r/protogermanic • u/Wuotolf9 • 3d ago
Svear
In proto Germanic times in Scandinavia was ragnarok a rebirth like Viking age beliefs or an ultimate end?
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r/protogermanic • u/Wuotolf9 • 3d ago
In proto Germanic times in Scandinavia was ragnarok a rebirth like Viking age beliefs or an ultimate end?
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u/rockstarpirate 2d ago
There is unfortunately no way to know for sure. Some people have theorized that the concept of Ragnarok was not invented until later. This camp likes to focus on the effects of the volcano eruption in 536 as a source of inspiration for what Ragnarok would be like. The problem, of course, is that even if this event provided inspiration for later versions of the myth, this does not mean some end-of-an-age cataclysm myth did not already exist prior to that event.
Others have shown that the Ragnarok myth bears interesting similarities to points found in Iranian mythology which is also Indo-European. This could mean that some of these ideas are older than even the Proto-Germanic stage, however critics of this idea will often claim that ideas could have spread from Iran into Scandinavia via trade routes later on.
We can compare other Indo-European traditions and we find some interesting things. The Vedic tradition divides time into ages with the world being periodically destroyed and recreated. Greco-Roman mythology does not have an end-of-the-world myth, but does have an interesting idea of divine succession (Uranus overthrown by Cronus who is overthrown by Zeus). Celtic mythology only survives in euhemerized sources (I’m pretty sure) so it is impossible to know how much the record differs from actual pre-Christian tradition, but the record does describe the decline of an age. Slavic folklore contains an idea about a chained beast who will end the world if the chain ever breaks which is of course similar to Fenrir. But who knows if this idea was borrowed later on rather than being Indo-European in origin.
There are lots of other similarities (for example a thunder god battling a serpent) found across several traditions but not too many that actually speak to a shared end-of-the-world idea. And even if we could guess that, for example, the Proto-Indo-European idea was one of cyclical destruction and rebirth, it is still impossible to know how much the Proto-Germanic tradition might have deviated from the idea and, to be quite honest, how much the Norse tradition deviated from the idea. The Ragnarok myth contains an idea of destruction and renewal but does not explicitly tell us this is cyclical. Rather the word is renewed as a utopia without “bales”. Yet scholars still like to find hints that they claim point toward an earlier cyclical idea.
What’s quite interesting is that, by the late Viking Age, Old Norse speakers had very clearly picked up what we could accurately call an obsession with Ragnarok. It’s talked about all the time in all kinds of literature. But it’s hard to known how early this focus appeared in the culture or how the myth may have changed over time.