Comets, Eclipses, and Ragnarök: an astronomical interpretation of pre-Christian Norse eschatology

Abstract

 This work has as main goal to try to explain the eschatological outbreak that occurred during the tenth-century in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, with themes that gave rise to a great iconography of Ragnarök, stemmed primarily from the pre-Christian Norse mythology. Our basic hypothesis is that many astronomical phenomena occurred during the VIII and IX centuries (total eclipses of the sun and passages of comets, both related to the constellation of Wolf jaw - the Hyades) which aroused the Nordic man his eschatological fears, yielding the large amount images next year AD 1000. Our main methodology is the Cultural Astronomy, coupled with the prospects of the cultural history of myths.