Ragnarok has become shorthand for "the end of everything." The source poem says otherwise, and says it beautifully.
The prophecy
The Völuspá — "the seeress's prophecy," the opening poem of the Poetic Edda — is delivered by a völva, a seeress, to Odin, who has sought her out precisely because the gods know their doom and want it told. She recounts the world's making, then its unmaking: the death of Baldr the bright; three winters with no summer between them; oaths broken, kin against kin — an axe-age, a sword-age, shields are cloven; a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world sinks; the wolf swallowing the sun; the ship of the dead unmoored; gods and giants destroying one another; fire; and the earth sinking into the sea.
The stanzas everyone forgets
And then — in the same poem, from the same seeress — this: she sees the earth rise again out of the sea, green anew; the waterfalls flow, the eagle flies above them, hunting fish along the fell. Surviving gods return to the old meeting-place and find in the grass the golden game-pieces of the elder days. Baldr comes back. Fields bear harvests unsown. A hall stands, fairer than the sun, where worthy people shall dwell and delight for ever. Two humans, sheltered through the fire, repeople the world.
The doom of the gods is real in the poem — nothing is dodged, and the gods walk into it knowing. But the prophecy's final movement is renewal. What the seeress actually foretells is not an ending; it is the cost of a beginning.
The pattern, again
Set this beside the turn of the yugas — Kali completing into a new Satya (the timeline) — and the Buddhist recovery that culminates in Maitreya, and the same shape appears in three unrelated traditions: the honest naming of collapse, and the refusal to make collapse the last word. Whether that shape is revelation or deep human wisdom, it is at minimum a fact about the texts — and a correction to every retelling that stops at the wolf.
Related
The four ages, twice discovered · What five traditions say about death · Impermanence