How old is the Ragnarök? Is it possible to have an estimate year of its origin?

by emnamidedeus

Hi! I was talking about Norse mythology with a friend and she asked me if I knew how old is the Ragnarök (estimated of course since having precise dates for these stuff is tricky I think). I'm not well versed in Norse mythology but I went on Googling to see if I could get some information about the origins and specially how old is Ragnarök but I couldn't find any precise information only that it is pre Christian.

Is there any historian in this subreddit who can give me some information about this? If there isn't such information, what is the oldest evidence of the myth in Nordic history?

Steelcan909

So there are several problems with trying to describe the history of Norse mythology. And unfortunately I'm going to focus on that for the answer, because it is quite simply impossible to come up with a timeline of beliefs in Norse mythology.

First of all there are NO extant sources that have not been influenced in some way by Christianity. The famous Sagas were all written down well after Iceland was converted to Christianity and views on Norse religion are all filtered through the Christian lens even outside of Iceland. For example the famous description of Norse sacrificial practices at Uppsala were written by a Bishop from modern day Germany. We need to keep all of these potential biases in mind when talking about Norse practices. There were no active practitioners of the religious tradition writing down their own beliefs and practices, literacy was almost exclusively a phenomenon of Christianization.

This also gets to a very common misunderstanding that is prevalent about Norse mythology. In the modern day there is a tendency to believe that the practices and beliefs that we have described for us in sources about Norse mythology were universal, ancient, and unchanging. This is completely untrue. All of the corpus of Norse mythology that has come down to the modern day is essentially a crystallized version of what MIGHT have existed at the time of conversion in a specific geographic location, namely Iceland. It has very little bearing on beliefs that were around centuries before or in different parts of the Norse world. Again, I will point to the sagas which were only written down several centuries after conversion by a Christian author.

Much of this takes for granted features of Christianity that were not prevalent in other religious traditions at the time. Namely standardized texts, rites, priesthood, and so on. These are all hallmarks of religion that have been ingrained in modern day audiences but do not hold true for ancient practices, especially in pre-literate societies such as the Norse.

Now with all of that in mind, what can be said specifically about Ragnarok in the literature that we do have? All of the mentions of Ragnarok in the modern day corpus all come from the Poetic and Prose Eddas, compiled in Iceland in the 13th century. There are no mentions of similar stories in other contexts that I am aware of. While it is tempting to believe that the Anglo-Saxons or other Germanic societies held similar beliefs, it is unattested in the literature that is available. Some may try to point to Anglo-Saxon ideas such as "wyrd" that would herald a similar world view, but there is nothing conclusive on this front.

Unfortunately there is nothing extant today that really gives a sense of the antiquity of Ragnarok as an idea. There have been attempts to connect it to other apocalyptic visions in Indo-European traditions, but there is nothing in Germanic literature to piece together a history of the belief.


Sources and further reading

Poetic Edda

Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson

Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus

A History of the Vikings, Gwyn Jones

If you're specifically interested on commentary on the stories in the Eddas, maybe take a look at Glendinning and Bessason's collection of articles, Edda: A Collection of Essays