How a thing finishes weighs more than it should in how the whole is remembered. The last essay, on endings — and on the problem this whole ring has been carrying.
The literature is preoccupied with how people finish. A good end — met on your feet, without complaint, with whatever you had left spent — is treated as retroactively completing a life, and a bad one as staining it.
There is a psychological finding adjacent to this. The peak-end pattern describes how people evaluate an experience disproportionately by its most intense moment and its ending, rather than by its duration or its average.4
That effect is real and it is narrower than its popular use. It was established mostly in short laboratory experiences — cold water, mild discomfort, medical procedures — and extending it to how a person evaluates a career or a life is a considerable reach that the original work does not license. Endings are salient in memory. Whether they determine the meaning of decades is another question.
What I take is the modest version: endings get disproportionate weight, they are often handled badly for that reason, and they are one of the few parts of a thing that can be deliberately arranged.
The practical observation is that most endings are not met. They are drifted out of — the last session that nobody marked as the last, the friendship that thinned rather than closed, the role left without anything being said.
That is not a moral failure. It is that endings are uncomfortable and there is always a reason to defer the acknowledgment.
What the literature supplies is a simple corrective: notice that this is the last one, and be present for it. Not ceremony, necessarily. Attention.
I have referred to this several times and it needs more than a reference.
Norse and Germanic heroic material is heavily used in the iconography of white-nationalist and neo-Nazi movements. The runes, the valknut, the Norse gods, the warrior ideal, the imagined north — all of it is in active use as identity symbolism by people organizing around race. This is not a historical curiosity about the 1930s; it is present and active. Far-right appropriation is an important and unavoidable modern context for this material — which is not the same as the only one. The same symbols are in ordinary use by practising heathens, by scholars, by Icelanders, and across a good deal of mainstream culture, and the Anti-Defamation League makes exactly that point when listing them: widely used in non-racist contexts, and also appropriated.
That creates a real problem for a series like this one. It is not that writing about the sagas is forbidden — that would be an absurd conclusion, and it would hand a literature to the people least entitled to it. It is that writing admiringly about heroic northern virtue, without acknowledging where that admiration currently lives, produces something adjacent to a body of material I want nothing to do with.
So, to be explicit. There is no ethnic content in anything I have drawn from these texts. The medieval north was not racially homogeneous, its literature is full of foreigners, converts and outsiders, and the idea of a pure Germanic inheritance is a nineteenth-century invention with a twentieth-century use. Icelandic scholars and Norse-practicing heathen groups have spent decades objecting to the appropriation of this material, and their objection is the right one.
And the other half of the honest account: this was a slave-holding society funded substantially by raiding, whose honour system was a membership rule for men of standing, and whose most celebrated deeds are killings. I have said that in the individual essays rather than saving it for here, but it belongs in the summary too.
What I have taken is a set of postures toward difficulty — meeting what is coming, going forward afraid, holding for the person beside you, spending yourself in a contest you will lose, finishing properly. Those are portable and they are not the tradition. The tradition is a literature about a violent, hierarchical world, written down by Christians looking back at it, and now contested ground.
Note — the appropriation, stated plainly
Present and active rather than a historical curiosity — and not the only context, since the same material is in ordinary use by practising heathens, scholars and a great deal of mainstream culture. There is no ethnic content in anything drawn from these texts; the pure-Germanic-inheritance idea is a nineteenth-century invention with a twentieth-century use, and Icelandic scholars and heathen groups have objected to the appropriation for decades.
Since endings get disproportionate weight and are mostly drifted out of, the practice is mainly noticing.
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.
Endings get disproportionate weight and are mostly drifted out of rather than met, which makes noticing that this is the last one nearly the whole of the practice.
And this material is contested ground. What I have taken is a set of postures toward difficulty; what I have left is a violent, hierarchical world and the people now using its symbols. Saying which is which is the minimum.