What Book to Read?

Ragnarök (2011) is the latest in the Canongate Myth Series, in which myths from all over the world are ‘re-imagined and rewritten’ by contemporary authors (see my previous post on Philip Pullman’s version of the Christian myth). Byatt hasn’t really re-imagined or rewritten; rather she has retold the Norse myths of the beginning and the end of the gods. As a child she read and deeply valued the book Asgard and the Gods, based on the Eddas and adapted from a German version written by Dr W. Wagner. Here she introduces a ‘thin child’ who is reading this book and thinking about the myths. Byatt says she found she was writing ‘for my childhood self’, and the child reflects Byatt’s own response to the myths.

The child is reading the myths while living in the English country side to which she has been evacuated during World War II. Her father is fighting in North Africa and she worries she will never see him again. Even the idyllic countryside is infected with fear of ‘the Germans’, though she wonders whether these can be the same Germans who wrote her treasured book. She wonders too about a fundamental question: why is there something rather than nothing? The Norse myths seem to her to answer this question better than the Church of England can. Somehow they have got inside her, ‘coiled like smoke in her skull’, so she sees the world in terms of them.

The myths themselves suit a time of war; they are filled with blood and darkness. The earth and everything on it is created by three gods, Odin, Thor and Loki, from the dismembered body of a giant. It is held together by Yggdrasil, the World-Ash and Randrasill, the Sea-Tree. (Everything has a name.) And then, ‘almost casually, to please or amuse themselves, they made human beings’ from two inert lumps of wood , Ask and Embla, which they found on a beach. (Lovers of Possession will remember the fragments of Randolph Ash’s beautiful poems ‘Ragnarök’ and ‘Ask to Embla’.)  The Gods live in Asgard, but go out into the world to hunt and fight. This world is inhabited by giants, monsters, wolves and demons, as well as humans, (who don’t seem very important in this story). The progeny of Loki, who is part god and part giant, are themselves monsters, who have such destructive powers that the gods seek to restrain them. Loki’s tricks and schemes cause such misery that he also is restrained, but breaks free and causes a battle in which the gods, giants and monsters all die. The earth is overwhelmed by fire and water and left with ‘a black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things’. This end is called Ragnarök.

Byatt suggests that myths are not narratives that engage a reader in the way that ordinary stories and characters do. ‘The thin child, reading and rereading the tales, neither loved nor hated the people in them – they were not ‘characters’ into whose doings she could insert her own imagination’. They have attributes that are fixed – being powerful or warlike, or gentle. Loki alone can change his shape; he is clever, ‘amused and dangerous’. Later writers have amalgamated him with Lucifer, the fallen angel, but Byatt says he is ‘neither good nor evil’. I can’t quite see this; his pleasure in chaos and cruel tricks seem malicious to me. But just as the attributes of the gods are fixed, so the story must take its course, and the destruction that is foreseen must come to pass. In this way Loki is an instrument of the story, not a good or bad person.

While the threat of invasion accompanied Byatt’s original reading about Ragnarök, I find resonances in a potential apocalypse brought about by changes in our climate. Byatt agrees. ‘If you write a version of Ragnarök in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by an imagining of a different end of things’. In her view, we are bringing about an end to the world we know: ‘Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short sightedness.’ The gods know Ragnarök is coming, but are incapable of finding any way to change the story. Let’s hope that’s not true of us.

You can read more about Ragnarök here. The Wikipedia entry says the destruction of the earth was followed by the resurrection of life, but Byatt rejects this is as a Christianised interpretation.

You can read more about Byatt here.