Odin is no comfortable sky-father. He is wanderer, war god, poet, sorcerer and lord of the dead – a god who pays almost any price for knowledge, and who lets even his own favourites fall to the spear to get it. No god of the North is more contradictory.
Odin (Old Norse Óðinn, on the continent Woden/Wotan) is the all-father of the Æsir – but anyone who takes him for a gentle sky god is badly mistaken. His very name comes from óðr: „frenzy, fury, ecstasy, poetry". Adam of Bremen put it bluntly around 1075: „Wodan id est furor" – „Woden, that is: the fury". God of wisdom and poetry, but equally of war, magic and death.
Few beings in myth carry so many names: more than 170 by-names (heiti) survive, and the Grímnismál alone strings together dozens – Grímnir („the masked one"), Ygg („the terrible"), Hár („the high one"), Bölverk („evil-doer"), Gangleri („the wander-weary"). Each name is a role, for Odin almost never appears as himself but in disguise: a grey wanderer in broad hat, cloak and staff, one-eyed, who comes to strange halls, poses riddles and vanishes again. The Romans already saw their Mercury in him: Tacitus writes that the Germanic peoples worshipped „Mercury above all" – meaning Woden. That is why Wednesday („Woden’s day", Latin dies Mercurii) still bears his name.
Two stories show how far Odin will go for insight. At Mímir’s well he laid down an eye as a pledge to drink from the spring of wisdom. And to win the runes he sacrificed the highest thing of all: himself. For nine nights he hung, wounded by his own spear, on the world tree Yggdrasil, „given to Odin, myself to myself". The tree’s very name gives the scene away: Yggdrasil means „steed of Ygg" – the „horse" the hanged man rides is the gallows.
“I know that I hung on a wind-rocked tree / nine whole nights, / wounded with a spear and given to Odin, / myself to myself.”— Hávamál 138, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
Odin masters seiðr, an ecstatic sorcery that was, in fact, held to be „unmanly" – in the Lokasenna Loki throws exactly that in his face. The god does not care; knowledge means more to him than honour. Humankind owes him poetry, too: disguised as a giant he won the mead of poetry, seduced the giantess Gunnlöð, drank the three vats dry in one draught and escaped to Asgard in eagle shape. Ever since, good verse is „Odin’s find".
On Odin’s shoulders sit the ravens Huginn („thought") and Muninn („memory"); each morning they fly over the world and whisper everything to him at evening – and the god, says the Grímnismál, fears more for Muninn than for Huginn: the fear of losing memory. At his feet lie the wolves Geri and Freki, he rides the eight-legged steed Sleipnir (a child of Loki), his spear Gungnir never misses, and from his high seat Hlidskjalf he overlooks all nine worlds.
In his hall Valhalla, Odin gathers those fallen in battle, the Einherjar, whom his Valkyries carry from the field – an army for the last battle. But the price is dark: those Odin loves, he lets fall, for only the fallen come to him. He stirs up wars, breaks oaths and chooses the slain before the blades even cross. At Ragnarök the wolf Fenrir devours him; his son Vidar avenges him.
Odin is also a god of the storm. As leader of the Wild Hunt he rushes with a ghostly host of the dead across the night sky – above all in the storm-nights of winter, in the twelve nights of Yule and at carnival time; in some traditions Frigg rides at his side. This image of the hunting storm-god held deep in folk belief and left traces reaching into our winter customs.
Odin’s cult had an uncanny side. To him the most human sacrifices were offered – hanged and stabbed at once, echoing his own self-sacrifice on the world-tree; already Tacitus reports that the Germanic peoples sacrificed humans to their „Mercury" (that is, Wodan). His spear Gungnir Odin cast over the host of the Vanir, bringing war into the world – a spear hurled over an enemy army was meant to dedicate it to Odin. Whoever gave himself wholly to him counted as feigr („doomed to death") and sometimes bore the valknut, the „knot of the slain", on the breast. His holy places were above all moors and groves.
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Odin’s Eye at Mímir’s Well · Odin & the runes · Valhalla · The Valkyries · The Einherjar · The Norse pantheon.
Völuspá, Hávamál (Rúnatal 138–145), Grímnismál, Lokasenna (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál, Ynglinga saga. Tacitus, Germania 9; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis IV 26. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).