Byatt's Ragnarök: re-purposing mythology.
After reading trendy Eggers' underwhelming recent essay on the D'Aulaires' childhood classic Norse Gods & Giants (which one already knows is wondrous all-ages magic without his stamp of uninsightful approval), running across celebrated A.S. Byatt doing her take on Norse lore was an offering Nine Worlds better. Known for one of the most refined epistolary novels, the Booker Prize winning Possession (1990), which will rip your heart out and make it pump tears of saddest sad sadness, one can only imagine the Wagnerian angst & pathos such a talent could lend to the verses of the Gods. Yet the tender Possession and the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson's mythopoeic collection are also worlds away from each other, and the gap shows at times. [Friedrich Wilhelm Heine's "Kampf der untergehenden Götter" (1882).] In Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), Byatt brings her own modern insights into the built-in eschatology of...