Citation: Óðinn

Tags: Hooded traveller
Deity
Incomplete entry

Description:

Óðinn (anglicized as Odin) is a deity and a major figure in Norse mythology and Old Norse literature. He belongs to the group of divine beings called the Æsir (LINK) (singular Áss). In addition to his prominent role in the mythological texts of the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, he shows up frequently in sagas (LINK) and other forms of medieval Icelandic literature.

His name comes from the Proto-Germanic *Wōdanaz¹ in turn from the Proto-Indo-European root *weh₂t-, meaning "to be excited." The Old Norse adjective óðr, "frantic, mad, inspired," comes from the same root, so that Óðinn can be glossed as "mad one, inspired one," or something along those lines. Instances of the same name in other Germanic languages, for instance Wōdan or Wuotan in Old High German and Wōden in Old English, also come from this same linguistic root.

Origin

Attributes​

Óðinn is a god of war, death, kingship, poetry, magic, runes, knowledge, and wisdom, and is thus also a patron deity of kings, warriors, and poets. He is most often depicted in the written sources journeying and seeking knowledge, desiring to know about his fate and the fate of the world at Ragnarök (LINK), the apocalypse of Norse myth. His desire for cosmological wisdom and knowledge of fate often leads him into dialogues with different beings, such as jötnar (LINK) (singular jötunn, often mistranslated as "giants") and völur (singular völva, "seeress, prophetess") (as in Völuspá and Vafþrúðnismál). The close connection between poetry, knowledge, and elite culture (royal power, nobility, courtly culture) is personified in the figure of Óðinn, who, according to one source, only spoke in verse (Ynglinga saga (LINK) ch. 6), and he is responsible for stealing the precious mead of poetry from the jötunn, Suttungr, and sharing it out among gods and humans (Hávamál stanzas 104–110). His close association with poetry is also colored by the major sources we have about Óðinn, being mainly poetic in form or in subject (the Prose Edda itself is a kind of handbook on how to compose skaldic poetry). 

His associations with war, death, and royal power are connected with his rulership over Valhöll, "hall of the slain," anglicized as Valhalla; the hall where the courageous battle-slain are brought to feast and fight endlessly in preparation for Ragnarök. They are the Einherjar, champions and Óðinn's retinue and fighting force. He is also connected to the valkyrjur (LINK) ("choosers of the slain"), or valkyries, who are depicted both as cupbearers in Valhöll and as battlefield spirits who, as indicated by their name, select heroes to fall in battle and thus join the company at Valhöll. Often this is a champion that Óðinn himself had granted victory to before, raising them up to become the greatest warriors before turning on them and bringing them into his hall. For this reason, Óðinn has a reputation as a fickle patron and deity. He is connected to the figure of the infamous berserk, "bear-shirt," and a similar type of elite animalistic warrior, the ulfheðinn, "wolf fur cloak," both of which imply taking on the terrific strength and power of an animal by wearing its skin.

Magic and runes

Kingship (or below?)

Worship

His commonly-depicted position as the king of the gods and head of the Norse pantheon, as well as the existence of a Norse pantheon at all, are mostly only found in Snorri's Prose Edda. Scholarship over the past few decades has cautioned against taking Snorri at his word on matters of Old Norse belief and myth, not only because he was a Christian compiling material on a religion that hadn't been 'lived' in nearly 300 years, but also because of the large amount of editing, synthesis, and rearranging that is evident in the Prose Edda compared with its sources of older eddic and skaldic poetry. For a more in depth description of this, see the subsections in the entry on Snorri Sturluson (LINK).

The archaeology of Old Norse religion and surveys of theophoric place-names (names of places which include a deity's name, indicating some significance or possible worship of that deity) also paint a different picture from Óðinn the "Allfather" as he appears in the Prose Edda. From these place-names and other written sources, including sagas, it seems worship of Óðinn as a head deity was limited to certain areas of southern Scandinavia (namely Denmark), whereas in most of Sweden, Norway, and especially Iceland, Þórr and Freyr had much more importance and were considered central deities, as gods of farming, livestock, travel, protection, weather, and fertility, matters that concerned Iron Age Scandinavians much more than war, poetry, and mischievous magic. In fact, in Iceland, where the vast majority of medieval Norse texts originate, there are no known Óðinn place-names; and as mentioned in the section above, his prominent appearance is tied more to the elite class of poets who revered him as a patron god of their art, and thus composed and wrote about him as a central figure. Snorri himself belonged to this class, as a wealthy, supremely well-educated, and politically ambitious chieftain and poet, and this can in part explain his 'promotion' to chieftain of the gods and goddesses.

Actual worship possibilities? 

Migration era, elite male warrior culture, the hall, the king, war, death, glorious afterlife

​​Items and Properties

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1. The asterix (*) before linguistic forms indicates a word that is not found in any written source, and has instead been reconstructed by following the chain of language change backward to hypothetical forms from prehistory.