RAGNARÖK: The Fate and Judgment of the Powers

The photographs accompanying this article were taken by the Chieftain during his visit to Historiska museet—the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm—in the summer of 2025.

Among the museum’s greatest treasures are the extraordinary picture stones of Gotland—monuments carved with ships, mounted warriors, women bearing drinking horns, scenes of death, ritual, myth, and passage between worlds.

Although these stones cannot simply be read as illustrations of a single Eddic poem, they allow us to stand before images created by people who inhabited the same religious universe preserved in the poems of the Poetic Edda: a world of Odin and Sleipnir, fallen warriors, ships of the dead, sacred obligations, cosmic struggle, and the final fate of the gods. That fate is called Ragnarök.

The Meaning of Ragnarök

The Old Norse word Ragnarök is formed from ragna, the genitive plural of regin—the ruling powers or gods—and rök, a word associated with fate, destiny, cause, or final consequence. Its most defensible rendering is therefore “the fate of the powers” or “the doom of the gods.”

“Judgment of the Powers” is not the most literal translation, but it captures something essential: Ragnarök is the moment when gods, monsters, men, and the cosmos itself meet the consequences woven into the structure of creation.

A related medieval form, Ragnarøkkr, means “the twilight of the gods.” That form entered modern consciousness most powerfully through Götterdämmerung, “Twilight of the Gods,” the final drama in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The phrase is magnificent, but it belongs partly to the later reception of the myth. Ragnarök is not merely the fading evening of the gods. It is their appointed fate—the violent culmination of the present mythological age.

The Prophecy of the Völva

The most powerful surviving account of Ragnarök appears in Völuspá, “The Prophecy of the Seeress,” the opening poem of the Poetic Edda.

Odin has summoned a völva, an ancient seeress, and commanded her to reveal the deepest past and the farthest future. She recounts the creation of the world, the ordering of the cosmos, the deeds and failures of the gods, the death of Baldr, the breaking of sacred bonds, the destruction of the present world, and the world that rises afterward.

Depending upon the edition and interpretation, the movement toward Ragnarök may occupy nearly the final thirty stanzas of the poem. By stanza 39, however, the descent has unmistakably begun.

The völva sees oath-breakers, murderers, and those who betray intimate trust wading through punishing currents. Níðhöggr feeds upon the dead, while a wolf tears at human bodies. The difficult phrase concerning one who corrupts another’s eyrarúna has been translated in several ways, but its sense concerns the betrayal of a deeply private or intimate confidence.

This is important. Ragnarök does not begin merely when monsters attack the walls of Ásgarðr. It begins with the corruption of obligation.

Before the cosmos breaks, oaths break. The moral order and the cosmic order are inseparable in the Eddic imagination. Once truth, kinship, and sworn obligation are abandoned, the ruin of the visible world follows.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Warning Cocks

In stanzas 40 and 41, creatures bred in the Ironwood pursue the heavenly lights. The sun darkens, the dwelling places of the gods are stained, and destructive weather sweeps over the world.

Then the cocks begin to crow. Fjalar, the red cock, cries among the giants. Gullinkambi—“Golden Comb”—awakens the warriors in Odin’s hall. A soot-red cock calls beneath the earth among the dead in Hel. These are not the ordinary calls of dawn. They announce the final awakening of every realm. Giants, gods, the dead, and the chosen slain are being summoned to the last field.

Garmr howls before Gnipahellir. Bonds break. The wolf runs free.

The refrain returns several times during the catastrophe, each time asking whether the listener wishes to know more. Its repetition gives the poem the sound of an approaching alarm—each cry closer than the last.

When Kinship Fails

Stanza 45 contains one of the most famous and terrible visions in Old Norse poetry. Its opening declares:

“Bræðr munu berjask ok at bönum verðask.”

Brothers will fight and become one another’s killers.

The stanza continues with the collapse of extended kinship, sexual fidelity, restraint, and mercy. It calls the coming period an axe-age and sword-age, when shields are split, followed by:

“vindöld, vargöld, áðr veröld steypisk.”

A wind-age and a wolf-age, before the world falls.

In close translation:

"Brothers will fight and become each other’s slayers.

Sisters’ sons will violate the bonds of kinship.

The world is harsh; faithlessness is widespread.

It is an axe-age, a sword-age; shields are split—

a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world falls.

No person will spare another."

This is not simply a prediction of warfare. Warfare already existed throughout the mythological age. The horror is that the distinctions governing honorable conflict have disappeared. Brother kills brother. Kinship no longer restrains violence. No one grants mercy.

Ragnarök is therefore not presented as an arbitrary divine disaster. It is a world in which every binding relationship—between relatives, lovers, rulers, followers, gods, and natural forces—has been violated.

Gjallarhorn Sounds

Heimdallr raises Gjallarhorn, and its call travels through all the worlds.

Odin seeks counsel from the severed head of Mímir, the ancient keeper of wisdom. Yggdrasill, the great ash tree binding the worlds together, trembles. The old tree groans. Nothing in heaven, earth, or the underworld remains untouched.

The giants stir. The dwarfs groan before their stone doors. Jötunheimr roars. The gods take counsel, but the time for preventing the catastrophe has passed. The counsels of the gods can no longer undo what has already been woven.

From the east comes Hrym, bearing his shield. Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, writhes in the ocean and lashes the waves. The ship Naglfar is released.

Another ship approaches from the east carrying the people of Muspell, with Loki at the helm. Surtr comes from the south bearing fire. Light flashes from his weapon. Mountains crash, giant beings advance, the road to Hel fills, and the sky itself is split open.

The Death of Odin and Freyr

Stanza 53 announces what the poem calls Hlín’s second grief. Hlín is closely associated with Frigg and may here function as a name or poetic designation for her.

The first grief was the death of Baldr. The second is the death of Odin.

The stanza declares:

"Then comes Hlín’s second sorrow,

when Odin goes to fight the wolf,

and Beli’s bright slayer goes against Surtr.

Then Frigg’s beloved will fall."

“Beli’s slayer” is Freyr, who once killed the Jotunn (giant) Beli. At Ragnarök, Freyr confronts Surtr, but he no longer possesses the sword he surrendered for his courtship of Gerðr. Snorri explicitly connects Freyr’s lack of that weapon with his death.

Odin rides against Fenrir. The Allfather—the god of battle, kingship, poetry, (seidr and galdr) sorcery, wisdom, and the slain—is swallowed by the wolf.

Freyr falls before Surtr.

The poem does not allow even the highest gods to stand outside fate. Odin has spent his existence seeking knowledge of Ragnarök. He has raised armies of the dead in Valhöll. He knows the wolf will kill him. Yet when the appointed hour comes, he rides forward. It is an inspiration beyond stoicism - it is as the book says "Laughing Shall I Die" by Tom Shippey. Knowledge of death does not excuse withdrawal from duty.

Víðarr, the Avenger

Odin’s son Víðarr then advances against Fenrir.

The surviving sources differ slightly in how the deed is described. In Völuspá, Víðarr drives his weapon into the wolf. In Snorri’s account, he plants his specially prepared shoe upon Fenrir’s lower jaw, seizes the upper jaw, and tears the wolf apart.

The details vary, but the meaning is constant: Odin is avenged.

Ragnarök is not a battle from which every god expects to return. It is the fulfillment of obligation even when survival is impossible. Víðarr does not prevent Odin’s death. He answers it.

Thor and the Midgard Serpent

Only then does Thor, the mightiest defender of gods and humanity, enter the poem’s foreground.

The text calls him the glorious son of Hlóðyn, another name for the Earth - Thor's mother. It also calls him the son of Fjörgyn, likewise associated with the Earth. These names were distorted in some later transcriptions, but the meaning is unmistakable: Thor, son of Earth and son of Odin, goes to meet Jörmungandr.

In translation:

"Then comes Hlóðyn’s glorious son.

Odin’s son advances against the serpent.

Midgard’s guardian strikes in fury.

The people of the world must abandon their homes.

Nine steps walks Fjörgyn’s son,

dying from the serpent he has slain."

Thor kills Jörmungandr, the ancient enemy he once nearly lifted from the sea and later confronted during his fishing expedition with Hymir. He then walks nine steps.

The serpent’s venom overcomes him, and Thor falls. His victory is complete, but it does not save his life. Thor does not defeat death. He defeats the enemy threatening the world, knowing the venom will claim him afterward.

This is one of the central heroic truths of Ragnarök: a deed does not become meaningless because the one performing it will not live to enjoy its consequences.

The World Falls

After the gods have met their enemies, the cosmos they ordered also collapses.

The poem says:

“Sól tér sortna, sígr fold í mar.”

The sun turns black; the earth sinks into the sea.

The bright stars disappear from the heavens. Smoke and flame rise. Heat reaches the sky itself. In Snorri’s account, Surtr casts fire over the earth and burns the entire world.

This is more than the destruction of civilizations. Mountains, seas, stars, and the structure of heaven are unmade. The created world returns to something resembling the watery, fiery instability from which ordered existence first emerged.

Ragnarök Is Not the End

Yet Ragnarök has two movements. The first is destruction. The second is renewal.

The earth rises again from the sea, green and fertile. Waterfalls descend. An eagle flies above the mountains. Fields bear crops without having been sown.

The surviving Æsir (Gods) assemble once more at Iðavöllr, the field where the gods gathered in the world’s earliest days. They speak of Jörmungandr and remember the ancient judgments and mysteries of the gods.

In the grass they discover the golden gaming pieces that belonged to the earlier divine age.

The meaning of these pieces is not explained. They may represent the recovery of memory, order, play, sovereignty, or the patterns through which the gods once shaped the world. Whatever their exact meaning, the new world does not begin without a past. The survivors recover objects belonging to those who came before them.

Memory survives catastrophe.

Baldr returns from Hel. Höðr, the blind god whose hand was used to kill him, is also present. The two dwell together, reconciled beyond the tragedy that once divided the divine family.

Hœnir survives and chooses sacred lots, suggesting that ritual, divination, and communication with the unseen continue in the renewed world.

A golden hall rises at Gimlé, brighter than the sun, where worthy people will dwell in joy. In one manuscript tradition, a mysterious “mighty one” descends from above to rule or pronounce divine judgment. That stanza is frequently considered Christian-influenced and must be treated cautiously rather than forced into an entirely pre-Christian reconstruction.

Even the poem’s final stanza remains unsettling: Níðhöggr appears once more, bearing bodies beneath his wings. The völva then sinks from sight.

Renewal has occurred, but evil has not been reduced to a simple memory. The poem refuses an easy ending.

The Gods Who Survive

Vafþrúðnismál and Snorri’s Gylfaginning preserve further details concerning the new world.

Víðarr and Váli, sons of Odin, survive. Thor’s sons Móði and Magni inherit Mjölnir. Baldr and Höðr return and dwell together. The hammer therefore passes into the renewed age, carried by the sons of the god who died defending the old one.

Two human beings also survive: Líf and Lífþrasir. They shelter in Hoddmímir’s Wood during the terrible winter and live upon the morning dew. From them comes a new human generation.

A daughter of the sun also survives to follow her mother’s path across the heavens.

The restored world is therefore not a wholly unrelated creation. It is a world of descendants, inheritors, survivors, remembered deeds, recovered treasures, and reconciled powers.

The old world gives its hammer, its stories, its bloodlines, and its responsibilities to the new.

Ragnarök and the Picture Stones of Gotland

The great picture stones displayed in the Swedish History Museum were created on Gotland and are among the most remarkable visual monuments of the Scandinavian Iron Age and Viking Age.

They resemble rune stones in their monumental form, and some contain inscriptions, but their primary language is pictorial. Human figures, horses, ships, weapons, birds, serpentine forms, drinking vessels, and scenes arranged in registers create complex visual narratives.

Their interpretation demands caution. Centuries of weathering have obscured the shallow carvings. Some stones were reused in later buildings. Modern outlines and painted reconstructions do not always reproduce the original designs accurately. Even specialists disagree about particular figures and scenes. The stones must therefore be approached as evidence rather than treated as illustrated manuscripts with captions.

The Tjängvide Stone

The Tjängvide picture stone contains one of the most celebrated images in Norse visual culture: a mounted figure riding an eight-legged horse.

The Swedish History Museum identifies the horse as Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged mount. Before the rider stands a woman bearing what appears to be a drinking horn. Below them is a ship.

The scene is frequently interpreted as a fallen warrior arriving in the otherworld and being welcomed with drink, perhaps by a valkyrie. The eight-legged horse establishes an Odinic association, while the ship may represent the journey of the dead.

GP 5 Alskog Tjängvide I

We cannot prove that the mounted figure is Odin himself, nor can we assign every scene to a specific surviving poem. Nevertheless, the stone presents the essential religious vocabulary surrounding Odin’s chosen slain: horse, warrior, woman, ceremonial drink, ship, journey, and reception in the world beyond death.

The Tjängvide stone fuses myth, memorial, and identity into a single monument. To stand before it is to see the Eddas not written in ink, but carved into limestone centuries earlier. For modern visitors especially those who walk the halls with their ancestors in mind—the stone vibrates with presence. Ship and horse, hall and horn: it is the eternal image of passage from this world into the next. It is a symbol of our faith - taken from us now restored.

The Ardre Picture Stone

The Ardre stones are among the museum’s best-known Gotlandic monuments. Ardre VIII contains a dense field of mythological and heroic imagery.

Several scenes have been connected with the story of Völundr, the legendary smith whose captivity and revenge are related in Völundarkviða. The bodies of the king’s decapitated sons can be distinguished within the carving. Elsewhere an eight-legged horse again evokes Sleipnir and the Odinic world.

Ardre does not depict Ragnarök as a continuous narrative. Instead, it shows how multiple sacred and heroic stories could exist together upon a single monument: vengeance, transformation, death, travel, divine animals, and the movement between human and supernatural realms.

Ardre Picture Stone

The Tängelgårda Stone

The Tängelgårda picture stone is divided into four principal fields and dates broadly to the Viking Age. Its imagery has been connected with battle, funerary procession, mounted figures, warrior death, and a great ship.

As with Tjängvide, the ship and horse imagery may concern the journey of the dead. Some interpretations see the mounted procession as the transport or reception of a fallen warrior. Odinic symbols and associations have also been proposed.

What matters most is not that every image can be conclusively named, but that the stone places death within a structured journey. The fallen do not simply disappear. They are carried, escorted, received, remembered, and incorporated into a larger sacred order.

Tängelgårda IV

Are These Stones Images of Ragnarök?

We should resist claiming that the museum’s picture stones form a direct pictorial version of Völuspá.

They do not securely show, in recognizable sequence, Heimdallr blowing Gjallarhorn, Odin being swallowed by Fenrir, Thor walking nine steps from Jörmungandr, Surtr burning the world, and the renewed earth rising from the sea.

What they do show is the religious and heroic universe from which the Ragnarök tradition emerged:

Odin and his horse the eight-legged Sleipnir

Warriors passing from life into another realm

Women (Valkyries) offering ceremonial drink

Ships associated with death and sacred travel

Battles, vengeance, sacrifice, and heroic obligation

Animals and supernatural beings crossing the boundaries of worlds

The preservation of memory through monumental art

The picture stones do not explain Ragnarök. They allow us to see something of the world that believed in it and that we in the Tribe believe in.

They remind us that the Eddic poems were not originally abstract literature detached from life. These stories belonged to communities that raised monuments, buried their dead, sailed dangerous seas, swore oaths, remembered ancestors, and understood honor as a bond with consequences.

The Meaning of Ragnarök

Ragnarök is often reduced to “the end of the world.” But it is not.

It is the end of a world whose bonds have failed. Kinship collapses. Oaths become meaningless. Restraint disappears. The wolves break free because the moral and cosmic restraints holding them have already been weakened.

Yet the gods still go to their appointed places.

Odin rides against the wolf.

Freyr meets Surtr.

Thor advances against the serpent.

Víðarr avenges his father.

They do not fight because victory will preserve the world exactly as it was. They fight because courage, loyalty, protection, and vengeance remain binding even at the end of the age.

The world burns. The earth sinks beneath the sea.

Then it rises again.

The descendants inherit the hammer. Survivors carry humanity forward. Baldr and Höðr return reconciled. The gods recover the golden pieces of those who came before them.

Ragnarök therefore contains both warning and promise.

It warns that no civilization, institution, tribe, or divine order can endure when oath, kinship, truth, and obligation are abandoned.

It promises that honorable action is not wasted merely because the warrior does not live to see the world that follows.

The old-world leaves something behind:

Memory.

Example.

Bloodline.

Sacred tools.

Unfinished duty.

The world is renewed because something worthy survived the fire.

Sources and Textual Notes

Primary sources

Völuspá, particularly stanzas 39–66, normalized Old Norse text in Guðni Jónsson’s edition. Stanza numbering varies slightly among editions and manuscripts.

Vafþrúðnismál, particularly stanzas 44–55, concerning Líf and Lífþrasir, the daughter of the sun, Víðarr and Váli, and Móði and Magni.

Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, chapters 51–53, in the Prose Edda, for Snorri’s expanded account of the battles, Surtr’s fire, the surviving gods, and the renewed human race.

Museum and archaeological sources

Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, material on Gotlandic picture stones, the Tjängvide stone, the Ardre stones, and the interpretation of their imagery.

Gotlandic Picture Stones: The Online Edition, especially its discussion of iconography, funerary journeys, ships of the dead, Sleipnir, afterlife reception, preservation, and the dangers of relying uncritically upon modern repainting.

Recommended scholarly background

John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs.

Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, translated by Angela Hall.

Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda, Volume II: Mythological Poems.

Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda.

The Swedish History Museum’s permanent Viking World exhibition, which places these objects within the wider material, religious, and social world of the Viking Age.