Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Deities

Odin

OH-din
Also Known As Woden The Old English name of the same god. · Wotan The Old High German / Wagnerian form. · Wodan The continental Germanic form.
Norse Deities

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As the Norse face of Mercury, Odin embodies mind, magic, and the questing spirit. Odin is the chief god of the Norse pantheon, the All-Father, god of wisdom, poetry, magic, war, death, and the runes, a restless and relentless seeker of hidden knowledge. He sacrificed one eye at Mimir's well to drink of wisdom, and he hung nine nights, wounded by his own spear, upon the world-tree Yggdrasil to win the secret of the runes. He wanders the worlds as a one-eyed old man in a wide hat, attended by his ravens Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory, his two wolves, and his eight-legged steed Sleipnir, gathering the chosen slain to his hall Valhalla. Wednesday, Woden's day, is named for him. He embodies the questing mind, magic, and the pursuit of wisdom at any cost.

Facts
Function
Domain / Function
War and battle 1
Domain / Function
Kingship and sovereignty 1
Domain / Function
Wisdom and counsel 1
Domain / Function
Magic and sorcery 1
Domain / Function
Death 1
Domain / Function
Music and poetry 1
Belief
Theology
Polytheistic: many gods 1
Life
Associated Relic
His spear Gungnir, his ravens Huginn and Muninn, and his eight legged horse Sleipnir are his standard attributes in Norse tradition. 1
Identity
Gender
Male 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
Odin's name descends from a Germanic root connected to fury or poetic frenzy, the same root that gives the day name Wednesday, Woden's day. 2
Cult
Principal Cult Centre
The temple at Gamla Uppsala, as described by Adam of Bremen 1
Attributes and Iconography
One-eyed and cloaked under a broad hat, with the spear Gungnir 1
Attributes and Iconography
The eight-legged horse Sleipnir 1
Attributes and Iconography
The ravens Huginn and Muninn, the wolves Geri and Freki 1
Attributions
Mythic Association
Odin hanged himself from the world tree Yggdrasil for nine nights to win the runes, and traded an eye at Mimir's well for wisdom. 1
Pantheon Family
Aesir 1
Status
Status Within the Tradition
Not formally addressed by this tradition 1
Attestation
Era of Attestation
100 to 1200 CE 1
Veneration Today
Historically attested; no continuous cult 1
Historicity
Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record 1
Learn More
The God Who Traded an Eye for Knowing

Odin (Old Norse Odinn) is the chief of the Aesir, but he is not a god of straightforward strength; he is a god of knowledge, and the sources dwell on what he gives up to get it. To drink from the well of wisdom guarded by Mimir he surrenders an eye, and remains one-eyed thereafter. To win the runes he hangs nine nights on the world-tree Yggdrasil, wounded by a spear and given to himself, "myself to myself", the Havamal says, neither dead nor alive, until the runes are revealed to him. Knowledge, in these stories, always has a price, and Odin is the god who is willing to pay it.

He is also the god of poetry, of seidr (a form of sorcery), of the runes and of prophecy, and the god of the slain in battle. His hall is Valhalla, to which the valkyries carry chosen warriors, not as a reward so much as a mustering: they feast and fight there to be ready for the last battle.

A caution runs through his worship. Odin gives victory and inspiration but is famously faithless, taking his favourites to himself at the moment of triumph. The sagas treat him as a patron of kings and poets who is powerful, necessary and never quite to be trusted.

Ragnarok, and How Much of This We Actually Know

Odin knows the future and knows it is bad. The poem Voluspa has a seeress tell him the course of Ragnarok, the doom of the gods: the binding of the wolf Fenrir will fail, the gods and their enemies will destroy one another, and Odin himself will be swallowed by Fenrir. His gathering of dead warriors into Valhalla is preparation for a battle he already knows he will lose, a strikingly bleak theology of a chief god who fights on without the promise of winning.

It is important to be clear about the sources. Almost everything we have was written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century, two hundred years or more after the conversion to Christianity, above all the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the latter composed partly as a handbook for poets by a Christian author. They preserve genuinely old material, but through a later, literate, Christian filter, and scholars weigh them against skaldic verse, place-names and archaeology rather than reading them as a pagan scripture.

That the cult was real is not in doubt: Odin (as Woden, Wodan) is remembered across the Germanic world, and his name still sits in the middle of the week as Wednesday, Woden's day.

In the Texts
Gylfaginning XV (Brodeur)The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlusonthe world tree

The Ash is greatest of all trees and best: its limbs spread out over all the world and stand above heaven. Three roots of the tree uphold it and stand exceeding broad: one is among the Aesir; another among the Rime-Giants, in that place where aforetime was the Yawning Void; the third stands over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhoggr gnaws the root from below.

The well beneath the root is where Odin pledges his eye.

The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur.

About This Passage

Havamal 77 (Bellows numbering)The Poetic Eddadeath and remembrance

Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And so one dies one's self; But a noble name will never die, If good renown one gets.

The Havamal is spoken in Odin's voice.

The Poetic Edda. translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

About This Passage

Voluspo 1 (Bellows)The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays)prophecy

Hearing I ask | from the holy races, From Heimdall's sons, | both high and low; Thou wilt, Valfather, | that well I relate Old tales I remember | of men long ago.

Odin, addressed as Valfather, is the one who asks.

The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays). translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

About This Passage

Voluspo 17-18 (Bellows)The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays)creation, humanity

Then from the throng | did three come forth, From the home of the gods, | the mighty and gracious; Two without fate | on the land they found, Ask and Embla, | empty of might. Soul they had not, | sense they had not, Heat nor motion, | nor goodly hue; Soul gave Othin, | sense gave Honir, Heat gave Lothur | and goodly hue.

Odin gives soul to the first humans.

The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays). translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

About This Passage

Voluspo 3-4 (Bellows)The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays)creation, cosmos

Of old was the age | when Ymir lived; Sea nor cool waves | nor sand there were; Earth had not been, | nor heaven above, But a yawning gap, | and grass nowhere. Then Bur's sons lifted | the level land, Mithgarth the mighty | there they made; The sun from the south | warmed the stones of earth, And green was the ground | with growing leeks.

Odin among the three sons of Bur who lift the land.

The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays). translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

About This Passage

Correspondences & Relations

Archetypes

Pantheons

Planetary Faces

Odin holds Mercury through interpretatio germanica: Roman observers matched Wodan to Mercury, and dies Mercurii became Wodnesdaeg and then Wednesday. Both gods guide the dead and both patronise cunning speech.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Addressed By

The charm names Woden, the Old English form of the figure the atlas holds as Odin.

Associated With

Frigg, Figures

This source names Odin directly: "tradition Frigg is the wife of Odin and the foremost of the Aesir goddesses, dwelling in the hall Fensalir."

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson
Gamla Uppsala, Sacred Sites

Why this is disputed. Adam of Bremens 1070s account is the single most quoted description of Norse religion in existence, and it is also, by its own authors admission, a secondhand report written a century after conversion by a cleric hostile to the religion he describes. Scholars weigh it as a genuine window onto continuing pre Christian practice against the possibility that its most dramatic details, the gold sheathed temple and the nine year sacrifice, are shaped by a rhetorical tradition of pagan atrocity. The naming of Odin among the temples three images shares that uncertainty with the account as a whole.

Why this is disputed. Bracteate imagery is read as depicting particular Aesir gods by stylistic comparison with later, better documented Norse iconography rather than by any inscription naming the figure shown. A head above a quadruped or a mounted rider is a recurring type across roughly a thousand surviving bracteates, and reading a given example as Odin specifically, rather than a more generic divine or royal figure, is an inference art historians draw rather than a certainty the object itself states.

This source names Odin directly: "Sayings of Grimnir") is spoken by Odin, travelling in disguise as Grimnir, tortured between two fires by a king he has come to test after being fed and comforted only by the king's young son."

Source The Poetic EddaAnonymous (Codex Regius)

Odin's own birds, sent out daily to gather knowledge and return it to him; named as his by both the Prose and Poetic Eddas.

Source The Prose Edda of Snorri SturlusonArthur Gilchrist Brodeur
Loki, Figures

This source names Odin directly: "the giant Farbauti, blood-brother to Odin and admitted among the Aesir despite his giant parentage, alternately helping and betraying the gods across a long sequence of tales, from securing the..."

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Sleipnir is Odin's eight-legged horse and carries him between the worlds.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Why this is disputed. Adam of Bremen names Odin among the temple's three cult images at the festival he describes. His account is secondhand and written generations after the events it reports, so this specific attribution carries the same uncertainty as the rest of his description.

Odin takes the mead from Hnitbjorg and carries it to the gods, and skaldic verse names poetry his find and his drink.

Source The Prose Edda of Snorri SturlusonArthur Gilchrist Brodeur

This source names Woden directly: "and deities from Anglo-Saxon paganism, Woden and Freya among them, for a new ritual framework he was candid about having composed himself rather than inherited unbroken."

Why this is disputed. The motifs own study is unsettled on exactly this point: named leaders of the Hunt vary sharply by region, from Odin in Scandinavian sources to Herne the Hunter in England and Frau Holda in southern Germany, and scholars including Jacob Grimm, whose own study is the source cited here, have never fully settled whether this reflects one continuous pre Christian tradition centred on a god like Odin that regional storytelling later renamed, or a later folkloric convergence onto whichever supernatural figure was locally prominent.

Source Deutsche MythologieJacob Grimm
Thor, Figures

This source names Odin directly: "narrative tradition Thor is the son of Odin and the earth goddess Jord, wielder of the hammer Mjolnir and the gods' foremost defender against the giants who threaten Asgard."

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson
Valhalla, Realms

Half of those who fall in battle come to his hall.

This source names Odin directly: "account of its appropriation by racist Odinist groups; a claim about the symbol's life in genuine Norse funerary art and its association with Odin centuries before that appropriation needs a source..."

Source Valknot (Hate Symbols Database)Anti-Defamation League

This source names Odin directly: "Its association with Odin rests on the company it keeps, since it recurs beside scenes read as sacrifice, hanging and the dead, but no source states what it meant and no ancient name for it survives."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Sent by Odin, and in the poems named as his.

This source names Odin directly: "by a volva, a seeress, addressing Odin directly with an account of the creation of the world from the void, the making of gods, dwarves and the first humans, the coming corruption and conflict among..."

Source The Poetic EddaAnonymous (Codex Regius)

Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve killed Ymir and built the physical world from his dismembered body.

Source The Prose Edda of Snorri SturlusonArthur Gilchrist Brodeur
Source The Poetic EddaAnonymous (Codex Regius)

Jolnir, the Yule one, is among the names the Norse sources give Odin.

Children

Baldr, Deities

Baldr is the son of Odin and Frigg.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson
Bragi, Deities

Snorri names Bragi among the sons of Odin.

Thor, Deities

Thor is the son of Odin by Jord, the earth.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson
Vali, Deities

Vali is the son of Odin by Rindr, begotten to avenge Baldr.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson
Vidar, Deities

Vidar is the son of Odin by the giantess Gridr.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Commonly Conflated with (See Note)

Depicted In

Wagner's Wotan is built on Odin, chief of the gods, but is written as cunning and manipulative, scheming across generations to reclaim the ring, which two sources cited on this work read as a significant departure from Odin as the Eddas and sagas present him.

Interpretatio Of

Mercury, Deities

Interpretatio germanica: Woden/Odin equated with Mercury; dies Mercurii calqued as Wodnesdaeg (Wednesday).

Source GermaniaPublius Cornelius Tacitus

Married To

Frigg, Deities

Frigg is the wife of Odin and shares his seat at Hlidskjalf.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Member Of

Namesake Of

English Wednesday is named for Woden, the Old English name of Odin, read as the equivalent of Mercury under interpretatio germanica for his role as a guide between worlds.

Source Dictionary of Northern MythologyRudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall

Passages on This

Gylfaginning XV (Brodeur), Passages

The well beneath the root is where Odin pledges his eye.

The Havamal is spoken in Odin's voice.

Voluspo 1 (Bellows), Passages

Odin, addressed as Valfather, is the one who asks.

Voluspo 17-18 (Bellows), Passages

Odin gives soul to the first humans.

Voluspo 3-4 (Bellows), Passages

Odin among the three sons of Bur who lift the land.

Same Figure, Narrative Entry

Odin, Figures

Sibling Of

Loki, Deities

Loki's own description: "blood-brother of Odin." A sworn oath-bond rather than birth kinship, the closest honest fit in the closed relation vocabulary; the note preserves the distinction.

Worshipped In

Norse, Cultures

Odin, chief of the Aesir, is attested in place names and in Adam of Bremen's account of the temple at Uppsala.

Source Dictionary of Northern MythologyRudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
1. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs
John Lindow, Oxford University Press, 2001Odin's knowledge-quests, Valhalla, and the dating of the sourcesView the Source
2. Dictionary of Northern Mythology
Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall, D. S. Brewer, 1993View the Source
The Poetic Edda
Anonymous (Codex Regius), The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923The Poetic Edda, tr. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), introductory note to Voluspo, p. 2
Quote, The Poetic Edda, tr. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), introductory note to Voluspo, p. 2
Othin, chief of the gods, always conscious of impending disaster and eager for knowledge, calls on a certain Volva, or wise woman, presumably bidding her rise from the grave.
View the Source
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. OdinView the Source
Germania
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, 98

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