The Ragnarok Riddle (Gåten Ragnarok)

Last night I went to the cinema to see Gåten Ragnarok (The Ragnarok Riddle or just Ragnarok), a new Norwegian action-adventure film inspired by Viking mythology and history.

In the film, Sigurd is an archaeologist and researcher at the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo, the capital of Norway. He works hard to reveal the mysteries connected to the very rich Oseberg burial finds, dug up during excavations back in 1904. His hard work has partly to do with the death of his wife, and his two children suffer because of his long working days.

Coming nowhere with his research and about to loose his job, Sigurd gets a breakthrough when a friend turns up with a rune stone he has found in the far north of Norway, in Finnmark. Combined with a broach from the Oseberg finds, a riddle written on the slab can be solved, but it only points to new riddles. The writings suggest that Queen Åsa, who was buried in the Oseberg ship, had been travelling up in the far north, and the runes point to a certain lake with a small island, called Odin's eye, deep into Finnmark wilderness.

Ragnarok

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is a great book: well-written, interesting, exciting. I read it twice.

Ragnarok is about a little girl. Evacuated from Sheffield, she grows up in the English Second World War countryside. Here she starts reading the English version of the German book Asgard and the Gods. Digging into the mind of the child, Byatt simultaneously tells the girl’s life, her experiences with Asgard and the Gods, and the story of the Norse gods and Ragnarok. It’s elegant.

I don’t understand the end of the book. Does it give a stripe of hope? I don’t know. In Voluspå (the great Edda poem telling of the World’s beginning and end), a new and cleansed Earth rises after Ragnarok. But I prefer to believe that the Vikings and Byatt see Ragnarok as the ultimate destruction. Humanity lives and dies. End of story.


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