Comparative mythologists have puzzled over Odin (or Óðinn, if you want to get technical) for years.

He’s a fascinating figure because his history and his attributes get more florid all the time. The Odin you hear about in Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to the one St. Olaf knew about.

As to where he comes from, ‘theories’ continue to grow like weeds. Hip ones right now have Odin originate among the Saami, a Finno-Ugaritic people in what will eventually be called Finland (‘Suomi’), or from the Roman world, the conjectural ancestor being Mercury.

It’s bewildering stuff. Following all of it and trying to understand Odin is like chasing Dracula backward from the nineteenth century and also forward to Hollywood looking for coherence.

He tricks a Russian princess into begetting him a son to avenge Baldur. He abandons his old protégé Harald Wartooth in war and aids lethally Harald’s enemies in Sweden.

But, there really isn’t any. One way through, it is decided you’d like to understand Odin in the way the Vikings understood him and not be distracted by neighboring cultures or modern accretion.

This has the advantage of keeping the discussion within the sources we actually have. It’s still a pretty diffuse project because mythology is like that, a constant mix and flow of ideas and tons of invention over acres of time.

Let’s remember, ‘Viking’ itself is a pretty diffuse concept. But it is less reckless than it might be and it is interesting if it’s Vikings you really want to get to know.

The Odins the Vikings Knew

What can you say about the real Odin, so to speak?

We know the name in the proto-Germanic Woþanaz and we know because they write about him that the early Germans and the Anglo-Saxons knew him pretty well.

He was ‘Woden,’ or ‘Wotan,’ the same one beloved by the Victorians in Wagner. There is an Indo-European precursor word in watós, referring to ‘rage’. (It gives the modern German Wut.) An eleventh-century chronicler in north Germany, Adam of Bremen, alluded to ‘Wotan, which is to say, anger personified.

Most of what we know about him comes from Icelandic literature, the prose and poetry Edda collections. We know from these pretty detailed stories that Odin obtained poetic mead from gods for men.

We know he sacrificed himself painfully on the World Tree, through which suffering he was granted runic wisdom. We know he played a part in shaping the world and causing mankind to come into existence.

We know that he had and lost a son named Baldur. We also know of his eventual downfall at Ragnarok. He’s quite different in Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfth-century History of the Danes. There, he’s a meddlesome minor deity, who works treachery among humans.

He tricks a Russian princess into begetting him a son to avenge Baldur. He abandons his old protégé Harald Wartooth in war and aids lethally Harald’s enemies in Sweden.

In the legends about early kings and in stories composed before the colonization of Iceland (these are spoken of as the konunga and fornaldar sagas), he appears to people as an old man who works mischief and in general tries to revive their interest in pre-Christian paganism.

What Odin was for

Generally speaking, though most of what Odin does in most places we find him is seeking wisdom and then eventually impart it. He’s a wise guy. He seeks wisdom through self-sacrifice. He lets himself be mutilated, hanged, impaled, or he tolerates torture by fire.

In his pain, he goes into raptures and utters spontaneous orations of deep and secret knowledge. He does things like allow the loss of an eye to be allowed to drink from the knowledge-giving well of the great and wise Mímir the Giant.

Elsewhere, he carries Mímir’s severed head around, embalmed, and listens while it speaks to him. Odin is on journeys all the time. The purpose of which is to learn things and learn he does. He is associated with the mastery of magic and he confers with or confronts supernatural beings on behalf of mankind.

He is spoken of in one place as ‘God of hanged men'. No one’s sure what this means. Back in Roman times, Tacitus, the historian, alluded to the ghost warriors of Odin that the western Germanic Harii said marched with them. (these Harii terrified everyone. They painted their shields and bodies black, so they could attack invisibly at night.)

Odin is, in general, the purveyor of wisdom. Anyway, and he sources it from otherworldly places and that’s the important part. That’s why he is associated later and mostly outside Scandinavia with the Wild Hunt, a nocturnal procession of the dead through the sky. (That’s for a whole different post if you’re interested.)

Where did this job description of Odin’s come from? It sounds vaguely shamanistic in the manner of northern Asia. There’s no historical evidence for any connection. On the other hand, the parallels are interesting: suffering into ecstatic enlightenment, intoxicants like poetic mead, rapturous music, and prophetic poetry.

Odin usually speaks in verse, and his priests were actually called ‘songsmiths’. There was also communing with animals: Odin used ravens as messengers and scouts. And there was even shapeshifting. Many times he changed his form to travel.

And yes, for all of this wisdom-journeying, he was also a god of war. We know he directed the Valkyries into battle and instructed them to give victory to particular sides. His name is associated with the berserks, too. (The berserks are also worth a post of their own.)

And that’s Odin, as we know him through Scandinavian sources either known to the Vikings or written close to the Viking period. His details vary here and there. He had an eight-legged horse named Sleipner, a special spear, and a magic ring. They all had names. (So did his ravens.)

 He was the father of Thor as well as Baldur. He had a German-ish wife, more or less known as Freya, and a real jerk of a friend, in Loki, both well-known elsewhere in northern storytelling.

Odin the Unknowable

It’s very hard to know more about Odin conclusively. We see his footprints probably in place names. We wonder if he arrived late in Scandinavia from the east or the south because he isn’t mentioned much in western Nordic sources.

Is he really Roman? Probably not. More likely, he’s one of many ramified versions of whatever came west with the Indo-Europeans. He’s one iteration of what the mythologist Joseph Campbell famously dubbed ‘the hero with a thousand faces.’

Image Credit: Volkisch Paganism, History of Vikings