All Gods Must Die, Yet Beneath Ice and Fire, Life Is Reborn.
Take Norse mythology—the ancient source of European literature and Western fantasy—as an example to understand fate in art.
Before the Norse faith became a complete system, Christianity had already arrived. Thus, Norse mythology is an unfinished story, yet still deeply rooted in Nordic identity.
The gods personify nature: cold and snow are evil, warmth and light are good. The battles between gods and giants mirror the shifting balance of heat and frost. The death of Baldr means the end of spring; Njord and Skadi’s marriage shows the cycle of summer and winter.
Unlike many myths, Norse mythology ends in destruction—Ragnarök. But this “end” is more a rebirth than extinction. Death becomes creation; the fall of the old gods clears space for new ones. Surtr’s fire burns all things, yet when the earth rises again, the sun still shines. In ruin lies renewal.
From the perspective of psychoanalysis, Odin represents human rationality, while Ragnarök represents the human desire for self-destruction—the death drive. Loki, in this framework, represents meaningless and unconscious enjoyment, the dissatisfaction born from the failure of desire, serving as the disguise of the death drive. In the myth, Odin sacrifices one of his eyes to drink from the Well of Mímir, and after doing so, he foresees the inevitable destruction of the gods. At this moment, Odin understands Ragnarök as a force coming from the outside, a subversion of the symbolic order. Yet in fact, if Norse mythology were to continue from the stories of Víðarr and his descendants, Ragnarök would be revealed as a form of self-renewal—a force that comes from within the subject itself. Without death, there would be no reason for rebirth; death is, in essence, a form of creativity. In the example of Ragnarök, when the old gods and the giants perish, a newly formed world must give rise to new gods and new enemies of the gods, destroying everything of the past to live once again. Many will realize that this is an unavoidable repetition. But death exists precisely to create new things and differences within repetition; history spirals upward—although the mechanism cannot be broken, the content can and will inevitably change. Surtr’s flames destroy all good but also burn away all evil, and when Víðarr returns to the resurfaced land, the sun rises as usual. When we destroy everything, the only thing that remains is the possibility of life.
And Loki is essentially the human impulse to “tempt death.” Humans enjoy doing meaningless things, just as Loki loves mischief. This is the function of the death drive, because death is purposelessness, non-thinking, the cessation of continued symbolization and of alienating the self. But rationality—the consciousness produced to suppress the Real—does not allow this. Therefore, when humans indulge in meaningless enjoyment, they feel anxiety. In Norse mythology, this is reflected in Odin, the representative of the symbolic order, who tries in every possible way to restrain Loki to suppress the death drive, but instead accelerates the arrival of Ragnarök. Repressed drives do not disappear; they accumulate and erupt in more extreme ways. In humans, this manifests as acts like suicide or self-harm. And this meaningless enjoyment paradoxically proves that in the exuberance of human life, the body still possesses surplus energy to enjoy itself—“tempting death” means that humans are in fact very much alive.
Myth itself is constructed upon fantasy—it exists within the Imaginary. Gods are essentially ideal selves that humans fashion in their own image, perfect versions of themselves. One could say that humanity, at this stage, is in the mirror stage. However, unlike the gods in Greek or many other mythologies, Norse gods are not immortal; the Æsir are in fact hybrids of gods and giants and must eat golden apples to prolong their lives. Could this mean that Norse mythology, formed in the ninth century, already recognized that the self is inherently fragmented rather than unified—that the image of the gods is actually the Imaginary’s alienation of self and nature? The self is the Other, and nature does not change simply because the symbolic order attempts to impose alienation upon it.
From the perspective of existentialism, the gods in Norse mythology undergo an existential crisis.
When Loki is a benevolent god, he symbolizes the spirit of life; when he is malevolent, he symbolizes life's temptations. Put simply, he embodies a playful attitude toward existence—the “absurd man” described by Camus. He disguises himself as different people, lives different lives, and performs meaningless pranks and absurd acts, opposing absurdity through a unity of opposites. The gods’ imprisonment of Loki can thus be seen as the premature death of the absurd spirit. Under this interpretation, the unwritten ending of Norse mythology can be seen as optimistic. A world that originally existed as a rigid, undevelopable in-itself being is negated by Ragnarök and becomes a for-itself being full of unfolding possibilities.
Based on the example of Norse mythology above, in general, literary works are born from a moment of inspiration and a spiritual experience of life. What is written is, in all cases, the author’s self, and the eternal struggle of the self and its introspection inevitably lies deeply embedded within the text. Or perhaps, humans enjoy watching countless destinies play out before them while refusing to suffer the pain of destiny; thus they put on the mask of fate, become fate itself, and manipulate and accept the poetry within it.
