Surtr and the Fire of Muspelheim

Of all the figures in the Norse apocalypse, Surtr is the one the Eddas describe least and fear most. He is the fire giant of Muspelheim, the southern realm of fire that existed before the world did — the same realm whose sparks, flung across the void, became the stars. He does not appear in the myths as a character with adventures. He waits. At Ragnarök he comes from the south with his sword, "brighter than the sun," and the Völuspá says simply: the sun turns black, the earth sinks into the sea, the bright stars fall from the sky, "and fire surges over the earth, / and the flame leaps against the very heaven."

Snorri adds the terrible economy of the thing: the fire giant fights Freyr, who has given away his magic sword for the love of the giantess Gerðr, and kills him. The god of the harvest, unarmed, dies first. Then Surtr's fire does the rest — the world's cremation, after which nothing is left but water and the possibility of green.

Fire is the Norse end's signature. The culture that told these stories lived on an island of volcanoes, in houses of timber and turf, and its own geography rehearsed the apocalypse: the country is geologically built by fire, and the glaciers and the volcanoes are the same landscape's two moods. Surtr is that geology given a face. He is also, the sources hint, older than the gods he ends. In the creation account, the first living being is the giant Ymir, born of the meeting of Muspelheim's fire and Niflheim's ice. Surtr is fire before creation, and at the end he reclaims his element. The world was made from fire and ice; it ends with fire and ice; and the green world that follows is the gift of what burned.

The motif of the fire that purifies rather than merely destroys runs through the whole archive: Zoroastrianism's molten river, the Stoics' ekpyrosis, the Book of Revelation's lake of fire. Surtr's fire is different. It is not a judgment and it does not discriminate. It is simply what fire does when it is let out, and the world, in the Norse telling, accepts it the way a tree accepts autumn.