Ragnarök

A Victorian epic of the northern apocalypse — Ymir unmade into earth, the gods still unburdened, blood as a gift that can be spilt — written by the century's public poet in a private hand.

LaMotte’s epic is a woman who must not be looked at. Ash’s is a world that will not survive being looked at too long.

Byatt did not sketch a famous Victorian and move on. She sat down in his metres and wrote the twilight of the gods as a man of that century would have written it: the three Áses walking out from Ida, Ymir dismembered into soil and sea, blood given as a human warmth and warned against as mortal ruin. The scholars in the novel have spent careers on Ash’s public voice. The letters show another one. The poem has to be there, or Roland has found nothing but a plot.

Shade’s Pale Fire is printed in full and then kidnapped. Ash’s Ragnarök is printed in pieces and left with its author. That is a kindness Byatt extends to a man she invented, and a difficulty she extends to us. Enough of the poem survives on the page to know the voice. Not enough to take a bound Victorian volume off a shelf. The volume is Possession, which is the usual joke of this library, told this time as a romance.

On the readability rating. Long extracts, in Ash’s voice, which is Byatt’s. No separate edition. The 2011 Ragnarok is hers, and is not this poem.

In-world history

Randolph Henry Ash, laureate-adjacent, Browning's cousin in the catalogue of ventriloquists, publishes the poem in his lifetime. A century later Roland Michell finds draft letters in an old book and the quiet life comes apart. Maud Bailey has LaMotte; Roland has Ash; the letters between the poets are the plot; the poems are the proof that the letters were not a novelist's coincidence. Byatt returned to the myth under her own name in 2011. The earlier Ragnarök remains Ash's.

Why it matters

LaMotte has the Melusine. Ash has this. Byatt wrote both because *Possession* is a novel about people who make things, and a romance between scholars is a bluff if the evidence is only described.

Appearances

Possession: A Romance (1990) — A. S. Byatt Ash's long poem on the twilight of the northern gods, printed in substantial passages among the novel's invented documents

Connected volumes

Related to The Fairy Melusine · Possession
Related to Pale Fire · Pale Fire
Related to The Hyperion Cantos · Hyperion

Also from this world

The Fairy Melusine · Narrative poem

Catalogue record

Category: Narrative poem
World: Possession
Imagined by: A. S. Byatt
Language: English
First appearance: Possession (Chatto & Windus, 1990)
Readability: Extensive excerpts