Norway

Ragnarök is usually read as Icelandic because the manuscripts are, but the material is North Germanic and Norway is one of its native grounds. The poems were composed and performed across the Scandinavian world before any of them was written down, and the expectation they carry, a fated losing battle followed by a green and repopulated earth, belongs to the whole region rather than to one island.

The stones are the evidence that survives the gap before the vellum. The Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, carved in a Norse-settled part of northern England, shows the bound Fenrir and the spear of the hunting god in a single scene that matches the written sequence closely, and related carvings run from the Isle of Man to Uppland. These were made by people who knew the story without needing a book, which is the point: the imagery was current matter across the Norse lands, not a literary Icelandic invention.

Snorri composed the Prose Edda in Norway and addressed it to an Icelandic audience, which means the standard prose account of the end was written on Norwegian soil. The sequence is set out in Ragnarök and the system in Norse Eschatology, the wolf in Fenrir, and the carved witness in Norse Eschatology. Norway preserves the material in stone and, later, in the Icelandic manuscripts. Norway's contribution is therefore mainly evidentiary: it is the country whose landscape and emigration carried the tradition from oral performance to stone to manuscript, so that the end of the gods can be shown to have been shared rather than inherited from a single source.