Ragnarök: The Complete Story of the Final Twilight of the Norse Gods | Norse Mythology for Sleep

A slow, quiet retelling of Ragnarök, told from the first sign to the last, made for falling asleep to.The whole story of how the Norse world ends, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.What makes this story different from most endings is that everybody in it already knows. The gods were told long in advance, in detail, and spent the rest of their existence preparing for something they had been informed they could not win. What follows is the sequence as it was handed down: the three winters with no summer between them, the world coming apart at the level of ordinary things first, the bindings that finally give way, the ship that sets out, the sky splitting open. Then the last battle, in which almost everyone meets the opponent they were always going to meet, and both of them fall. And then, after all of it, something quieter — water going back down, a green field, two people who slept through the whole thing in a wood, and a handful of the younger gods walking back to find the old game pieces lying in the grass. It's the bleakest story in Norse myth and it doesn't quite end where you'd expect.But the point of this recording isn't really the story. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere in the long winter and wake up much later, in the quiet after everything, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episode every day.