The Small Farm Future Blog

Ragnarök revisited

Posted on February 16, 2026 | No Comments

It’s about time I wrote some posts about my recently published book Finding Lights in a Dark Age. There are twelve chapters in the book plus a preface, introduction and afterward, so my intention is to write fifteen posts about the book in all, one for each of these segments. And, as a bonus, one about the bibliography too. I also have a few other posts up my sleeve, including one about my ongoing debate with Tom Murphy, so there will doubtless be some interspersing. Apologies however that the blog posts are only trickling out these days – a slow turnover that’s set to continue given various other calls upon my time.

Let’s begin with the preface, then – in fact, with the beginning of the preface, where I cite some lines from Völuspá, otherwise known as the Seeress’s Prophecy, in the Norse Poetic Edda. The poem concerns the mythic, or possibly not so mythic, end times of Ragnarök. I used Nick Richardson’s lovely translation, which appeared in the now defunct literary journal The Junket. I had quite a job tracking Nick down to get his permission to reproduce it – one of the hidden burdens of authorly life. Anyway, happily I eventually did and I’m grateful to him not only for the permission but for breathing such life into an English version of the poem.

The basic story I tell in the preface – which actually has some resonances with my ongoing debate with Tom Murphy – is that in early ‘Dark Age’ Scandinavia, a region poised on the outer periphery of the disintegrating Roman Empire, most ordinary people were small-scale farmers living deeply local lives within numerous petty chiefdoms or monarchies. There was no particular endogenous tendency within this world for economic growth or predatory domination, but that’s ultimately what happened when the region became the centre of the Viking expansion.

That expansion was precipitated by various factors, including changes in the machinations of militarised elites in the aftermath of the empire who built on the back of local agrarian society, and the impact of climate change caused by volcanic eruptions leading to a dust-veil winter and ensuing famine (events that Völuspá possibly references). The result was the expansion of a self-reinforcing Viking raiding-slaving-trading (and settling-farming) nexus into not only Europe but also western Asia and eastern North America.

It was self-reinforcing because the enslaving and the plunder enabled more enslaving and plunder. But, y’know, the Vikings weren’t all bad. Provided you didn’t fall into the category of the enslaveable or the actually enslaved, they had remarkably democratic and egalitarian legal codes for their times, and they helped to spread useful trade and economic linkage across their diaspora.

I started my book with this example because it resembles modern day globalisation and its justifications, even if the plundering and coercion involved nowadays isn’t always quite so overt. And because we currently also face the end of empire, or at least the beginning of the end, and the impact of climate change.

We don’t really see the violence that historically underlay and still underlies the globalised ‘free’ trade that defines the modern world because a lot of effort has gone into forgetting it. Whole academic disciplines are devoted to expressing the benefits mathematically while effacing the violent undertow. So I thought the parallel with Viking free trade from a less occult era might be informative.

That’s not to say more localised societies are free of violence. Raiding and slaving can operate at all geopolitical levels, in numerous forms, and I don’t presume to be able to weigh the historical evidence and determine which level generates the least misery. Possibly, there’s some sweet spot where regional polities can prevent the grimness of internecine local conflict without merely replicating it at a higher level with its own predatory expansion. I’m not sure.

On the plus side of local internecine conflict, this usually involves ultimate stalemates that prompt people to routinise hostilities and limit the toll they take. For all the talk of our present fossil fuel ‘energy slaves’ being replaced by actual slaves in the future, the historical fact is that people rarely enslave their neighbours and co-locals. Enslavement and other forms of predatory violence usually involve frontiers – especially oceanic ones – beyond which people become fair game. How might such frontiers manifest in the future? It’s reasonably clear how they manifest right now.

The Vikings enjoy a lot of contemporary mythologising in certain corners of the internet as super-macho badasses, and therefore as role models for a performative masculinity. But one of the problems with ‘heroic’ societies of this type is that they create a lot of losers and only a few winners. It’s easy for people, perhaps alienated young men in particular, to fancy themselves among the winners, but the stats aren’t in their favour.

The likelier outcome is to become at best the lackey of some superior leader. Lackeys can keep such societies ticking along, but I struggle to see the honour in it. Better, I’d argue, to embrace the role of the settled local farmer-householder (which in fact many of the Vikings were too) who knows how to produce their own livelihood from the land. It’s a sad fact of contemporary society that this role (even without the ‘farmer’ bit) is increasingly unattainable for a lot of young people, especially young men – something I talk about a bit more in Chapter 5 of my book. Wise societies attach young men to households, find ways of keeping them busy and flatter their egos with the possibility of local honour. I fear one of many sources of future trouble in the world is the failure of our contemporary societies to do this.

This is all rather dark stuff with which to begin a book – I didn’t call it ‘Lights for a Dark Age’ (my original title) lightly, so to speak. But I wanted to avoid the faux ‘optimism’ that blights so much writing about eco-political futures. Nevertheless, I do think there’s potentially some light to be found in the darkness, and indeed one aspect of the book was to play with the idea that dark ages aren’t necessarily so terrible for ordinary people. Some readers have told me they found the overall vibe of the book quite bleak, while others have said they found it strangely uplifting. I’m happy about that, because I want to channel both sentiments. But if there’s to be any lightness, I think it’s going to have to be hard won out of the dark.

Despite uncertainties over its date(s) of composition, the Poetic Edda was written down some centuries after the possibly real-life events described in Völuspá, at a time when a confident Christian medieval culture was entrenching itself across Europe, including the once-pagan Norse kingdoms. Easy then for the Seeress to say with the benefit of hindsight that “Another green Earth will rise from the sea”. Our challenge today, without such future hindsight, is to seek ways in which that might happen again in the future. Still, the Seeress also speaks of a future in which black dragons bear corpses to Hel, where she too is destined. That’s something I come back to at the end of the book. But I’m getting ahead of myself.