RE: What is Ragnarök?
July 17, 2026 at 3:26 pm
(This post was last modified: July 17, 2026 at 3:31 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Imma give you the very..very...VERY abridged version Leo.
In norse mythology there are two tribes of gods that eventually came together as one. Aesir and Vanir. Aesir are celestial deities who rule from Asgard and concern themselves with things like war and law and political power. The Vanir are earth-bound gods ruling from Vanaheim and they're agrarian. Concerned more with fertility and magic. Additionally, there are the Jotun, from Jotunheim. They're not gods, neither Aesir nor Vanir....but pure chaos and primordial force...with the exception of one. Loki. Loki is Aesir by blood brotherhood oath to Odin.
Neither the gods nor the jotun always existed. In the primordial void, called Ginnungigap... fire from Muspelheim merged with ice from Niflheim and created Ymir (the first jotun) and Auðumbla... the hornless cow - who sustained Ymir with four rivers of milk. Now, the rest of the early jotun sprung fully formed from various parts of Ymirs body. It's weird, and weirdly specific. The first god, however, was revealed when the cosmic cow was forgaing and licking a salt block. Buri was not born, he was unearthed. Buri married the jotun Bestla and sired the first major gods of the Aesir. Odin, Vile, and Ve. The three brothers. Odin would become important....the other two...not so much. Before the others faded into obscurity, however...they would as brothers slay Ymir and create the world we know from his remains, killing almost all of the jotun in the process by flooding the cosmos with his blood.
After doing so, and strolling upon their creation..they came across two pieces of driftwood. Ask and Embla (ash and elm, male and female).....and the three of them each imbued something into them. Odin our breath and spirit. Vile our intelligence, wit, and behavior. Ve our appearance, our senses, and the ability to speak. There are reasons to think these three brothers are actually just one. Different aspects to a triune god. Who knows..this is forgotten to time. Now..as it so happens, almost all of the jotun were killed in the apocalypse of Ymirs death. A few made it...in some some stories, by riding out the blood flood in hollowed log boats. Their scant survivors would be the partners to the original Aesir. So you end up with phrases that, translated into english, sound something like "the progeny of night and power was a son of thunder". You're probably picking up what I'm putting down. Odin had many jotun wives, and Thor (and all the other Aesir) were a product of this. Vanir are a bit more ambiguous. They're treated as preexisting. They do ostensibly have an alternate geneology...and in some stories sdome of them get an explicit one...but by and large they're just the gods who were already there. Another important one to mention at this point is Baldur. He's the son of Odin as father god and Frigg as mother goddess.
I'll pause here....for comparison..... between what the story is saying (and/or how it's been interpreted by comp myth)...and what you want it to say. What you want is for the jotun to represent both big oil and societal forces, the effect of mans action in the world....however, this is Aesir territory and human territory, respectively, in the norse myth. IOW, jotun don't have shit to do with any of that. Jotun are volcanoes, jotun are tides, jotun are storms, jotun are all the things explicitly -not- connected to either the order imposed by aesir or the work done by man. In fact, jotun...jotun, primordial nature.... the main antagonists to that order, to mans effort. What you would need...for your interpretation at least, is for human ignorance, populism, and the aesir as political gods...to be The Issue. This is 180 degrees at odds with the story as told. ...at least so far......
Would you like to know more?
(I would point out that the story as told by Snorri actually did happen...just not in the future........but then again the norse cosmology is cyclical, past is future, future is now present-then-past, etc)
In norse mythology there are two tribes of gods that eventually came together as one. Aesir and Vanir. Aesir are celestial deities who rule from Asgard and concern themselves with things like war and law and political power. The Vanir are earth-bound gods ruling from Vanaheim and they're agrarian. Concerned more with fertility and magic. Additionally, there are the Jotun, from Jotunheim. They're not gods, neither Aesir nor Vanir....but pure chaos and primordial force...with the exception of one. Loki. Loki is Aesir by blood brotherhood oath to Odin.
Neither the gods nor the jotun always existed. In the primordial void, called Ginnungigap... fire from Muspelheim merged with ice from Niflheim and created Ymir (the first jotun) and Auðumbla... the hornless cow - who sustained Ymir with four rivers of milk. Now, the rest of the early jotun sprung fully formed from various parts of Ymirs body. It's weird, and weirdly specific. The first god, however, was revealed when the cosmic cow was forgaing and licking a salt block. Buri was not born, he was unearthed. Buri married the jotun Bestla and sired the first major gods of the Aesir. Odin, Vile, and Ve. The three brothers. Odin would become important....the other two...not so much. Before the others faded into obscurity, however...they would as brothers slay Ymir and create the world we know from his remains, killing almost all of the jotun in the process by flooding the cosmos with his blood.
After doing so, and strolling upon their creation..they came across two pieces of driftwood. Ask and Embla (ash and elm, male and female).....and the three of them each imbued something into them. Odin our breath and spirit. Vile our intelligence, wit, and behavior. Ve our appearance, our senses, and the ability to speak. There are reasons to think these three brothers are actually just one. Different aspects to a triune god. Who knows..this is forgotten to time. Now..as it so happens, almost all of the jotun were killed in the apocalypse of Ymirs death. A few made it...in some some stories, by riding out the blood flood in hollowed log boats. Their scant survivors would be the partners to the original Aesir. So you end up with phrases that, translated into english, sound something like "the progeny of night and power was a son of thunder". You're probably picking up what I'm putting down. Odin had many jotun wives, and Thor (and all the other Aesir) were a product of this. Vanir are a bit more ambiguous. They're treated as preexisting. They do ostensibly have an alternate geneology...and in some stories sdome of them get an explicit one...but by and large they're just the gods who were already there. Another important one to mention at this point is Baldur. He's the son of Odin as father god and Frigg as mother goddess.
I'll pause here....for comparison..... between what the story is saying (and/or how it's been interpreted by comp myth)...and what you want it to say. What you want is for the jotun to represent both big oil and societal forces, the effect of mans action in the world....however, this is Aesir territory and human territory, respectively, in the norse myth. IOW, jotun don't have shit to do with any of that. Jotun are volcanoes, jotun are tides, jotun are storms, jotun are all the things explicitly -not- connected to either the order imposed by aesir or the work done by man. In fact, jotun...jotun, primordial nature.... the main antagonists to that order, to mans effort. What you would need...for your interpretation at least, is for human ignorance, populism, and the aesir as political gods...to be The Issue. This is 180 degrees at odds with the story as told. ...at least so far......
Would you like to know more?
(I would point out that the story as told by Snorri actually did happen...just not in the future........but then again the norse cosmology is cyclical, past is future, future is now present-then-past, etc)
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