Table of Contents
Odin is the chief of the Norse gods, a god of wisdom, war and poetry. On this site he shows up in two ways: in the Norse stories themselves, and in the books of Ignatius Donnelly, who read the Æsir as Atlantean kings remembered as gods.
One god, three names
Is Wotan the Same as Odin? is the page to read first. It answers that Odin, Woden and Wotan are dialect names of one Germanic chief god. The name goes back to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic Wōðanaz, usually glossed as “lord of frenzy”. Wednesday still carries his name in English.
The world and its builders
Ymir and the creation of the world tells how the first giant formed where the ice of the north met the fire of the south, and how Odin and his brothers made the world from his body. Midgard: The Norse Middle World Between Frost and Fire is the realm that came out of that act. Asgard: Home of the Æsir and Donnelly’s Norse Atlantis is the home of the gods above it, and it is where Donnelly’s theory lives. Donnelly says Odin lived there:
He dwelt with the twelve Æsir, or gods, upon Asgard, the Norse Olympus, which arose out of Midgard, a land half-way between the regions of frost and fire (to wit, in a temperate climate).
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Two families of gods and a giant
Æsir-Vanir War: Conflict Sparked by Gullveig and Power Struggles covers the war that ends in a truce and the exchange of hostages. Freyja: Norse Goddess of Love, the Vanir and the Falcon Cloak is the best-known Vanir who moved into Asgard afterward. Þór and Hrungnir tells how Thor met the giant who had raced Odin’s horse and challenged the gods.
Loss and the end
Baldr and Hodr in Norse and Danish tellings compares the Old Norse death of Baldr with Saxo’s Danish version. For the end of the world I read Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), where Donnelly argues that the myth remembers a real catastrophe from the sky. I go through it for its dates and for the myths he lines up, not as settled history.
Related pages
- Is Wotan the Same as Odin?
- Ymir and the creation of the world
- Midgard: The Norse Middle World Between Frost and Fire
- Asgard: Home of the Æsir and Donnelly’s Norse Atlantis
- Æsir-Vanir War: Conflict Sparked by Gullveig and Power Struggles
- Freyja: Norse Goddess of Love, the Vanir and the Falcon Cloak
- Þór and Hrungnir
- Baldr and Hodr in Norse and Danish tellings
- Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883)
For every page I tagged with Odin, see the Odin tag archive.
