“The myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed” : reading A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarök: The End of the Gods and Klas Östergren’s The Hurricane Party

• Autor(a) principal: Cheira, Alexandra
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/29017
• topic: Byatt, Antonia Susan, 1936-..... Ragnarök: The End of the Gods; Canongate Myth Series; Östergren, Klas; Mitologia nórdica

A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarök: The End of the Gods and Klas Östergren’s The Hurricane Party, both published by Canongate Myth Series, reimagine the Norse myth of Ragnarök in quite distinctive ways. Whereas Byatt chooses to merge a quite rare autobiographical account of her reading experience of the Norse myth as a child during World War II with its retelling in a new context, Östergren combines a futuristic dystopian tale and a modern retelling of the Lokasenna, one of the poems of the Poetic Edda which presents an exchange of insults between the Norse gods and Loki. Hence, this paper argues that Byatt’s Ragnarök and Östergren’s The Hurricane Party are both a cautionary tale and a thoughtful gaze through the looking glass at the tradition of storytelling against death in their modern reimagining of the Norse myth of Ragnarök.