Songfacts®:

• Ragnarok, in Norse mythology, is an apocalypse, taking out everything in the universe, even the gods. The 2017 movie Thor: Ragnarok finds the superhero trying to prevent it. Often lost in the myth, though is that after Ragnarok, a new world forms. In this song by Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, he tells this tale.
  
  "The idea of Ragnarok, people who are familiar with it from movies and Thor and all the rest of it, it's actually not the end of the world," he told Songfacts. "That's the whole point: Ragnarok is the end of this world, but it's the beginning of the next world. The cycle of life starts all over again. The sun will rise again over the waters and off you go. That is actually what the song is about."
• "Afterglow Of Ragnarok" is the first song and lead single from Dickinson's seventh solo album, The Mandrake Project. The album is tied in with a comic book series of the same name that Dickinson created. He also created a comic prequel to the series called Afterglow Of Ragnarok that was included with physical copies of the song's single.
• Ryan Mackfall directed an elaborate video for this song that's shot like a graphic novel and based on the comic series that accompanies the album. There's a hooded figure, ships, and fire, but no vikings, which was by design.
  
  "I was very pleased with the song, but I was also a bit annoyed that we were stuck with Vikings!" Dickinson said in his Songfacts interview. "Because I didn't want people to get the impression that this was going to be some kind of cliché Viking album, and we were going to be all dressing up in bearskins and paddling longships. So, I addressed that with the video to the song."
• Dickinson wrote the song with his longtime collaborator Roy Z, who produced the album and added guitar and bass. They hadn't worked together in about seven years when they started working on the album around 2021. The riff to "Afterglow Of Ragnarok" was one of the first that Roy Z presented to Dickinson.
• Released late in 2023, "Afterglow Of Ragnarok" was the first new music from Bruce Dickinson since his 2005 album Tyranny Of Souls.
• The Mandrake Project entered the UK Albums chart at #3. This strong showing follows even bigger wins in Germany and Sweden, where the LP claimed the coveted #1 spot, marking Dickinson's first-ever solo chart-toppers anywhere in the world. Prior to The Mandrake Project, Dickinson's highest-charting album in his native UK was his 1990 debut, Tattooed Millionaire, which peaked at #14.