Fenrir by G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.

Fenrir in Germanic mythology is the great wolf whose enormous jaws stretch from one end of the cosmos to the other.  At the end of time, at Ragnorok, when the worlds are collapsing in fire and heat and cold, as the world serpent arises to kill the god Thor (and be killed by Thor’s hammer at the same time) the great wolf Fenrir will advance on Woden himself, open the enormous jaws, and swallow the great god of consciousness and feelings. Fenrir’s gaping jaws seem to be a stand-in for cosmic space and its vast unconscious, unfeeling extent, the very incorporation of Northern Europeans’ fear of death- not just the death of the individual person or god, here or there, but absolute death, the time when all conscious being would no longer exist, when consciousness itself would have perished, replaced only with the dark jaws of cold space. Here, where the wolf is the Germanic equivalent for the serpent in the Garden, he remains in some ways a figure more devouring, even more representative of the nihil than Satan or the serpent. And, like Fenrir of old, he is not just plotting how to eat you, so to speak, but your roots and origins as well, your grandmother. When Red Riding Hood says to the wolf, “O, grandmother, what an enormous mouth you have!” it is, as Wilhelm surely must have thought, a remnant of a powerful religious feeling thousands of years old.