When the Sun Went Out: Eliyana, Fimbulwinter, and the Year That Changed the World

Eliyana, the Druidess, is a key figure in the Jamie Poole Books and appears on several tarot cards, including The Tower.

There is a moment in the Jamie Poole Diaries (Destiny of the Departed, and Time by Einstein) when a character named Nassor the Jackal, clan chief of Larupus, stands in his hall and makes an accusation against his own daughter. He blames her for the death of her mother. He blames her for the weather. He blames her for the long winter that will not break, for the sun that rose grey and stayed grey, for the crops that would not come. He calls what she caused the Ragnarök. This is why she is featured on the Tower card in The Time Travelers Tarot.

He is not entirely wrong.

This is where fiction and history sit down together, and I want to be transparent about where the seam runs — because the history underneath this story is not invented, and it deserves to be named clearly.

The Real Winter 

In Chapter 2 of Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020), archaeologist and historian Neil Price lays out one of the most haunting chapters in the early medieval record. In the years 536 and 539/540 CE, two or more massive volcanic eruptions threw enough ash and sulphate into the upper atmosphere to dim the sun across the northern hemisphere. The result was a dust veil that curtailed plant growth and triggered what scientists now call the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

Price is precise about the scale. Mean temperatures in Scandinavia fell by as much as 3.5°C (6.3°F). In Norway, where only three percent of the land is cultivable under normal conditions, food production may have ceased altogether. The worst effects lasted three years. The wider impact endured for eighty. Survivors fought each other for what remained. The Justinian plague arrived in 541 CE and may have reached Scandinavia. Population estimates suggest a loss of fifty percent. Settlements that had existed for generations were abandoned. The land went back to birch forest because there was no one left to farm it.

Price's chapter is titled "Age of Winds, Age of Wolves." The title is not metaphor. It is the world as those people experienced it: cold, violent, and without apparent end.

The Myth the Catastrophe Made 

Here is where Neil Price makes his most compelling argument, and the one that changed how I wrote the Jamie Poole Diaries.

In Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the great winter that precedes Ragnarök is called Fimbulwinter — three years without summer, sun and moon dimmed, the world locked in cold. After Fimbulwinter comes the end of all things: the gods fall, the worlds burn, the sea swallows the land.

Price argues that this is not pure mythology. In a culture rooted in oral tradition, he suggests it would be entirely unsurprising that two hundred years after the catastrophe of 536, the trauma was still embedded in the stories — the gods' knowledge of their coming doom, the constant pulse of Norse mythology returning always to the question of when the end would come. Fimbulwinter, he writes, was likely a cultural fossil: a narrative built around a real event that the survivors of the sixth century lived through and passed down, generation by generation, until Snorri wrote it into the Edda in the thirteenth century.

One model of culture was destroyed. The Viking Age began with the imagining of its own end.

Where the Fiction Begins 

Eliyana is born in the year immediately following the first of Price's volcanic events. Her birth year places her in the long shadow of the dust veil, in the grey years when the crops still would not come.

That is a deliberate choice, and a historical one.

Her father Nassor is not wrong that the world changed around the time of her birth. The world did change. It changed because a volcano on the other side of the planet threw the sun into shadow, and the north paid for it in famine and death and the collapse of the only way of life anyone had known. Nassor cannot know that. He is a man in the middle of a catastrophe he has no language for except the one his mythology gives him: Fimbulwinter. The great winter. The beginning of the end.

And so he looks for a cause closer to hand. He finds one in the girl born the night her mother died, the girl whose eyes are the same colour as a sapphire brought out of Egypt, the girl the sword will choose over every man in his hall.

The fiction is that Eliyana caused it. The history is that something caused it, something real and violent and beyond any human agency — and that frightened people in the sixth century did exactly what frightened people have always done. They found someone to blame.

What the Jamie Poole Diaries add is a name for that someone.

Ragnarök Is Inevitable 

One of the working slogans of this series is Ragnarök is Inevitable. I want to be clear about what that means, because it is not nihilism. It is the crux of The Time Travelers Tarot in that we can all have this moment(s) in our lives.

It means that the cascade was real. 536, then 539/540, then the plague in 541. The cold that lasted eighty years. The settlements that never came back. The oral tradition that turned the whole catastrophe into myth because that was the only way to hold it. The myth that predicted the end of everything because the people who built it had already watched one world end and were living in the wreckage.

Eliyana does not cause Ragnarök. She is born inside it. She grows up in a world that is already coming apart, among people who know it and have named what they fear, and she is handed — at the age of seven — a sword that has nothing to do with winning a battle against the Shetland Islands. She is handed a key to time itself, in the middle of the great winter, by two old men who already know what Nassor cannot accept.

The end is already coming. It has been coming since the sun went out.

What you do inside an ending is the only question that matters. That is what the Jamie Poole Diaries are about.

If you have read this far, use code JAMIE10 to get a discount on The Time Travelers Tarot and companion guidebook. Check it out on Etsy.

A Note on Sources 

All historical details in this post draw from:

Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020), Chapter 2: "Age of Winds, Age of Wolves," pp. 70–77.

The argument linking the 536 dust veil event to the Norse myth of Fimbulwinter originates with Price and colleagues including Bo Gräslund. The connection is a modern scholarly reconstruction from tree ring data, ice cores, and archaeological evidence — not a direct claim made by any medieval Norse source. I have tried to honour that distinction throughout.

The fiction is mine. The catastrophe was real.