Rocks dash together 

And witches collapse,

Men go the way to Hel

And the heavens are cleft.

Thus ran the Vala’s Prophecy of Ragnarok, chronicled by Snorri Sturluson in his Prose Edda of the thirteenth century. As one Viking shuffled off his mortal coil, however, he would have been greatly surprised to find not Hel awaiting him in the afterlife, but the animistic burial beliefs of the Australian Aboriginals.