Texts in Context:
The Sons of Midgard

Valhalla, on the other hand, housed a pantheon which was fated to destruction and death—and knew it. One day, Jörmungandr will release its tail from its mouth, making the seas roil with chaos; Thor will succeed in killing Jörmungandr, but will himself be struck with the sea-serpent’s venom, and after its death, he will walk only nine paces before dying himself. Fenrir’s chains will not hold forever, and when they break, he will swallow Odin whole; the lord of Muspelheim will cover all Midgard with fire, and the world will end. Depending on the source, in the end, either most Æsir and jötnar are slain alike, or, put simply—the Æsir lose. The very word Ragnarök means either “the twilight” or “the destruction of the powers.”

The Doom of Men

Interestingly, this cosmic pessimism was blended with a high courage in the ethical realm. In his autobiography, C. S. Lewis relates that his first literary love came to him through Longfellow’s translation of the poem Tegner’s Drapa (a drapa being an elegy or lament), which opens with the lines “I heard a voice, that cried, / ‘Balder the Beautiful / is dead, is dead'”. As he says,

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then … found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.⁸

But, returning to the subject of Ragnarök, death and doom were no reason to side against what was right. Lewis again, in Letters to Malcolm, wrote, “Would not you and I take the Viking way: ‘The giants and trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin.'”

Incidentally, most of the Norse actually weren’t Vikings in the strict sense—in other words, most of the Norse weren’t pirates. They were the same as most people in Europe: farmers, hunters, herdsmen, fishermen, artisans. Why a percentage of their society suddenly began taking up piracy in the late 700s is not well understood. Had it begun a century or so later or a couple centuries earlier, we might be tempted to pin the blame on something we do know about, which everybody so loves to discuss, they’ll even converse with strangers about it: namely, the fluctuations of the weather.

The Medieval Warm Period

The Medieval Warm Period (or “Medieval Climate Optimum”) was a span of about three hundred years from the mid-tenth century to the mid-thirteenth, roughly 950-1250, during which higher-than-average temperatures prevailed in the North Atlantic. This primarily affected the east of modern Canada, northwestern Europe, and Greenland. (It was also roughly the reverse of the cooling we saw during Justinian’s reign, and on a scale of hundreds rather than dozens of years.) Glaciers retreated, simultaneously freeing up land and putting fresh water into a usable form; North Sea and North Atlantic winters were less stormy and unpredictable; crops that were intolerant of cold could be grown further to the north than usual; warm clothes were less necessary, which in turn lessened the time and effort spent on making and mending warm clothes. And it freed certain desperate or curious souls to do some wandering further afield than usual.

Also around 950, in the southwest of Norway, a red-headed boy named Erik was born to a hot-tempered, violent father. The family were banished about ten years later (Erik’s father had been found guilty of manslaughter), and they moved to Iceland. After reaching adulthood, in 982, Erik managed to get himself banished (albeit for only three years) by Iceland’s delightfully-named parliament, the Thing.⁸ Erik decided to set sail west, instead of toward the European mainland in southeast. He soon made landfall on a large island; for three years, he whiled away his exile exploring it. The bulk of it, then as now, was firmly snow-capped, but there were innumerable sheltered fjord-valleys, some of which were free of ice and could be used to farm.

In 985, Erik was back in Iceland, hawking his ready-to-settle new country of Greenland (a name which, as he reportedly said, he picked because people would be more interested in settling there if it had a good name). The Groenlendinga Saga relates that thirty ships full of people⁹ set out with Erik the Red on his return journey. Sadly, “much better weather” does not mean “ideal weather.” Of those thirty ships, just fourteen reached Greenland; the rest were drowned in storms. Yet the far-flung hamlets of Greenland were not the utter edge to which Midgard would be brought …

¹It took the rest of recorded history, down to the beginning of the Völkisch (proto-Nazi) movements of the nineteenth century, for anyone to come up with an even sillier idea about the North Pole.
²Pronounced sûð-re͡y-àŕ and nõŕð-re͡y-àŕ. (from eyjar [e͡y-àŕ], “islands”). The territories of the former included the Inner and Outer Hebrides and the Isles of Arran, Bute, and Man (home of the Manx—both the Celtic nation and the cat).
³Rurik I (r. 862-879?) is a murky figure. Some historians consider him mythological, though little seems implausible about his existence. Russia (whose name is derived from Rus’) also owes something to Novgorod and Muscovy; Ukraine more specifically continues the cultural lineage of the Kyivan Rus’.
⁴The Norse were not the first to inhabit Iceland; a few Irish monks set up shop there even earlier. Their discovery may be reflected in Irish tales of saints who sailed west, known as immrama. However, while the monks temporarily peopled Iceland, they could not exactly populate it!
⁵That is, “Midgard” was sort of the Norse name for it: Miðgarðr is more accurate. Many Norse words and names have occurred in English-language material often enough to produce a class of “Anglo-Norse” terms used only in describing Norse mythology. Note that, transcription notwithstanding, Miðgarðr is what is written in runes in the second sentence of the paragraph (these follow the Younger Futhark); the runic word of the next sentence (written in Old English futhorc) is transliterated exactly. Finally, οἰκουμένη came mainly to mean “the Mediterranean” in Greek and in its Latin loanword form, Oecumene—see footnote 2 in this post for further descendants.
⁶The direct cognate would be “swarthy elves,” svart-álfar. Some authorities identify these “dark elves” with dwarves; what is more certain is that the Norse contrasted them with ljósálfar or “light elves.”
⁷Pelf is an obsolete English word meaning “ill-gotten gains, plunder, lucre.”
⁸Surprised by Joy, chapter 1.
⁹In other words, among Norsemen, saying I have a thing was not only a serious excuse but a quite specific one.
¹⁰An average Norse longship could carry about thirty people. As these were families traveling with property and livestock, this could easily put the first company of settlers in the low hundreds when they left Iceland.

Gabriel Blanchard’s ancestors are from Hampshire—there are also interesting places in the world, but we’re from Hampshire; it’s fine—and he now works as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

If you enjoyed this piece, and would like to pick up our history series from the beginning, you can find its three-part introduction here, and pick up with the beginning of the story itself in what we can glean about the Stone Age. Alternatively, if you’re in a more philosophic mood, you might dip into our series on the great ideas, such as life and death, progress, rhetoric, and the variety of subjects into which knowledge is divided.

Published on 20th January, 2025. Page image of the carved head of the Draken Harald Hårfrage (“Dragon Harald Fairhair,” or “Dragon Harold Fairfax”), a modern longship built in Norway.