Welcome to Fimbulwinter, Midgard

Turns out, the Norse understood at least one thing better than anyone else: how worlds die.

Ragnarök by Emile Doepler as Surtur burns all Nine Worlds in his death throes

Like all our ancestors, they were right about a lot of things — there’s deep wisdom in all the old lore, powerful truths we scorn at our own peril.

And the truth about our world’s end?

Well, ain’t nobody got nuthin’ on the Ragnarok version of the thing, folks. Not even Marvel.

I should know, because I spent three years researching and writing a rather long, ridiculously epic six-book saga all about a group of unlikely heroes transported to and caught up in it.

Fun (and #1 best-seller, woo!) science fiction aside, you really ought to care about Ragnarok, because it’s what’s happening to the world right now.

Probably not the Ragnarok (though possibly!), but a Ragnarok all the same.

Oh, and sorry for the purists out there — but I prefer to English it simply as Ragnarok rather than Ragnaroek or Ragnarök. Language evolves.

Most English-speakers are brought up with an incredibly narrow and distorted way of thinking about the world. Part of this is Christianity’s fault, but mostly it’s a function of the fact that through history only a select, privileged few got to actually write that history.

Then another fairly small group decided that knowing facts from history told a certain way made a person educated. Schools began to incorporate approved textbooks into the curriculum.

And so the modern view of our supposedly barbaric heritage was produced by a clique of intellectuals who wanted to tell history as a particular kind of story — one where people they liked were the heroes, the great movers of the past.

There’s a reason history literally has story in it. People naturally gravitate to stories — we all constantly think and communicate in stories whether we know it or not. Even scientists tell stories to communicate their findings.

For a lot of history, writers have tended to either romanticize the past, imagining it to be magically clean and pristine, or to go completely the other way and amp up the horror of it all — the violence, lack of sanitation or medical knowledge, average life expectancy of around 40 years.

Either way history is usually told as a tale of progress — sometimes slipping backward, but still overall a steady movement towards some imaginary goal.

This has been a tragic mistake.

History is taught as a sequence of facts unfolding over time, emphasizing a few particular instances instead of the bigger picture, the patterns of continuity and discontinuity and change across the ages.

In short, it’s a story that mistakes the clouds for the sky.

We’re taught to view the past with pure egotism, a story of how we came to be, rather than an endlessly unfolding tapestry of action we all have a hand in shaping during our time.

That is a much more scientifically accurate way of describing history, but it unfortunately does not lend itself to casting the past in either a heroic or nightmarish mode.

The way history is taught has resulted in the bitter loss of deep, ancient wisdom developed and sustained by our ancestors across thousands of years of experience. The very knowledge that actually built the world we inhabit and could help make it less bad in these difficult times.

The destruction of the complex global society we’ve inherited from our parents and their parents before is now a real possibility in our lifetime.

But this is not the first time the peoples of Earth have faced a moment like this.

In fact, perhaps the most basic, fundamental piece of lore passed down by our ancestors was the story of how our world was born — and must one day die.

Our ancestors lived through eras of total collapse too. More locally, of course, which is why the details of the story vary all across the world. But almost all mythological traditions — which underpin all culture — have something very interesting in common.

In his incredible book, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, E.J. Michael Witzel lays out a concise theory of the evolution of this grand idea of a world that is born and dies.

It is actually a relatively recent development — planet Earth was first peopled by several waves of migration out of Africa starting a couple hundred thousand years ago. Some cultures in a few fringe parts of the world that were isolated from the rest by rising seas for much of history still retain, Witzel argues, a modern-day echo of this ur-story.

They tend to see the world as eternal, created by divine forces and populated by thinking people who emerged from nature —which is, funny enough, pretty much what modern science argues so long as you assume the Big Bang and laws of physics to be the equivalent of divine forces.

This Gondwana cosmology had no distinct beginning or end, only peoples and other creatures with some level of divine ancestral connections going about life as ordained by whatever deities of the landscape were locally important.

Most of the mythological traditions around the world, however, are rooted in something very different: a grand cycle of creation and destruction. Laurentia cosmology, Witzel calls it.

Reality is born, gods with distinct powers and roles shape it from some divine material, they have conflicts that involve humans and end up having kids with humans who grow up to be great leaders and heroes of their age — and our ancestors. Typically there is a great flood and a malevolent serpent involved — these motifs are nearly universal, and present in cultures that themselves later produced the Bible, Quran, and other holy scriptures.

But one day it must all go wrong — another aspect of the grand cosmic cycle. The authors of the Bible and Quran, for example, influenced by binary Manichaean thought, saw the forces of good and evil battling it out to the bitter end. Buddhists and Hindus and the ancient Mayans all saw existence and even the gods themselves being part of an eternal cosmic cycle of death and rebirth.

Many are surprised to find out the ancient Europeans did too. In fact, the mythology of pre-Christian Europe is distantly related to the Hindu and Buddhist systems in the same way English is a cousin of South Asian languages like Hindi and Bengali.

Norse, or rather, Northern European mythology, which we only happen to know anything substantial about solely thanks to the fact a few scholars wrote down some of their ancestral stories about 1,000 years ago, is the best-preserved part of what evolved from the western migration of the Indo-Europeans.

Modern “white” Europeans — this includes most Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, thanks to colonialism — were made by three waves of migration:

• Hunter-gatherers following the retreating glaciers north from Iberia and the Balkans after the last ice ages ended around 15,000 years ago
• Farmers from Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago, about bringing agricultural techniques and settling fertile lowlands
• Semi-nomadic herders from Central Asia starting about 6,000 years ago, the Indo-Europeans, whose leaders ended up ruling the proto-nations of ancient Europe ’cause they figured out how to ride ponies to war.

The true heritage of the European peoples lies — as with people in any other part of the world — in complex ethnic origins now disastrously subsumed under the racial category white or generic colonial designations like American.

The fragments of this process of multiple different lifestyles merging across the continent are what is recalled by the oldest stories of Europe — the Eddas, Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other ancient sources.

The Ragnarok cycle was remembered when so many other of the beliefs of the past were forgotten (or deliberately omitted) when medieval Christian scholars wrote them down for a very important reason.

Ragnarok has come before, and it will come again. The first stages — Fimbulwinter — have already begun.

To really understand the true meaning of Ragnarok you have to remember that the ancient Europeans loved metaphors and told their stories in poetic verse. Ships were sea-steeds, swords were blood-wands.

Remember how in Lord of the Rings Tolkien has all the characters citing poetry left and right? He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and a philologist steeped in the old stories of Northern Europe — his fiction is rooted in them, very intentionally carrying their spirit, as he details in his many letters.

Metaphor is key.

Fimbulwinter, in the Eddas, is three years of perpetual winter preceding the final act in the grand drama of this world: Ragnarok, the fate of the gods who represent essential forces of humanity and nature.

Basically, everyone starves as crops fail everywhere and freeze in the endless winter. But it gets worse — all bonds holding society together break under the strain. Siblings turn against each other, friends go to war, and all the slaughter simply fills the ranks of the Undead the chaos god Loke — Loki is another spelling, but I much prefer the Swedish way low-kay — calls to his service when he breaks free of his prison and leads an army to challenge the protector gods of Asgard who watch over our world, Midgard.

Mutual, complete destruction ensues when the fiery god Surtur and Freyr mortally wound each other, causing the former to burn all existence in his final wrath.

It’s pretty effing compelling, and why I’m so glad so many people are giving Bringing Ragnarok a try.

But there’s a deeper meaning to Ragnarok that is worth highlighting given the events happening all around us right now.

Voluspa — the Eddaic stanzas containing most of the information — is actually unclear on what precisely happens after, but in most translations a new world is eventually born and inhabited by the few survivors among the gods and people. Leif and Leifthrasr (again, spellings vary) are said to be the only surviving humans, an echo of the first two humans — Ask and Aembla — who came into existence at the beginning of this cycle.

Ragnarok is a metaphor — but no less real for that.

Our ancestors knew all too well that the world dies all the time — each day dies, each season dies in its turn. Renewal comes — but not always.

The northern Europeans of old were terribly vulnerable to the ravages of nature. Climate shifts occur in Europe every few centuries that dry the whole continent out, in the old days leading to widespread famine. Also, just to the northwest is the ever-explosive island of Iceland, where now and again a massive volcanic eruption brings a year where summer never comes.

A veritable death sentence to agriculture-dependent peoples, and something with serious consequences for the rest of Europe. Because when you can’t feed yourself in a place, you move. Ancient law of history, that, just as true five thousand years ago as today.

And when you are a people who already tends to live close to the margins but are prosperous thanks to trade networks, you are pretty much ideally suited to evolve into a raiding society. Raiding and trading, after all, being flip sides of the same coin. A group of tough bodies with gear is required to hold off bad guys, and in tough times allows for simply taking over their racket.

The reason we think of the Vikings as being especially prone to this kind of behavior, by the way, comes down to the simple fact the last time Norsemen migrated south in large numbers they were pushing into lands controlled by Christians — who happened to write most of the books recording events of the time.

But the reality is when times get tough enough, people look to their local community for support and if desperate enough they’ll band together to find another community to pillage in order to survive.

The closer your society is to the margins, the more present the danger will be in the collective consciousness of your culture. Ragnarok and Fimbulwinter are both terminal events in the belief system of the old world because lesser versions of the grand terminal catastrophe were regular occurrences in old Europe.

Ever wonder why Europeans turned out so mean, obsessed with conquest and wealth?

It’s because deep down we know in our bones that the End is always just around the corner.

We are, all of us, living through the first stages of the Fimbulwinter of our times, with Ragnarok still to come.

How bad it will be, how deep the collapse, cannot be known. All that is certain now is that for anyone born after about 1945, the world we knew is literally dying.

Poverty, climate change, war, plague — leaders can go on TV to reassure everybody all they like, but it has very little effect anymore.

People know, deep down, something is coming — that’s why they’re so agitated. Bonds are breaking down. People don’t know who to trust, and too many are willing to follow charlatans promising an easy way out.

The hard bitter truth is that the world is going to suck for the next five to twenty years. Dark clouds are filling the skies in literal and metaphoric terms.

It isn’t your imagination. It’s bad. And it’s gonna get worse.

How much so depends mostly on how long people continue to fight the old battles in the name of the gods of our time.

Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Liberalism, Terrorism, Nationalism, Patriotism, Nazism— the ideas that drove the past couple centuries were all set in shoddy foundations that have long since rotted away.

The world is collapsing fast and hard, yet everywhere people are being incited to fight over their favorited dead white man’s ideology.

Our world is too unequal on too many levels to continue as it has for the past eighty years. Basic material shortages are starting to bite — the cheap oil is almost gone, there are no more arable lands unless you chop down forests.

The global Ragnarok of our days is at hand, and unlike any other point in human history this time we silly humans could take most of the planet down with us.

Unless, of course, we figure out a way to get organized on a global level and push resources where they need to go in time.

But the scale of that challenge is immense.

It is likely that the effort will only begin in earnest, at the soonest, towards the end of the 2020s.

By then, the many emergencies the world faces will be reaching — or already beyond — critical thresholds. Only swift action will prevent a collapse that really could resemble — if not be, Ragnarok as foretold.

The final stanzas of Volsupa are vague but generally interpreted as meaning a better, hopeful, freer world is bound to emerge from the wreckage of the old. The god of hope Baldr and sons of Odin — god of wisdom — and Thor — god of freedom — will emerge to rediscover their forefathers’ tools.

That’s the other side of the cosmic cycle. Death is but a prelude to rebirth.

Sometimes, when things get bad enough, collapse can be a good thing.

Many people speak of resilience these days, as if it is a fundamentally good thing.

It isn’t always.

The predatory, extractive, brutal systems of exploitation most human beings are trapped in should not be resilient. Dictatorships and monopolies should not be resilient.

And sometimes destroying what is preventing adaptation is necessary.

It is always awful when that day comes, though, so peaceful reform well ahead of time is always preferable for everyone involved.

But in a sense, reform too is a kind of death, a collapse one world leading to the birth of another, just not as deep or painful as otherwise might be.

In the end, on a high level, that’s one of the key things Bringing Ragnarok is all about.

What both the collapse and rebirth phases of the cosmic cycle ultimately look like depend on is the actions of those with the most power in our madly unequal world.

If they keep fighting, the struggle will go on until there is nothing left for anyone. When resource shortages and grand challenges bite, cooperation is the only way out — otherwise, the cycle of self-destruction will continue.

The ancients knew this — it was why leadership was synonymous with gift-giving among most people’s distant ancestors.

Good leaders amassed fortunes not for themselves, but for their people. Beowulf’s dying wish to see the treasure he won from his final fight with the dragon is not about greed, but about the satisfaction that comes from dying in service, of securing your people’s future.

It is that kind of ethic that is required now to save what can be saved of this world as the next is born.

It is very likely these already dark times will grow much darker. Millions have been killed by this pandemic, hundreds of thousands by the last twenty years of futile wars.

The next pandemics and wars will be much, much worse. And climate change looms over everything, eating away at the natural world’s ability to sustain our need for healthy food and clean water and stable weather.

Fimbulwinter has arrived. Ragnarok is coming soon.

The best way to get prepared is to double-down on the bonds you hold dearest. Conserve and store resources as you can— especially the important ones, like community and trust and whatever shared wealth you can get hold of and bind in local institutions as things fall apart.

In the end, the best hope humanity has relies on rediscovering the power of the local and finding a way to connect the many locals to mass movements with impacts at the global level.

Because even as most bonds break in this terrible unending season of bleakness, others will grow tighter. In this process lies our common hope.

In the end, all people are tribal. Leif and Leifthrasr, the survivors of the Eddas, like the gods should not be taken as individuals, but as a metaphor for the basic spirit of comradeship that drives us all deep down.

Even if you prefer the company of animals, hey — they’re in this with us too. And unlike humans, they’re blameless in everything that is happening to our world.

Find your team. Do what you can to protect what you can. Pick your tribe, and fight for them.

This is the only way any of us gets through the dark days ahead.

Because like it or not, we’re all in this together.