Ragnarök

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Ragnarök (disambiguation).

The north portal of the 12th-century Urnes stave church has been interpreted as containing depictions of
snakes and dragons that represent Ragnarök.[1]

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök (/ˈræɡnəˌrɒk, ˈrɑːɡ-/ ( listen);[2][3][4] Old Norse: Ragnarǫk) is

a foretold series of impending events, including a great battle in which numerous great
Norse mythological figures will perish (including
the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdall, and Loki); it will entail a catastrophic series of
natural disasters, including the burning of the world, and culminate in the submersion of
the world underwater. After these events, the world will rise again, cleansed and fertile,
the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two
human survivors, Líf and Lífþrasir. Ragnarök is an important event in Norse mythology
and has been the subject of scholarly discourse and theory in the history of Germanic
studies.
The event is attested primarily in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from
earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri
Sturluson. In the Prose Edda and in a single poem in the Poetic Edda, the event is
referred to as Ragnarøkkr (Old Norse for 'Twilight of the Gods'), a usage popularised
by 19th-century composer Richard Wagner with the title of the last of his Der Ring des
Nibelungen operas, Götterdämmerung (1876), which is "Twilight of the Gods" in
German.