A teenager moves to a Norwegian factory town, develops powers he does not understand and discovers that the richest family in town are giants who are poisoning the fjord. That is the opening of the Netflix series Ragnarok, which ran in three seasons from 2020 to 2023. It borrows names, characters and motifs from Norse mythology and turns them into a coming-of-age drama about environmental damage. This article checks what actually comes from the Eddas, what the show deliberately twists and what it invents outright. Be warned: it gives away the ending of all three seasons.
Ragnarok is a Norwegian-language fantasy series commissioned by Netflix. It was created by the Dane Adam Price, best known before this for the political drama Borgen, and produced by the Danish company SAM Productions. The Norwegian newspaper VG noted in its review that hardly anyone speaks the West Norwegian dialect you would expect in that region.
Season 1 was released on 31 January 2020, season 2 on 27 May 2021 and season 3 on 24 August 2023. Each season has six episodes, eighteen in all, and the third was announced in November 2021 as the last. David Stakston plays Magne Seier, and Jonas Strand Gravli plays his younger half-brother Laurits. Filming took place mainly in Odda in the Hardanger region of Western Norway; according to the regional film commission, the Folgefonna glacier and the wider Hardangerfjord area were also used.
In the show the town is called Edda. The name sounds almost like Odda, and it is also the title of the two medieval books that preserve most of what we know about Norse myth: the poetry collection in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript from around 1270, and the handbook for poets that Snorri Sturluson wrote around 1220. More on that in the article on the Edda.
A quick plot outline. In season 1 Magne moves to Edda with his mother and Laurits, gains unexpected powers after an old woman touches him and uncovers that the local company, Jutul Industries, is dumping toxic waste. In season 2 the reborn gods gather and forge the hammer. Season 3 builds towards the final battle, which turns out very differently from what viewers expected.
The location suits the theme. Odda is an old industrial town at the head of the Sørfjord. From 1908 calcium carbide was produced there using hydropower; the plant later ran as Odda Smelteverk and made, among other things, calcium cyanamide, a fertiliser, until 2002. The plant went bankrupt in 2003, according to Store norske leksikon. A factory, a fjord and a glacier within sight supply the environmental storyline almost by themselves.
The villains' surname is well chosen too. Jutul is a Norwegian word for a giant found in folklore and place names, going back to Old Norse jǫtunn, plural jǫtnar, usually anglicised as jötnar. The giants of myth form a world of their own, often called Jötunheim, and they face the gods as an older, wilder power; according to Snorri, the gods built the world from the body of the primeval giant Ymir. The show translates this opposition into money and influence. In the Eddas, however, the giants are neither polluters nor simply evil. Odin's mother is a giant's daughter, and Thor has a son by a giantess. That is where the show's strangest naming joke lies.
The hero is called Magne, the Norwegian form of the Old Norse name Magni. In the sources, though, Magni is not Thor but Thor's son. The article on Magni and Modi lists every passage. The most important is in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, his treatise on poetic language. Thor has killed the stone giant Hrungnir but lies pinned under the giant's leg, and none of the gods can free him. Then Magni arrives, only three nights old, lifts the leg away and remarks that he would have finished the giant off with his fist had he come sooner. His mother, according to Snorri, is the giantess Járnsaxa.
The second key passage concerns the end of the world. According to the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál, Magni and his brother Móði survive the fall of the gods and receive their father's hammer. So the show gives its hero the name of the heir, not of the god. I know of no statement by the makers explaining this choice.
It gets stranger with Saxa. German Wikipedia identifies the Jutul daughter as a counterpart of Járnsaxa, of all people Magni's mother. In the show Magne and Saxa have an affair at the end of season 2, and season 3 features a love triangle between Saxa, Magne and his girlfriend Signy. Thor's union with a giantess, from which Magni is born, is thus transferred to a teenage romance. Magne's surname is telling as well: seier is Norwegian for "victory".
Some of the giant family's names come from the Eddas, but they are turned on their heads. Vidar is the clearest case. In the sources Víðarr is not a giant but a god, son of Odin and the giantess Gríðr, whom Snorri calls the "silent god". At the end of the world he avenges his father by tearing apart the jaws of the wolf Fenrir, and he is among the survivors; see Vidar and Vali. In the show he is the giants' patriarch and company boss and dies at Magne's hand in season 2.
Ran is Vidar's wife in the series and also the school's headteacher. In the sources Rán is a sea figure, the wife of Ægir, who catches the drowned in her net. Since some texts count Ægir among the giants, a giantess Ran is not entirely off the mark. Rán has no role of her own at Ragnarök in the sources, and the series Ran killing with a bow is an invention.
For the son, Fjor, I know of no clear model in the sources; reading meaning into echoes of words would be speculation. The show makes him the torn heir, caught between his love for his classmate Gry and his family.
Laurits is perhaps the show's most successful adaptation. He is Magne's half-brother, and his biological father is Vidar, the giant patriarch. He belongs to both camps and fully to neither. In season 3 he first helps the giants get hold of the hammer and then helps the gods take it back.
In outline that fits Loki. According to Snorri, Loki's father Fárbauti is a giant, yet Loki lives among the gods and, according to the Eddic poem Lokasenna, is Odin's blood brother. At the end of the world he stands with the gods' enemies. Laurits lacks the cruelty of the mythical Loki, who engineers Baldr's death and is bound for it (see Loki's punishment).
One detail looks at first like pure invention: Laurits, in a sense, brings a monster into the world. The sources do in fact know a Loki who gives birth. According to Snorri he becomes pregnant in the shape of a mare and bears Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir. In the Eddic poem Hyndluljóð he eats a woman's half-burnt heart, becomes pregnant and fathers every ogress on earth. Jörmungandr, however, is not one of these births.
In Snorri's Gylfaginning, Loki has three children with the giantess Angrboða: the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Jörmungandr and Hel, mistress of the realm of the dead. Odin throws the serpent into the sea, where it grows so large that it encircles the whole inhabited world and bites its own tail. Hence its other name, the Midgard Serpent. More in the article on Jörmungandr.
The show makes something of its own from this. In season 2 doctors remove a gigantic tapeworm from Laurits. He keeps the creature like a pet and releases it into the fjord at the end of the season; in season 3 it is called "Little O" and has grown considerably. The principle even matches Snorri, a small creature growing into a monster in the water; only there it is Odin, not its father, who puts it in the sea.
A second motif is taken over quite closely. In season 3 Magne says he hauled a "big fish" ashore and then lost it; the hammer vanishes into the deep fjord until the serpent coughs it back up. This recalls Thor's fishing trip. In the Eddic poem Hymiskviða and in Snorri, Thor rows out to sea with the giant Hymir, baits his line with an ox head and hauls the Midgard Serpent to the surface; in Snorri the terrified giant cuts the line before Thor can strike. The scene appears on Viking Age picture stones such as the Altuna stone in Sweden. At Ragnarök, Thor and the serpent finally kill each other.
Anyone who knows the Eddas will miss the wolf. Fenrir is the second child of Loki and Angrboða and at least as important to the end of the world as the serpent. The gods raise him and bind him with a magic fetter, and Týr loses his hand in the process. At Ragnarök Fenrir breaks free and swallows Odin. Only Vidar kills him.
In the synopses, reviews and encyclopaedia entries I was able to check, Fenrir does not appear as a character; MovieWeb pointed this out explicitly after season 2. A brief visual allusion cannot be ruled out. As a figure in the plot, the wolf plays no part, and with him goes Vidar's mythical task.
The show takes its time with the hammer. In season 1 Magne angrily hurls his late father's sledgehammer into a storm; it lands far away and smashes, of all things, the windscreen of Vidar's car. Only in season 2 do the gods forge Mjölnir, at night, in the eternal fire in the basement of Jutul Industries. According to one episode review, the finished hammer has only a short stump for a handle.
That short handle is the detail that fits the sources most closely. According to Snorri, two dwarf brothers make the hammer: Brokkr and the smith who is called Sindri in many editions and Eitri in the standard modern edition. Loki has bet his head that they cannot make better treasures than other dwarfs, and he disrupts the work in the shape of a fly. He stings Brokkr on the eyelid, the bellows pause, and the handle comes out too short. The whole story is in the article on Sindri and Brokkr.
The theft of the hammer has a model as well. In season 3 the Jutuls get hold of Mjölnir. In the Eddic poem Þrymskviða the giant Þrymr steals the hammer and will only return it in exchange for the goddess Freyja as his bride. Thor retrieves it disguised as the bride. The show tells a quite different story, but the basic motif, giants stealing the hammer and the gods being helpless without it, is old. More about the hammer and Viking Age amulets under Thor's hammer.
Odin is called Wotan Wagner in the series. "Wotan" is the German form of the name, made famous above all by Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, whose final part is called Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The reference is obvious, though I know of no comment from the makers. Ragna rǫk actually means "fate of the powers".
Old Wenche, who awakens Magne's powers, corresponds to a völva, a seeress; fittingly, since the Völuspá itself is the speech of a seeress. Iman Reza is Freyja, the mechanic Harry is Týr. In season 3 Jens joins as Baldr and Kiwi as Heimdall.
In the Eddas Baldr is protected against almost everything. Loki finds out that only the mistletoe has sworn no oath and puts it into the hand of the blind god Höðr, who throws it at Baldr. In the series Jens is hit at the graduation party by an arrow shot by a child referred to as Hod. Loki as the schemer is missing; instead of a murder, an accident stands at the beginning of the end.
For the end of the world there are essentially three texts; there is more detail under Ragnarök. The Völuspá, the "Prophecy of the Seeress", survives in the Codex Regius and in a manuscript from the early fourteenth century; its date of composition is disputed, with around the year 1000 often suggested. Vafþrúðnismál, a wisdom contest between Odin and a giant, names the survivors. Around 1220 Snorri combines both into one narrative in his Gylfaginning and adds material of his own.
The Völuspá opens the end with a collapse of order among humans. Stanza 45 says Bræðr munu berjask ok at bönum verðask: brothers will fight and become each other's killers. That suits a series about two half-brothers on opposite sides. Odin goes out against the wolf and falls; his son Víðarr avenges him. Thor fights the serpent and kills it. Stanza 56 then says gengr fet níu Fjörgynjar burr: the son of Fjörgyn, that is Thor, walks nine steps before he dies of the serpent's venom. Freyr falls against the fire giant Surtr, who then sets the world ablaze. In stanza 57 the earth sinks into the sea and the stars fall from the sky.
Snorri adds that Týr and the hound Garmr kill each other, as do Heimdall and Loki, and that a threefold winter without summer comes first, the Fimbulwinter. Neither main source ends in nothingness. A new earth rises green from the sea and some gods survive (see After Ragnarök). For the series, the stanza about Thor's sons matters most. In Henry Adams Bellows' translation of 1923 it reads:
In the gods' home Vithar | and Vali shall dwell,
When the fires of Surt have sunk;
Mothi and Magni | shall Mjollnir have
When Vingnir falls in fight.Vafþrúðnismál, stanza 51, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (The Poetic Edda, 1923); wording read through a retrieval tool on voluspa.org; Old Norse: Víðarr ok Váli byggja vé goða, þá er sloknar Surta logi, Móði ok Magni skulu Mjöllni hafa Vingnis at vígþroti
Who Vingnir is remains disputed. He is often taken to be a byname of Thor, in which case the line refers to Thor's death in the final battle. For the series this means that a Magni carrying Mjölnir belongs, in the sources, to the time after Thor, not in his place.
At first, season 3 withholds the big battle. Gods and giants face each other at a harbour, Magne throws away the hammer and asks everyone to lay down their weapons. The giants accept a peace, Fjor steps down, and Saxa becomes head of Jutul Industries and meets environmental activists. In the Völuspá, by contrast, the end is fated and not even Odin can prevent it.
The last episode, titled "Ragnarok", delivers the battle after all. At the graduation party Jens is hit by an arrow, and only Magne seems to notice. A battle follows, intercut with images from a Thor comic Magne has drawn. Thor kills the serpent, is bitten, walks nine steps and dies; in reality Magne kneels in front of Signy at this moment. The nine steps are one of the few places where the show takes a source literally.
Then comes the twist that annoyed many viewers. Magne's mother explains that he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after his father's death. The battle was in his imagination. According to Looper, director Mogens Hagedorn said the fantasy recasts real events as Norse myth. How far that applies to the whole series is left open; Looper points to earlier scenes that are hard to explain as imagination, such as the one in which Vidar eats a reindeer's heart.
In the final scene Magne toasts the graduation with Signy, Laurits and the others, and only he sees the dead Isolde sitting at the table. Reviews were divided: The Review Geek found the last two episodes deeply disappointing, Leisurebyte called it a worthy ending. In the end the show treats the myths as one person's story about his own life, not as world history.
The show's biggest intervention is its reading of the end of the world. In Ragnarok, doom threatens because humans and giants destroy nature. Isolde monitors a shrinking glacier, heavy metals such as cadmium turn up in the water, and Laurits says in a speech, in effect, that the rich will suffer least from climate change. Wired accordingly described the series as climate fiction.
The sources know nothing of this. In the Völuspá the end does not come because someone exploits nature but because order breaks down, oaths are broken and fate has decreed it. The Völuspá is certainly moral: it names oath-breakers and murderers who must wade through a river. But the giants there are not culprits in the sense of guilt; they are the forces of chaos waiting at the edge of the world. The Fimbulwinter is an omen, not man-made damage.
Still, the transfer is not arbitrary. The myths tell of a world built from a slain giant that must defend its order against cold, fire and sea. They offer strong images for melting glaciers and poisoned fjords. The images are old; the interpretation is new. And while the show lets its heroes negotiate peace, in the sources the end cannot be averted.
How many seasons does Ragnarok have on Netflix? Three, each with six episodes, released in 2020, 2021 and 2023. Netflix announced the third season as the last; I am not aware of any plans for a continuation.
Where was Ragnarok filmed? Mainly in Odda in the Hardanger region of Western Norway, including the nearby Folgefonna glacier. The fictional town of Edda is modelled on Odda.
Is Magne Thor in Norse mythology? No. Magne is the Norwegian form of Magni, and in the sources Magni is Thor's son. According to Vafþrúðnismál he survives the end of the world and inherits the hammer.
Does Fenrir appear in the series? Not as a character, as far as I was able to check. That also removes Vidar's mythical task of killing the wolf.
Is the series a good introduction to Norse mythology? It sparks curiosity and adopts a few motifs aptly, such as Thor's nine steps. It is no guide to what the myths say, because it deliberately reassigns names and roles. For the sources, start with the Völuspá and Snorri's Gylfaginning.
On the characters and motifs of the series: Ragnarök – the fall of the gods, After Ragnarök, Thor, Magni and Modi, Loki, Jörmungandr, Sindri and Brokkr and Thor's hammer. More fact checks: Marvel's Thor fact-checked and Viking films.
Ragnarök · Thor · Magni & Modi – Thor's sons · Marvel's Thor fact-check · Viking films and series.
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