When we say "Odin" and the Vikings said "Óðinn", the Saxons "Wodan" and the south "Wuotan", we are not hearing three foreign gods but a single name passing through different stages of one language family. The Germanic languages are one branch on the great tree of Indo-European, and their path from reconstructed Proto-Germanic through Gothic and Old Norse to our modern German and English can be traced with surprising precision. That journey explains why Donner, thunder and Þórr are relatives – and clears up a few stubborn myths along the way.
Most languages of Europe and large parts of Asia descend from a common, never-written parent tongue: Indo-European. From it developed Latin, Greek, the Celtic, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian languages – and Germanic. Not a single sentence of Indo-European survives; everything we know about it is reconstruction from the systematic comparison of its daughter languages. That is why reconstructed forms are always written with a preceding asterisk, for example Indo-European *pətér- "father". The asterisk is no decoration: it is an honest admission that we have inferred the form rather than read it in a source.
From one Indo-European dialect there arose, somewhere in the first millennium BCE, Proto-Germanic (*Proto-Germanic) – likewise a reconstructed language with no writings of its own. It was probably spoken in southern Scandinavia and the north German region, in the world that archaeology links to the Nordic Bronze Age and the Jastorf culture. Germanic becomes tangible to us only many centuries later: in the oldest runic inscriptions, in names and words noted by Roman authors, and finally in large texts such as the Gothic Bible.
What makes Germanic a thing of its own is a chain of sound changes called the First or Germanic Sound Shift. The Danish scholar Rasmus Rask first described it; it became famous through Jacob Grimm, hence the name Grimm's Law. Put simply, the Indo-European voiceless stops became fricatives in Germanic: p became f, t became þ (the "th" sound), k became h.
You can still see it when you set Germanic and non-Germanic relatives side by side. Latin pater and English "father" go back to the same root – only the p has become f. Latin tres and English "three" show the change from t to þ. Latin cornu and Germanic "horn" show k to h. In addition, the voiced stops shifted further: Indo-European d became Germanic t (Latin decem against "ten"). This shift was not random but ran regularly through the whole vocabulary – and that very regularity is the proof that we are dealing with a real historical development and not with chance.
Grimm's Law had apparent exceptions: in some words a voiced sound appeared instead of the expected fricative. The Danish scholar Karl Verner solved the puzzle in 1875. His explanation, Verner's Law, holds that the development depended on where the original Indo-European accent had fallen. If the stress did not lie immediately before the sound in question, that sound became voiced. With this, the last great "irregularity" of the Germanic shift was explained – a triumph of method, because it showed that sound laws really are without exception once all the conditions are known. An echo of this law survives in the alternation of English was and were: the same stem, two consonants, because the stress once moved.
Many centuries later a second sound shift struck only part of the Germanic area: the Second or High German Sound Shift, roughly between the 5th and 8th centuries in the south German region. It shifted Germanic t to z/ss, p to pf/ff and k to ch. This shift separates High German from Low German, Dutch, English and Norse.
You recognise it in word pairs that still mark the language boundary: German "das" against English that / Low German dat, "Apfel" against apple, "machen" against make, "Zeit" against tide/tid. And it explains a difference central to our field: the thunder god is "Donar" in the High German south, but "Þórr" in North Germanic Old Norse (from Proto-Germanic *Þunraz). This is not a different god – it is the same name, shaped differently in the south by the second shift than in the north, where that shift never happened. Anyone who wants to understand why Wodan, Woden and Óðinn exist side by side will find the answer in such sound laws, not in different gods.
From Proto-Germanic grew three main branches. The East Germanic branch centred above all on Gothic; it is now wholly extinct. The North Germanic branch led to Old Norse and through it to today's Scandinavian languages: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish. The West Germanic branch produced Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian and Old Dutch – and thus our modern German, Dutch, English and Frisian.
The relationship matters: German and the Scandinavian languages are cousins, not ancestor and descendant. Both go back to Proto-Germanic but have developed separately for more than two thousand years. That is why a German speaker often half-understands Old Norse words yet never fully – the family resemblance is there, but each language has gone its own way.
For the study of Germanic, one language is worth its weight in gold even though its speakers long ago vanished: Gothic. In the 4th century the Visigothic bishop Wulfila (Ulfilas) translated large parts of the Bible into Gothic, devising for it an alphabet from Greek, Latin and runic elements. Its most famous witness is the Codex Argenteus, the "Silver Bible", today in Uppsala. Because this text is some four hundred years older than the first great Norse or German manuscripts, it gives us a unique view of a very early stage of Germanic.
How close Gothic is to German and English, and yet how much its own, is shown by the opening of the Lord's Prayer in Wulfila's translation:
Atta unsar þu in himinam, weihnai namo þein, qimai þiudinassus þeins, wairþai wilja þeins, swe in himina jah ana airþai.Wulfila Bible, Gothic Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9–10), 4th c., public domain
You can recognise "Atta unsar" as "Father our", "himinam" as "heaven", "namo" as "name", "wilja" as "will", "airþai" as "earth" – and in "airþai" sits exactly that þ which Grimm's Law made from an older t.
The language in which the Eddic poems, the sagas and most Viking-Age runestones are composed is Old Norse. It grew from a shared Proto-Norse and split during the Viking Age into two main branches: West Norse (Norway, Iceland, the Atlantic islands) and East Norse (Denmark, Sweden). A frequently cited example of the difference is the word for "stone": West Norse steinn, East Norse sten. Such small differences accumulated and finally led to the separate national languages Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish and Danish.
Icelandic is remarkably conservative: a speaker today can still read medieval saga texts with a little practice. Other branches have changed more. For our work Old Norse is the source language of every genuine god-name and formula – and the reason we watch cases and forms so carefully in engravings: Óðins is the genitive of Óðinn, Þórs that of Þórr. Engrave the dictionary form blindly and you quickly write a grammatically wrong sentence.
The Germanic peoples wrote long before the Viking Age – namely with runes. The Elder Futhark of 24 characters is attested from the early centuries of our era, the Younger Futhark of 16 characters shaped the Viking Age, and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc of up to more than 30 characters was used in England and Frisia. Runes are an ordinary script for writing down language – names, marks of ownership, memorial inscriptions, everyday notes. Anyone wanting to go deeper will find a full treatment in our runic lore. For language history one point matters: the oldest runic inscriptions are our earliest direct witnesses of Germanic at all, older than any book.
A piece of living Germanic language history sits in everyone's calendar. When the Germanic peoples adopted the Roman seven-day week with its days named after gods, they replaced the Roman deities with their own – a so-called interpretatio. So the day of Mars became the day of the war god Tíw/Týr (Tuesday), the day of Mercury became the day of Wodan (Wednesday = Woden's day; German instead settled on the neutral "Mittwoch"), the day of Jupiter became the day of the thunder god Þunor/Þórr (Thursday, German Donnerstag), and the day of Venus became the day of the goddess Frijjō/Frigg (Friday). In these names the old gods live on to this day, without most people ever noticing.
Language history is not a dry school subject but the most honest bridge between us and the people of the Viking Age. Anyone who grasps that "Donner", "thunder" and "Þórr" are children of the same Proto-Germanic word suddenly hears, in their own everyday speech, the voice of a very old world. That is exactly the spirit in which we work: we want to show the genuine thing, with names and forms that are attested – and where we reconstruct or conjecture, we say so openly. We prefer an asterisk in the right place to a beautiful but false certainty.
Runes & their meaning · Runes: origin & history · Forgotten Germanic month names · Viking names & their meaning.
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