The end of the world, the Vikings sang, would be drenched in the blood of gods and monsters. On that final day, the day of Ragnarök, the legions of evil would launch their final assault on the capricious, petty overlords of Asgard, beyond the Rainbow Bridge, and the carnage that would follow would make the Viking’s own excursions to Cornish monasteries look like a visit from a Hare Krishna lentil merchant.
As the sun and moon are eaten by wolves, and the heavenly Aesir ride forth to die on the plain of Vigrid, the monstrous Fenrir, wolf-son of Loki, runs loose. From the east, the ice-giants of Jotunheim creak closer in ghastly Naglfar, a ship made entirely from the fingernails of dead men, while Garm the hell-hound bays for gore. When the fire-giants appear from Muspelheim in the south, things look distinctly dicey for the rulers of Asgard.
But, as they say in Viking lays, when the going gets tough, the tough go berserk; and soon Thor is laying about him with his sledgehammer (disappointingly named Mjolnir rather than Percy). The Serpent of the Middle Earth, Jörmungandr, tastes the wrath of the war-hammer and is slain, but not before it has tasted the soft bits of Thor: the god takes nine heroic steps, the venom oozing from every pore, and falls down dead. Things go from bad to Wagnerian as Odin is shredded by Fenrir, but the bloody chops are soon smiling out of the other side of the beast’s face — quite literally — as Odin’s son Vidar stands on Fenrir’s jaw, takes a firm hold of the wolf’s snout, and tears him in half down the middle, rendering a PicassoÂesque moment of reflection in an otherwise rowdy scene.
When the dust settles, only a handful of gods and two humans walk out on to the gory plain, having presumably watched enough horror films to know better than to leave the safety of the team bus. The humans, by lucky coincidence a man and woman, are tasked with repopulating the planet, and we leave them there, hard at work, and draw a veil over the inevitable issues of incest and inbreeding that are implied by their urgent union.
It is a grand myth, as Armageddon goes. Which makes it odd that the militant white right, who draw so heavily on Nordic myth in so many other respects, should have cast it aside and come up with their own version of the end of the world. For the Suidlander apocalypse, it emerged last week, involves no wolves and fewer serpents, but rather a nervous wait behind the racks of Drum and Farmer’s Weekly. The bittereinder world ends not with a bang, but in the Heilbron Spar.
It was a small detail, almost trampled out of sight by the paranoia, isolation and nihilistic yearnings on display in all the revelations about the far-right group; but it was a curious one. What, one wondered, was so unusual about the Heilbron Spar that it would offer whites refuge from the avenging black masses, after the Night of the Long Knives? Has the franchisee fashioned some sort of sooty Alamo behind a stack of Charka briquettes? Has he been exploring the explosive properties of peri-peri chorizo sausages laced with Smarties shrapnel? Or are the Suidlanders and their kin simply hoping that the massacre of white South Africa takes place on a weekend, so that they can hide behind the canvas curtains drawn tight over the wine racks, and put their faith in the sobriety of the invading horde?
Of course, one hopes that the fearful volk have taken special care with their spelling: one would hate to see them all rushing down to the Heilbron Spa on that fateful day, and having to defend themselves with emery boards and slices of cucumber. Indeed, those of less combative ilk might even consider the camouflaging possibilities of the spa’s sun-beds, the opportunity to sneak unnoticed out of the melee tempting some of the paler defenders to lie down for half and hour with the dial turned from “Rio” to “Rwanda”.
Not that the beauticians on hand would mind the custom, naturally. If Ragnarök comes to the chosen people, at least they’ll be thoroughly exfoliated before they’re flayed. (“My shattered nerves, luvvy! Have you been walking barefoot over the Drakensberg? Let’s give these toenails a clip, and … okay, going to need the angle-grinder … good. That one’s going straight into the kitty for Naglfar.)
It is easy to mock, but of course those who follow the whims of prophets are no more ridiculous than those who follow the whims of profits. Naturally the upmarket English-speaking verkramptes won’t be welcome at the Spar, but perhaps the Heilbron Queenspark might accommodate their last stand, offering discounts on jumpers for those in need of Kashmir tourniquets.
But wherever the right-wing Götterdämmerung takes place — whether in the Heilbron Ackermans or the fevered racist fantasies of a handful of political dinosaurs — one inescapable fact remains: the world in which these people live has ended long ago. Not with a bang, but with a ballot box.