Denmark

Denmark held the same eschatology as the rest of the Norse world and recorded it differently. Around 1200 Saxo Grammaticus wrote the Gesta Danorum in Latin, and his method was euhemerism: Odin and Thor appear as human magicians and kings whose reputations were inflated by credulous northerners. The mythology survives in Saxo, but stripped of divinity, which makes his work a useful control. What a Christian Danish cleric was willing to preserve, and how he chose to frame it, shows the tradition under pressure.

The material evidence is older than the texts. Amulets and picture-stones from across the Danish and wider Scandinavian area carry motifs that belong to the end: the bound wolf, Thor fishing for the serpent, the hammer worn as a pendant. These images circulated for centuries before Iceland committed the poems to vellum, and the Rök stone in Sweden shows the same vocabulary of prophesied conflict in a runic inscription of the ninth century.

Denmark's position clarifies where the corpus actually comes from. The Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda are Icelandic manuscripts, and it is easy to read Ragnarök as an Icelandic invention on that basis; the Danish and Swedish evidence establishes that the expectation was general across the North long before it was written down. The sequence itself is set out in Ragnarök, the system in Norse Eschatology, the bound wolf in Fenrir and the runic witness in Rök Runestone (Ög 136). Transmission and belief are separate questions, and Denmark is where the difference shows.