He stood at the beginning and he stands at the end: Surtur, the fire giant, has guarded the border of the burning world Muspelheim since the beginning of the world – and when the time is ripe, he sets out with the flaming sword to turn everything to ash. Scarcely a figure of the North is so mighty and so sparing of words.
Surtur (Old Norse Surtr, „the Black One“) is no ordinary giant but a primal power. His name means the soot-blackened, the burnt. He belongs to the fiery world of Muspelheim, which already at the creation stood opposite icy Niflheim. From the meeting of Surtur’s fire and the ice, life once arose – the same fire will consume it again at the end.
Surtur wields a sword that shines brighter than the sun. With it he guards the border of Muspelheim. As long as the world endures, he remains there – a charged, waiting threat at the edge of creation. The Völuspá names him long before the end, as if his coming were certain from the very beginning.
„Surtur fares from the south
with the branch of ruin,
there shines from his sword
the sun of the gods.“
— Völuspá, st. 52 (after Henry Adams Bellows, 1923, public domain)
At Ragnarök Surtur breaks forth with the sons of Muspel. Beneath their hooves the rainbow bridge Bifröst shatters. On the battlefield Vigrid, Surtur meets the fertility god Freyr – and Freyr falls, for he had once given away his best sword out of love. At the last, Surtur hurls fire over the whole world: the nine worlds burn, and the sea swallows the scorched earth.
Ragnarök · What comes after? · Freyr · Ginnungagap & Muspelheim · The nine worlds.
Poetic Edda: Völuspá (st. 52), Vafthrúdnismál. Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (Gylfaginning: Muspelheim, Surtur, Ragnarök), c. 1220. English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).