Friday 21 February 2014

World Ends Again

I feel it's only fair to warn you that, if the Norse myths are to be relied on - and there is no reason to doubt it* - the world will be ending tomorrow. Rogmarok - a succession of unfortunate events, on the kind of grand scale that Norse mythology favours - will tomorrow culminate in the submersion of the world in water. Only a few of the gods will survive, plus a couple of humans, Líf and Lífþrasir, whose job will be to set about repopulating the world.
 Oddly, with all this end-of-the-world stuff going on all around it, the otherwise exhaustive Norse chroniclers make no specific mention of the fate of the world-tree Yggdrasil. According to some interpretations, it could be that Lif and Lífþrasir survive the unpleasantness by sheltering in the world-tree. That would be nice.
You might recall that Yggdrasil (or Igdrasil) gets a mention in Richard Wilbur's homage to Robert Frost - Seed Leaves.


* apart from the fact that they are a pile of ballsachingly tedious hokum.

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