Viking and Old Norse imaginaries aren’t rooted in any single geographical space nor any specific historical time; they are “conjured in an assemblage of alternative Earthbound pasts, fictive post-apocalyptic futures, as well as inhabiting various supernatural realms, alternative universes and outer space” (Williams, 230). The idea of Ragnarök is similarly malleable. No vision of things to come – whether utopian, dystopian, or apocalyptic – is really about the future. Speculation about the end of days is about the present in which it’s articulated, and the end of the world is always about the end of a world, some specific social formation that appears to be threatened or threatening to whoever prophecies about its downfall. Starting from these points of departure, this paper focuses on Ragnarök narratives in comics, aiming to both historicize them and to analyze them as popular cultural means serving socially formative ends.

Reference

Williams, Howard. “Towards Public Viking Research.” In Viking Heritage and History in Europe: Practices and Re-Creations, edited by Sara Ellis Nilsson and Stefan Nyzell, 229–243. Routledge, 2024.