Ragnarök: The End of the Gods was published by Canongate in 2011 as part of their Myths series. A thin child — Byatt herself, thinly disguised — is evacuated from wartime London to the English countryside. Her father is at war; the world may end in fire at any moment. She reads a book of Norse mythology (Asgard and the Gods, the same text Byatt read as a child) and finds in its stories of cosmic destruction a framework for understanding her own threatened world.
Byatt retells the major Norse myths — the binding of Fenrir, the death of Balder, Loki’s monstrous children, the Midgard Serpent — with extraordinary prose intensity. Her language is dense with physical sensation: the textures of scales and fur, the taste of blood and mead, the sounds of ice cracking and worlds burning. The Norse cosmos is rendered as a biological system: Yggdrasil is not a symbol but a living tree; the serpent Jörmungandr is not an allegory but a creature of the deep ocean.
The contemporary frame — the thin child reading myths while the real world burns — gives the retelling its urgency. Byatt draws explicit parallels between Ragnarök (the death of the gods, the poisoning of the world-tree, the releasing of monsters) and contemporary ecological catastrophe. The myths are not quaint stories from the past but warnings: they describe, precisely, what happens when the systems that sustain life are destroyed.
Collecting Ragnarök
First edition (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2011): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $40–$100