Ragnarok is usually pictured as a fiery comic-book apocalypse, but the Old Norse sources tell a stranger and more human story. This episode traces the doom of the gods from its mistranslated name to the Fimbulwinter, the breaking of Fenrir and Loki’s bonds, the symbolic duels on the plain of Vigrid, and the green world that rises from the sea afterward. Along the way it looks at who actually wrote these stories down, including the 13th-century Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson, and what that means for how much of the myth is authentic Viking belief.

The conversation then moves from poetry to ice cores, exploring the theory that the three-year winter of the Voluspa records a real volcanic catastrophe in 536 AD, and how rune stones like the Gosforth Cross show Norse and Christian imagery being carved side by side as missionaries repurposed the old myth as a prologue to Christianity.

• Why Twilight of the Gods is a linguistic accident popularized by Wagner, and what Ragnarok really means
• Odin’s necromancy, the Fimbulwinter, and how social collapse precedes cosmic collapse in the Voluspa
• The fatal matchups at Vigrid: Odin and Fenrir, Thor and Jormungandr, Freyr and Surtr, and why each pairing is symbolic
• Naglfar, the ship of untrimmed fingernails, and the rebirth in which surviving gods find golden game pieces in the grass
• Greenland ice cores, Byzantine accounts of a dimmed sun, and the case that Surtr personifies volcanic fire