Germany
The twilight of the gods, reforged as national myth.
The German-speaking lands produced no indigenous apocalypse but became a workshop for other peoples'. The Norse Ragnarök reached them already reworked by Christian scribes, and in the nineteenth century Wagner rebuilt it as a national myth: the Völuspá's battle report, which refuses a verdict, became Götterdämmerung, an immolation of the gods so that a free world can begin.
Beneath the opera lies a separate medieval German layer. The Kyffhäuser legend holds that Friedrich Barbarossa sleeps in a mountain, his beard grown through the stone, and will return to restore the empire, a vernacular form of the worldwide Last Emperor motif. Hildegard of Bingen, cast by later printers as the "Sibyl of the Rhine," dictated apocalyptic visions of a corrupted church. Both feed the same current the comparative essays trace: an imported end-of-the-world story, absorbed and repurposed to the shape of the society that receives it.
The tradition is examined in German Eschatology (Götterdämmerung), set beside Norse Eschatology from which it borrows, and Christian Eschatology which supplied its imperial prophecy.
See also
- German Eschatology (Götterdämmerung)A 19th-century operatic reframing of Norse Ragnarök laid over a medieval German
- Norse EschatologyThe Germanic and Scandinavian worldview of a cosmos fated to die in fire and flo
- RagnarökIn Norse myth the gods fall in a final battle against the giants and monsters, t
- Christian EschatologyThe teaching that history moves toward the return of Christ, a resurrection of t
Further reading
- Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Götterdämmerung), 1876 · Schott, complete edition