The Twilight Of The Gods

 

Other reading: Wagner's The Ring Of The Nibelung: The Twilight Of The Gods, graphic adaptation by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. 

This is relevant to Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

The Wagnerian Gotterdammerung is different from the Eddaic Ragnarok. We are used to the difference between the book and the film. This is the difference between the myth and the opera. 

Is there a Ragnarok equivalent in Poul Anderson's works? There is the end of the universe in Tau Zero. In the Eddas, the Ragnarok is an event not that has happened but that is foretold. It has still to happen, like the Apocalypse. In Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series, the Fall of the Terran Empire and the subsequent Long Night have this apocalyptic status, especially when Flandry imagines roaring bombs, howling barbarians, smashed buildings, burning books, dead men, tattered uniforms and the departure of beauty and gallantry from the universe.

For Flandry, all of this remains in the future. We see the aftermath. He does not.