Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

About this book

A comet strikes the ancient Earth. Fire sweeps the land, gravel rains from the sky and survivors carry the disaster into myth. Donnelly believed the catastrophe explained both the shape of the land and the stories its survivors passed down.

Donnelly links scattered stones and glacial deposits to Norse stories, the fall of Phaëton and passages from the Bible. Modern geology does not accept the cosmic collision he describes. He reads these widely separated accounts as fragments of a disaster so immense that its memory survived in myths long after the event itself had been forgotten.