatile and unpredictable, like the Greek Gods, and a little like life itself – changeable without warning, sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. The story explains the origin of the world and the Gods at the outset, and is full of action from there. An interesting parallel to Odysseus journeying into Hades, one of my favorite chapters in the Odyssey, is when Hermodur travels into Hel to beg for the reverse of the death of Baldur.

The prime mover in this story is Loki, the trickster God, who thrives on chaos and entropy. His mischievous ways earn the wrath of Odin, and in the buildup to the final battle scene, Loki is captured show more and chained beneath a snake which drips poison endlessly upon him. I love the illustration for this, and as an aside, the form factor for this little book in general.

Ragnarok, the end of the world, comes about from a combination of chaos, the fallibility of the Gods who are all-too-human, and the unleashing of powerful beasts in a final cataclysmic war. Truly an epic tale.

Quotes:
On the Bible (Genesis):
“The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathize. Except maybe the snake, which had not asked to be made use of as a tempter.”

On Life, embodied in the Gods:
“The Christian God condemned sinful men, and raised up the ‘good’ dead. The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. Not clever enough, and bad. The thin child, thinking of playground cruelty and the Blitz, liked to glance at the idea that gods were bad, that things were bad. That the story had always been there, and the actors had always known it.”

On Death, the cruel nature of death:
“Hermodur bowed to the queen of Hel, and said that he had come to beg for Baldur’s return to Asgard. Gods and men, and all creatures, were helpless with grief, and needed the young god to bring back their liveliness, their power to hope. Most of all, said Hermodur, the goddess Frigg had asked him to beg Hel for Baldur’s return, for she could not live without him. To this, Hel replied that mothers throughout time had learned to live without their sons. Every day young men died and came quietly over her golden bridge. Only in Asgard could they die in battle every day, as a game, and live again to feast in the evening. In the hard world, and in the world of shadows, death was not a game.
But this death, said Hermodur, had diminished the light of the world.
So, said Hel. It is diminished then.”

Lastly, I love the elements described in the making of a magical rope, Gleipnir, crafted by dwarves:
“And the dwarves made a supple skein from unthings. There were six, woven together: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. The thing was light as air and smooth as silk, a long, delicate ribbon.” show less