The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [473]
How the story eventually ends is only known from a wise old woman who can see the future. She tells Odin that there will be three years of perpetual cold and darkness, the Fimbull Winter. Then the Last Great Battle will begin, when Loki and his three monsters break their bonds, joining the Giants and all the dark forces of the earth in unleashing a fearful assault on Asgard. Looking down on this twilight of the gods will be Surtur who, like his Roman equivalent Saturn, presides over endings and beginnings. After a mighty struggle, Thor and the great Midgard Serpent will kill each other; Odin will be eaten by the ravening Fenris Wolf, now grown to enormous size, although it in turn will then be slain by Odin's son Vidar. Loki will engage in mortal combat with another of the Aesir, Heimdall the Watchman, ending in both their deaths. Surtur will then spread fire over all the earth, and everything living will perish.
At this point, says the prophetess, `darkness descends and I can see no more'. But then Odin himself has a vision. First he sees the earth covered with a great waste of storm-tossed waters. Then, rising out of the sea, he sees a new earth, covered in forests, meadows and rivers. There standing in the sunshine are his two older sons, together with the sons of Thor, and they are joined by Baldur, returned from Helheim. Down in Midgard, it seems that two members of the human race, hiding away in a dark cave, have also escaped Surtur's holocaust, and they too emerge to begin repopulating the earth. Soon new halls are rising in Asgard, children are playing and Odin weeps for joy. At last he knows the meaning of the mysterious word he had whispered into Baldur's ear as his dead son lay on his funeral ship. The word had been `rebirth'.
What makes the role played by Loki in this sequence of stories so significant is precisely his remarkable ambivalence. He is endlessly inventive, yet strangely amoral. Directly or indirectly he provides the gods with immense benefits. He brings them great riches, security, peace and prosperity, an array of fearsome weapons, magical new modes of transport. But always there is that shadowy underside to his feats of ingenuity, that hidden price to be paid, and nothing more so than the dreadful monsters he brings to birth which, although for a long time they can be kept out of sight and under control, are eventually destined to play a crucial part in destroying the world.
The function of Loki, who like Prometheus was associated with fire, is to personify ego-consciousness'; that inventive capacity of the human brain which, never more than in the past two centuries, has given Homo sapiens astonishing prosperity and the power to transform the earth to his own material advantage on an unprecedented scale. Yet for every new advance made possible by the onward march of one-sided human consciousness there has been a price to be paid: not least, of course, that it has brought that unprecedented command over the forces of nature which has the potential to destroy the earth and all the life it contains a thousand times over.
It is in this respect that the character of Loki provides an appropriate introduction to this final chapter, as we look at what the storytelling of the past 200 years reveals of the lengthening shadow cast by mankind's triumphantly evolving consciousness.
The nineteenth-century watershed: Imagination and fantasy
In Part Three we saw how, in the decades around 1800, a remarkable change began to come over Western storytelling. Up to that time the vast majority of stories imagined by mankind had reflected an instinctive harmony with the values of the Self. But now something unprecedented happened. In many instances, the archetypal patterns underlying stories began