Most mythologies promise their gods a victory. This one does not, which is the strangest and most interesting thing about it.
The gods know how the story ends. At Ragnarök they will go out against a foe they cannot beat, and they will fall, and they go out anyway.
Two things before I take anything from it.
The first: our fullest account comes from Snorri Sturluson, a Christian writing in thirteenth-century Iceland, and scholars have long argued that his version may be shaped by Christian apocalyptic material. How much of the doomed-gods picture is pre-Christian and how much is Snorri organizing fragments is genuinely unsettled.
The second matters more for what people do with this myth. The Völuspá does not end at the destruction. A new world rises, the surviving gods return, and there is a passage about fields growing unsown. The heroic-pessimist reading — doom, and nothing after — is a selection from the text, and it is the selection most modern users make, mine included until I read further.
So what I am working with is a narrower thing than the myth: the image of going out fully into something you will not win.
The practical question is whether a person can give everything to something they expect to lose. Most people discover they cannot, in the moment, and that discovering it is unpleasant.
What happens instead is subtler than quitting. The prospect of losing arrives, and effort quietly reduces, and the reduction gets justified afterward by the loss — which makes the whole thing unfalsifiable and comfortable. Nobody experiences this as giving up.
The motivational research offers a partial account: effort anchored to the doing rather than to the outcome is more robust when the outcome looks bad.4 That is a reasonable finding and a modest one, largely from self-determination work, largely self-report.
There is also a literature on disengaging from unreachable goals, which finds that letting go of what cannot be attained is associated with better outcomes than persisting.7 I find that more interesting than the first, because it is the direct counter-argument to this essay, and it is not obviously wrong.
The question you ask determines what is available to you.
A philosophy that admires magnificent doomed effort has an obvious problem: most doomed efforts should be abandoned.
The goal-disengagement research points the other way from this essay, and it is decent research. People who can let go of unattainable goals do better on a range of measures than people who persist. Sunk cost, escalation of commitment, and the inability to quit a bad project are among the best-documented failures in decision-making. Against all that, “go out magnificently” is advice with a body count.
The distinction I would draw is between a contest and a project. A contest has a fixed end — the race finishes, the match ends, the thing is over by Thursday — and inside it, reducing effort because you expect to lose costs you information about yourself and buys nothing. A project has no natural end, and persisting in one that cannot work is the error the research describes.
The myth is about a battle, which is a contest. Applying it to your career, your business, or a relationship is applying it to a project, and there the disengagement literature is the better guide.
Note — contests and projects
The goal-disengagement research points the opposite way from this essay and is decent research. The distinction that survives it: inside a contest with a fixed end, reducing effort because you expect to lose buys nothing. Applied to an open-ended project, this is the error that literature describes.
The whole move is replacing a question you cannot answer with one you can.
These essays draw on Old Norse and Old English literature — the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf — all of which were written down in Christian societies long after the pagan world they describe. Eddic and saga passages follow the translations named below; where a term or picture is contested, the essay says so rather than the list. Modern research is cited by author and publication.
Inside a contest you expect to lose, effort tends to reduce quietly and get justified by the result afterward — which is comfortable, unfalsifiable, and costs you the only thing a lost contest can give you.
But most doomed efforts should be abandoned, and the research says so. The myth is about a battle. Applied to an open-ended project it is the escalation error with better scenery.