Odin

• 1. The God With A Hundred Names

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  Odin has more than 170 recorded names, more than any other god among the Germanic peoples. The names describe his attributes, point to myths involving him, or recall religious practices tied to his cult. Many of them trace back to a single reconstructed word, the Proto-Germanic theonym Wodanaz, which carries the sense of lord of frenzy or leader of the possessed. To meet a god through his names is to meet him through his contradictions. He is a god of the dead and of warfare. He is also a god of poetry, possession, and prophecy. He hung himself from a tree to win secret knowledge, and he gave up an eye in exchange for wisdom. How did a deity of rage and ecstasy come to sit at the head of an entire pantheon? Why does a one-eyed, long-bearded wanderer still ride through European folklore, and why does his name still mark a day of the week? The answers live in runestones, royal genealogies, Roman histories, and the verses of the Eddas. They reach across more than a thousand years.

• 2. Lord Of Frenzy

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  Wodanaz, the reconstructed source of Odin's name, joins the adjective wodaz, meaning possessed, inspired, delirious or raging, to a suffix meaning master of. Cognates spread across the medieval Germanic languages: Old English Woden, Old Saxon Wodan, Old Dutch Wuodan, and Old High German Wuotan. The thread running through all of them is divine possession and ecstatic divination. The same root that gave the god his name also gave Old Norse odr, which means both mad and furious and, in its noun form, mind, song, and poetry. Frenzy and verse share an origin. Writing between 1075 and 1080 in his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, Adam of Bremen made the link explicit. He glossed the god with the Latin word furor, declaring Wodan id est furor, Odin, that is, furor. The word could be rendered as rage, fury, madness, or frenzy. Scholars have traced the adjective further still. Jan de Vries argued that the deities Odinn and Odr were originally connected, with Odr being the elder form and the ultimate source of Odinn. He set the god of rage in opposition to Ullr, a god of glorious majesty, comparing the pair to the Vedic contrast between Varuna and Mitra.

• 3. Mercury Of The North

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  Tacitus, writing in his late first-century work Germania about the Suebi, recorded that among the gods Mercury is the one they principally worship. By that name he meant Odin. The Romans identified non-Roman gods with their own through a process called interpretatio romana, so Tacitus called Odin Mercury, Thor Hercules, and Tyr Mars. He added that the Suebi offered Mercury human as well as other sacrificial victims on fixed days. Anthony Birley noted that the identification had little to do with Mercury's role as messenger and much to do with his role as psychopomp, the guide of souls. Odin, like Mercury, may already have been pictured with a staff and hat, may have been seen as a trader god, and shared the role of a wandering deity. The pairing outlived Rome. In the mid-seventh century, Jonas of Bobbio wrote that the Irish missionary Columbanus disrupted an offering of beer to Odin, whom others called Mercury, in Swabia. The prose narrative Solomon and Saturn names Mercurius the Giant as an inventor of letters, which may point to Odin, founder of the runic alphabets. That equation set the calendar. The English Wednesday comes from Old English Wodnesdaeg, day of Woden, a calque of the Latin Mercurii dies, day of Mercury.

• 4. Ancestor Of Kings

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  Old English royal genealogies record Woden as an ancestor of the kings of Lindsey, Mercia, Deira, and Bernicia, which eventually became Northumbria, Wessex, and East Anglia. He appears in seven of the eight genealogies. Only Essex broke the pattern, tracing its line instead to Saxnot. Beginning in the eighth century, some of these lists pushed past Woden and named his father as Frealaf. The Welsh ninth-century Historia Brittonum carried the line further, giving Woden's ancestry as son of Frealaf, son of Fredulf, son of Finn, son of Fodepald, son of Geta. Other genealogies stretched the descent all the way to Sceaf, named as the son of Noah from the Bible, weaving a heathen god into Christian scripture. This habit of turning gods into mortal forefathers is called euhemerism. It also shaped the founding story of the Langobards, recorded in the seventh-century Origo Gentis Langobardorum and Paul the Deacon's eighth-century Historia Langobardorum. A small people called the Winnili, led by Gambara and her sons Ybor and Aio, faced the Vandals, who asked the god Godan for victory. Godan vowed to give victory to whomever he first saw at sunrise. Frea, his wife, turned his bed to face east and arranged for the Winnili women to come with their hair drawn around their faces like beards. Godan woke and asked who those Long-beards were. Having named them, he gave them the victory, and the Winnili became the Langobards.

• 5. The Self-Sacrifice

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  The poem Havamal, the Sayings of the High One, consists entirely of wisdom attributed to Odin, ranging from the practical to the mystical. Its final section holds eighteen charms. Among the scenes Odin recounts is his own sacrifice. In Benjamin Thorpe's translation he says, I ween that I hung on the windy tree, Hung there for nine nights full nine; With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was, To Othin, myself to myself. He was given no bread and no horn of drink. Peering downward, he took up the runes, shrieking, then fell back. The tree is not named in the poem, yet it is near universally accepted as Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree. The name Yggdrasil means Ygg's steed, and if the tree is Yggdrasil, the name relates directly to this story. John Lindow comments that the hanged ride the gallows, and Odin is bound to hanging and gallows throughout the lore. This was not his only sacrifice for knowledge. In Voluspa, an undead volva tells Odin she knows where he has hidden his eye, in the spring Mimisbrunnr, from which Mimir drinks mead every morning. The price of wisdom was an eye, which is why he is so often described as possessing only one.

• 6. Hall Of The Slain

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  The einherjar are the slain warriors Odin receives at Valholl, a name meaning Carrion-hall or Hall of the Slain, in the realm of Asgard. He is a god of the dead and of warfare, and the Poetic Edda links him to the Valkyries, perhaps as their leader. In Voluspa they are named the ladies of Odin. Two ravens carry the world to him. In Gylfaginning, the enthroned figure of High explains that Huginn and Muninn sit on Odin's shoulders, fly out at dawn, range over all the world, and return at dinner-time to tell him everything they have seen and heard. From this he is called raven-god. Odin himself needs no food. High says he gives all the meat on his table to his wolves Geri and Freki, for wine is to him both meat and drink. Odin's command over warriors had a darker edge. In the prose introduction to Sigrdrifumal, the hero Sigurd finds a sleeping, armored figure inside a shield wall and cuts away a tight corslet with his sword Gram. The figure is the valkyrie Sigrdrifa. She explains that Odin had promised victory to a king named Hjalmgunnar, yet she brought Hjalmgunnar down in battle instead. In punishment Odin pricked her with a sleeping-thorn, told her she would never again fight victoriously, and condemned her to marriage.

• 7. The Rider On The Stones

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  Migration Period gold bracteates of the fifth and sixth centuries show a human figure above a horse, holding a spear and flanked by one or two birds. The birds led scholars to identify the figure as Odin with Huginn and Muninn. Rudolf Simek suggests these bracteates may show Odin and his ravens healing a horse, hinting at a veterinary function for the god. The horse itself becomes a clue. Two eighth-century picture stones from Gotland, the Tjangvide image stone and the Ardre VIII image stone, depict eight-legged horses most scholars read as Sleipnir, with a rider many take to be Odin. On the Tjangvide stone a female figure greets the rider with a cup, a scene interpreted as a rider arriving at the world of the dead. Stones also recorded his death. A portion of Thorwald's Cross at Kirk Andreas on the Isle of Man shows a bearded man holding a spear down at a wolf, his right foot in its mouth, a large bird at his shoulder. Read as Odin being consumed by Fenrir at Ragnarok, the cross is dated by Rundata to 940. The eleventh-century Ledberg stone in Sweden shows a similar figure with his foot at a beast's mouth, again perhaps Odin devoured by the wolf. In November 2009 the Roskilde Museum announced a niello-inlaid silver figurine found in Lejre, a person on a throne flanked by two birds, identified as Odin on Hlidskjalf with Huginn and Muninn.

• 8. Riding Through The Centuries

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  Benjamin Thorpe, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, recorded that on Gotland many traditions and stories of Odin the Old still lived in the mouths of the people. In Blekinge it was once the custom to leave a sheaf in the field for Odin's horses. In Kraktorpsgard, Smaland, a barrow said to hold the body of Odin was reportedly opened in the eighteenth century, after which it was called Helvetesbacke, Hell's Mound. When carriages and horses were heard by night in Sweden, the people would say, Odin is passing by. Scholars long argued over where this god came from. Beginning with Henry Petersen's 1876 dissertation, many viewed Odin as a later god of chieftains and poets, imported from elsewhere, while Thor belonged to the farmers. Bernhard Salin proposed that both Odin and the runes arrived from Southeastern Europe in the Iron Age. Georges Dumezil placed Odin in the first function of his trifunctional hypothesis, sovereignty, corresponding to the Hindu Varuna, in contrast to Tyr, who answers to Mitra. The god still rides through art and story. Richard Wagner called him Wotan in Der Ring des Nibelungen, a spelling of his own invention. Neil Gaiman recast him as the con artist Mr. Wednesday in his 2001 novel American Gods, the name itself a quiet nod to the day that has carried Odin's memory the longest.