Conclusion - The End of the World in Fire

Abstract

Concepts relating to the end of the world figure in many written sources deriving from past cultures across a wide geographical space. Among these concepts is the widespread idea that the world will perish by fire. Despite the fact that there are some culturally specific traits in the various sources, some components of the concepts seem to be similar in many of these sources. Therefore, the question arises whether these concepts have developed independently and parallel in various eras and cultures-which could hint to a possible universal concept of a global conflagration-or whether the idea as a whole or at least some conceptual components of it have been borrowed from one culture and have been-with some conceptual changes-included in another. In the latter case, one could ask if and how the sources address the act of borrowing, for example, is the process made explicit or even used as a means of granting authority to an argument, or is the borrowing concealed? These are the leading questions that this section wished to answer through four case studies, each of them dealing with texts from different periods and cultural backgrounds, namely Latin and Greek writings from Classical Antiquity, as well as Old Iranian, Old Norse, and medieval Latin texts. For all these sources, it is a much-debated question where the idea of a global conflagration stems from, i.e., whether it originated one within each specific time and culture, or whether it was taken over from another culture directly or indirectly, possibly mediated through the ancient Greek and Roman writings that influenced all the others to a certain degree.