[D66] Garmonbozia: Leestip UvA: Ragnarok

Tue Aug 30 11:02:53 CEST 2011

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A S Byatt:
review<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8722704/Ragnarok-The-End-of-the-Gods-by-A-S-Byatt-review.html>A
S Byatt's retelling of Norse myth, Ragnarok, achieves a rare beauty, says
Ruth Scurr.

By Ruth Scurr

4:44PM BST 25 Aug 2011

[image: Comments]Comment<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8722704/Ragnarok-The-End-of-the-Gods-by-A-S-Byatt-review.html#disqus_thread>

In her retelling of Ragnarok, the death of the gods in Norse mythology, A S
Byatt recalls her childhood discovery of an English translation of Dr W
Wägner’s *Asgard and the Gods*. The book had been used by Byatt’s mother as
a crib for exams in Old Icelandic and Ancient Norse. For Byatt, reading late
at night, under the covers, when her father was away in the war, it became a
crib for the rhythms of life, death, destruction and regeneration that she
felt all around her: in news of the Blitz; in the British countryside on her
walks to school; in her own rich imagination.

Revisiting Ragnarok, half a century later, Byatt has chosen not to imbue its
gods with human psychologies, nor to rewrite the myths as a conventional
novel. Instead, she has entwined the epic stories with her memories of
childhood reading and her love of the natural world.

When Byatt was a child, learning the names of British wild flowers, fishing
with a line and hook in the North Sea, she had no idea she would live to see
species of flowers extinguished and stocks of fish dangerously diminished.
She explains how the death ship Naglfar, that sets sail at the finale as the
gods are dying, now seems an image of “the trash vortex, the wheeling
collection of indestructible plastic in the Pacific, larger than Texas”.

Her description of Naglfar is haunting: “It was a terrible and a beautiful
ship, made of a material buoyant and dully translucent, the horny afterlife
of dead men’s nails, culled as they pushed out, after the blood stopped. It
was a ghost ship, bone-coloured, deathly grey, as though all the floating
mess in the water, that would neither rot nor disintegrate, had coagulated
and clung into this ramping vessel.”

Byatt’s writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel,
has never been so beautiful.

Pain is as integral to the myths as beauty. Torture, killing and sacrifice
fill these pages: “The gods are good at vengeance.” Byatt details the god
Odin’s preference for sacrificed men in the form of “blood-eagles”: “tied to
tree-trunks, their lungs torn back through their ribs”. Another god, Loki,
the shape-shifter, has a preference for lungs and brains: “A sacrificed man
was a cross, a simplified tree. A lung, a brain, was complexity run wild, an
unholy mess in which a different kind of order might nevertheless be
discerned.” Resonating in these descriptions is the creative tension Byatt
noticed as a bookish, asthmatic child, between the Old Norse and Icelandic
myths and the Bible stories she had encountered in church, scripture lessons
and in Bunyan’s *Pilgrim’s Progress*.

She tried to feel wicked, to respond imaginatively to the Christian
explanations of creation and salvation, but it was the stone giants that
made her want to write.

In Byatt’s fiction, sudden death and grief are often powerfully evoked. Here
she plays with the idea of death, almost as children do. She remembers
picking apart a poppy bud, knowing in her heart that she shouldn’t
“interrupt a natural unfolding”, but doing it for the pleasure of “satisfied
curiosity and the glimpse of a secret”. When the goddess Hel in the kingdom
of the dead is asked to allow the god Baldur to return to his grieving
mother, her reply is simply that mothers throughout time have learnt to live
without their sons.

This hard and curious attitude to death is at the heart of the violent myths
that Byatt so beautifully retells.

Her *Ragnarok* is a prose poem about the world ending “because neither the
all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker
know how to save it”.

* Ruth Scurr is writing a book about John Aubrey

Ragnarok: the End of the Gods

by A S Byatt

240PP, Canongate, £14.99

Buy now for £12.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph
Books<http://books.telegraph.co.uk/>

"

Henk Elegeert

2011/8/30 Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks <fluks at combidom.com>

> Bron:  Universiteit van Amsterdam
>      Spui 25 (Electronisch blad voor UvA Alumni)
> Datum: 29 augustus 2011
> URL:   http://www.spui25.nl
>
> (...)
>
>
> Noteert u alvast
> ----------------
>
> Ragnarok | The End of the Gods
> De Engelstalige editie van A.S. Byatt's nieuwe roman Ragnarok
> is nu voor de speciale prijs van EU 12,50 verkrijgbaar bij de
> Athenaeum Boekhandel (Spui 14-16) of via http://www.athenaeum.nl
> Bestellen
> http://www.athenaeum.nl/shop/**details/Ragnarok:%20The%20End%**
> 20of%20The%20Gods/**9781847678430<http://www.athenaeum.nl/shop/details/Ragnarok:%20The%20End%20of%20The%20Gods/9781847678430>
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Op de bovenstaande website van de Atheneum Boekhandel staat...
>
> Ragnarok - The End of the Gods
> ------------------------------
> EU              12,50
> Auteur          A.S. Byatt
> Uitgegeven bij  Canongate
> isbn            9781847678430
>
> Beschrijving van de uitgever
>
> During the second world war Antonia Byatt was given a book of Norse myths
> by her father. She read it and reread it but there was one myth she was
> drawn to in particular and which has continued to hold her under its spell -
> the Myth of Ragnarok. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of
> the Gods, plays out the endgame of Norse mythology. It is the myth in which
> the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the
> wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats his own tale as he crushes the world
> and the seas boil with poison. It is only after such monstrous death and
> destruction that the world can begin anew. This epic struggle provided the
> fitting climax to Wagner's Ring Cycle and just as Wagner was inspired by
> Norse myth (it was also Hitler's favourite myth!) so Byatt has taken this
> remarkable finale and used it as the underpinning of this highly personal
> and politically charged retelling.
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