Ms.

Sokolov
Lesson plan for Ragnarok, pages 37-58
PART I: ANNOTATION ACTIVITY
Take 15 minutes to read and annotate the below passage from the Chapter
Asgard in Ragnarok. Consider the following questions as you annotate: What
emotions does the thin girl experience in this passage? How does she cope with
them? Why does the narrator interweave the story of Odin with the story of the
thin girl in this passage? Why is there no paragraph break between discussion of
Odin and discussion of the thin girl? What does the story of Odin do for the thin
girl? Why does the thin girl compare her father to Odin? Does such a comparison
help her? Consider the last word control. Does the thin girls processing of the
Odin story give her a sense of control or not? How so?

Odin was the god of the Wild Hunt. Or of the Raging Host. They rode out through
the skies, horses and hounds, hunters and spectral armed men. They never tired
and never halted; the horns howled on the wind, the hooves beat, they swirled in
dangerous wheeling flocks like monstrous starlings. Odins horse, Sleipnir, had
eight legs: his gallop was thundering. At night, in her blacked-out bedroom, the thin
child heard sounds in the sky, a distant whine, a churning of propellers, thunder
hanging overhead and then going past. She had seen and heard the crash and
conflagration when the airfield near her grandparents home was bombed. She had
cowered in an understairs cupboard as men were taught to cower, flat on the
ground, when the Hunt passed by. Odin was the god of death and battle. Not much
traffic came through the edges of the small town in which the thin child lived. Most
of what there was was referred to as Convoys, a word that the thin child thought
was synonymous with processions of khaki vehicles, juddering and grinding. Some
had young men sitting in the back of trucks, smiling out at the waving children,
shaking with the rattling motions. They came and they went. No one was told
where. They were our boys. The child thought of her father, burning in the air
above North Africa. She did not know where North Africa was. She imagined him
with his flaming hair in a flaming black plane, in the racked of propellers. Airmen

were the wild hunt. They were dangerous. If any hunter dismounted, he crumbled
to dust, the child read. It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger
were in it, and things out of control (40-41).
(ACTIVITY CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE)
Now, use your annotations to participate in a discussion with your peers,
where you share your insights on this passage (15 minutes). Then,
whether as a class, in pairs, or individually, write a topic sentence below
that explains the significance of the above passage (5 minutes):
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________.
PART II: In pairs, COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE FENRIS WOLF STORY
FROM THE BREAK OF PAGE 52 UNTIL THE END OF THE CHAPTER WITH A
CHILDRENS VERSION OF THE SAME STORY. 35 minutes.
Read the childrens story with your partner, noticing what details are the same and
what are different. Make a chart comparing the childrens version to Byatts. What
does the childrens version include that Byatt leaves out? What does Byatt
emphasize more than the childrens version? How does reading the childrens
version help you see Byatts purpose in HER retelling? What IS Byatts purpose in
retelling this wolf story in the way she does? Consider our earlier discussions on the
thin girls character, the setting of War, and the themes we have discussed so far.
Time permitting, share your findings with the class, as each pair will be working with
a different childrens version. You may make notes below:
CHILDRENS VERSION OF WOLF STORY
VERSION OF WOLF STORY

BYATTS