This seminar proposes a comparative reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road through the lens of Germanic mythological ethics, arguing that McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world revives the moral logic of Götterdämmerung and wyrd. In Germanic mythology, the gods and heroes of the Norse cosmos act with courage, loyalty, and dignity in full knowledge that existence ends in Ragnarök. Meaning is located not in outcome but in conduct, in clinging to ethical principles despite certain destruction.

The Nibelungenlied brings this logic to a human scale. After water-sprites foretell the Burgundians' deaths, Hagen burns their boats and presses on toward the Hunnic court anyways. He does not flinch from what he knows. Instead, he embodies the Germanic ideal, by accepting his fate without illusions, and choosing to meet it honourably. 

McCarthy's father occupies a similar position. The world has ended, survival is unlikely, and God is absent (he lives within a post-Ragnarökian world). Yet he insists on carrying the fire — protecting his son, refusing moral compromise, maintaining goodness without expectation of reward or rescue. He accepts what cannot be changed, and within that acceptance, chooses to act well. The parallel is not incidental: both Hagen and the father embody the Germanic ideal of meeting one's wyrd with dignity rather than despair.

The Road is a post-Götterdämmerung text: Germanic ethics stripped of their mythological architecture, but structurally intact.