Fimbulwinter

The Fimbulwinter ("great winter," from Old Norse fimbul, "great" or "mighty") is the opening catastrophe of Ragnarök, the long winter that signals the beginning of the end in Norse mythology. It is described in the Völuspá and elsewhere as the first of the signs, the weather of the end as much as its physics.

The description

Before Ragnarök proper, the world suffers three winters in succession with no summer between them. Snow drives from every direction; frosts are fierce; the winds are cruel. The Völuspá says that during this time "brothers will fight and kill each other, / sisters' sons spoil kinship; / hard it is in the world, / great whoredom, / an axe-age, a sword-age, / shields are cloven, / a wind-age, a wolf-age, / before the world falls." The social and moral order breaks down first: kinship and oath are abandoned, and kin turn on kin.

The end of the seasons

The loss of the summer is the cosmological point. The turning of the year, the most basic rhythm of the inhabited world, fails. With it fails the continuity of human society. The Fimbulwinter is thus both a physical disaster and a moral one: the cold outside mirrors the cold inside. It is the world's withdrawal of its own conditions of life.

Place in the sequence

The Fimbulwinter leads directly into the sharper signs: the sun and moon swallowed by wolves, the earth shaking so that all bonds break and the monsters Fenrir and Jörmungandr are loosed, Heimdall blowing the horn, and finally Surtr's fire. It is the slow beginning of an ending that accelerates into catastrophe. As the first and most "human" of the signs (a winter of strife, not yet of monsters), the Fimbulwinter is where the Norse end-of-the-world story touches ordinary life: the world does not end with a bang visible only to gods, but with the failure of the harvest and the breaking of the family.

The sources give the winter its arithmetic. Völuspá names it simply as a great wolf-time before the world's end; Snorri specifies three winters running with no summer between, and adds the social cascade: brothers will kill brothers for gain, no father spares his son, adultery and slaughter fill the time, "a wind-age, a wolf-age," language that echoes the Voluspá's own stanza on the axe-age, sword-age, wind-age, wolf-age before the world falls.

That stanza's echo of the Old Testament "wolf-age" formula has been argued over since Sophus Bugge: some read Christian influence, others a common Indo-European inheritance, and the dispute has never closed. What both readings accept is the sequence's function within the Norse scheme. Ragnarök needs no preliminary judgment or sign; it needs only weather, and the weather is enough to break the bonds that hold society together before any monster arrives.