Surtr

Surtr is the fire-giant of Norse myth, and his significance is eschatological: he is the appointed destroyer of the world at Ragnarok. He stands guard at the border of Muspelheim, the primordial realm of flame in the far south, one of the two elemental worlds, fire and ice, whose meeting the Eddas make the origin of creation itself, wielding a sword that blazes brighter than the sun. He is among the oldest beings in the cosmos, present before the gods, and he is destined to outlast them.

At the end of the world, the sources foretell, Surtr will ride out from the south at the head of the sons of Muspell; the rainbow bridge Bifrost will break beneath them; he will meet and kill the god Freyr in the final battle; and then he will fling fire across the whole of creation, and the nine worlds will burn. Yet the Norse conception of the end is not simple annihilation: from the ashes a renewed earth is said to rise. Surtr thus frames the Norse cosmos at both ends, the fire present at its kindling and the fire that consumes it, the destined agent of a destruction that is also, in the myth's cyclical vision, a clearing for what comes after.

Surtr appears in only a handful of genuinely old sources, chiefly a few stanzas of the Poetic Edda poem Voluspa, which describes him coming from the south with fire at the world's end. The fuller, more narratively complete account most people know, Surtr's home in Muspelheim, his role leading the fire giants against the gods, and his final duel with Freyr, comes from Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written in the thirteenth century, roughly two hundred years after Iceland's conversion to Christianity and by an author working from a Christian literary and educational background even as he preserved older pagan material.

Scholars of Old Norse religion generally treat Snorri as a genuinely valuable source, since he clearly drew on earlier poetry now otherwise lost, but also as a systematizer who imposed more narrative order and coherence on scattered, sometimes contradictory eddic references than pre-Christian oral tradition necessarily had on its own. Some researchers have also asked how much the overall shape of Ragnarok, a final cosmic battle followed by a cleansing destruction and a renewed world, may owe something to the Christian apocalyptic framework current in Snorri's own time, a question that remains open rather than settled, since the pre-Christian oral material behind his account cannot be recovered independently to check against it.