# Ragnarök has an aftermath

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH09.P011](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH09.P011/#char=984,1018): "in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome"

‘Ragnorak’ invokes the Norse catastrophe in which gods fight their enemies and the world burns. In Snorri Sturluson's *Prose Edda*, *The Fooling of Gylfe*, §§55–56, the disaster includes the deaths of Odin and Thor and Surt's burning of the earth. Chesterton uses this cosmic scale to make Rome's collapse look like the natural terminus of an entire world. [Snorri, ‘Ragnarok’](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18947/pg18947-images.html).

The same witness complicates the surrounding claim that other societies die finally. Its next chapter, ‘Regeneration,’ describes renewed earth, surviving gods, Balder returning from Hel, and two human survivors whose descendants repopulate the world (§§57–58). Pagan mythology here already imagines life after catastrophe. That does not refute a proposition about the institutional survival of historical societies, but it prevents treating Ragnarök itself as an uncomplicated emblem of pagan inability to conceive renewal. The inspected edition is Rasmus B. Anderson's English translation, Chicago, 1901, carrying an 1879 copyright; its introduction dates the first printed original-language edition to 1665.

## Sources

- [Snorri Sturluson, The Younger Edda, translated by Rasmus B. Anderson, 1901](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18947/pg18947-images.html), The Fooling of Gylfe, chapters XVI–XVII, §§55–58, printed pp. 140–150; Introduction on the 1665 first printed edition; title and copyright pages

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