In norse mythology who is odin

Though hero gods, such as the mighty Thor , fought with brute strength and bravado, the trickster god Odin dismissed these tools in favor of craft and cunning. The name fit Odin's character nicely, as a kind of inspired fury and passion permeated his many thoughts and actions. In all his personae—as warrior and king, shaman and seer, traveler and trickster—Odin channeled a focused intensity and single-mindedness of purpose.

Such focus was a boon; knowledge, magic, and war—among other domains over which Odin held sway—all necessitated such intensity. Having cultivated the magical arts of seidr , the set of rituals enabling foresight, Odin could see the future and commune with spirits and the dead. He was also a shapeshifter who could take the form of snakes, eagles, and other powerful creatures.

Additionally, Odin spoke in poetic verse and had the power to bewitch humans into committing deeds outside their characters. Odin was often depicted with a staff or spear, but otherwise wielded no specific weapons. On multiple occasions, he consulted with the decapitated and embalmed head of Mimir which revealed many secrets to him.

Odin also kept a pair of ravens known as Huninn and Muninn. These ravens served as spies and informers, leaving each morning to travel the nine worlds and returning each night to tell Odin of all they saw. Although much about Odin's origins has remained obscure, consensus held him to be the son of the Bestla and Borr.

She [the cow] licked the ice-blocks, which were salty; and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man's hair; the second day, a man's head; the third day the whole man was there.

He begat a son called Borr As Sturluson succinctly continues:. In later life, Odin married Frigg also Frija, Fria, and Frige , a goddess associated with wisdom, forethought, and divination; Frigg was likely connected to the goddess Freya. According to most traditions, Odin fathered children with many other women. Although modern manifestations of Odin, particularly those in Marvel comic books and movies, have depicted him as the adoptive father of the mischief-maker Loki , this claim was never made in any sources of Norse mythology.

Loki was, however, sometimes described as the brother or half-brother of Odin. Tacitus claimed that by the first century, Odin had been established as the central god among a variety of Germanic groups. Most viewed this as a late attempt to impose order on the character of Odin, who seemed to emerge fully formed in the older mythic sources.

Some of the same ambiguities surrounded the Norse origin of humankind. Traditionally, the first humans were Ask and Embla, a male and female. Little was said about their actual creation, however, with different traditions holding that they were either formed by gods or dwarves. Pitying the creatures, the three gods decided to endow Ask and Embla with the gifts of life and sense, each choosing a separate gift to bestow upon them.

A cataclysmic conflict believed by the Norse to be the first war in history, the Aesir-Vanir War marked a seminal moment in Norse thought, as the Trojan War did for the Greeks.

The Aesir and Vanir constituted two separate tribes of deities. By contrast, the Vanir hailed from Vanaheimr a separate region and one of the Nine Worlds in Norse thought and were made up of fertility deities and magicians who cultivated seidr , such as Freya and Gullveig the thrice-born.

The tribes represented the two halves of an archetypal dichotomy—the Aesir serving as masculine warriors, and the Vanir fulfilling a feminine role as magicians. Some historians have proposed that the mythic Aesir-Vanir War reflected the actual historical conquest of Northern Europe. Beginning in the second and third centuries CE, the local fertility cults were displaced by the advances of the more warlike Germanic tribes.

As both a warrior and a magician, Odin was a deity that uniquely straddled the divide between the two cultures. He was a conciliatory figure that may have helped to bridge the gap between the displaced and their displacers.

The war I remember, the first in the world, When the gods with spears had smitten Gollveig, And in the hall of Hor had burned her, Three times burned, and three times born, Oft and again, yet ever she lives. The Vandals, ruled by Ambri and Assi, came to the Winnili with their army and demanded that they pay them tribute or prepare for war.

Ybor, Agio, and their mother Gambara rejected their demands for tribute. Ambri and Assi then asked the god Godan for victory over the Winnili, to which Godan responded in the longer version in the Origo : "Whom I shall first see when at sunrise, to them will I give the victory.

Meanwhile, Ybor and Agio called upon Frea, Godan's wife. Frea counseled them that "at sunrise, the Winnil[i] should come, and that their women, with their hair, let down around the face in the likeness of a beard should also come with their husbands.

Godan saw the Winnili, including their whiskered women, and asked: "who are those Long-beards? Benjamin Thorpe translation: Spirit they possessed not, sense they had not, blood nor motive powers, nor goodly colour. The meaning of these gifts has been a matter of scholarly disagreement and translations therefore vary. While the name of the tree is not provided in the poem and other trees exist in Norse mythology, the tree is near universally accepted as the cosmic tree Yggdrasill , and if the tree is Yggdrasill, then the name Yggdrasill Old Norse 'Ygg's steed' directly relates to this story.

The woman's corslet is so tight that it seems to have grown into the woman's body. The woman recites a heathen prayer in two stanzas.

In the Ynglinga saga , the first section of Heimskringla , a euhemerized account of the origin of the gods is provided. As a result, according to the saga, men came to believe that "it was granted to him" to win all battles.

However, afterward, [Odin] returned and took possession of his wife again. As part of a peace agreement, the two sides exchanged hostages. Gestumblindi said: "Who are the twain that on ten feet run?

All right guess now this riddle, Heithrek! Local legend dictates that after it was opened, "there burst forth a wondrous fire, like a flash of lightning," and that a coffin full of flint and a lamp were excavated. Halting before the entryway, he kept all from entering or leaving all night, which occurred every night until the rye was cut. Thorpe notes that numerous other traditions existed in Sweden at the time of his writing.

Thorpe records that in Sweden, "when a noise, like that of carriages and horses, is heard by night, the people say: 'Odin is passing by'.

Migration Period 5th and 6th century CE gold bracteates types A, B, and C feature a depiction of a human figure above a horse, holding a spear and flanked by one or more often two birds. Like Snorri's Prose Edda description of the Ravens, a bird is sometimes depicted at the ear of the human, or at the ear of the horse.

Bracteates have been found in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and, in smaller numbers, England and areas south of Denmark. Vendel Period helmet plates from the 6th or 7th century found in a grave in Sweden depict a helmeted figure holding a spear and a shield while riding a horse, flanked by two birds.

The scene has been interpreted as a rider arriving at the world of the dead. The mid-7th-century Eggja stone bearing the Odinic name haras Old Norse 'army god' may be interpreted as depicting Sleipnir.

The back of each bird features a mask-motif, and the feet of the birds are shaped like the heads of animals. The feathers of the birds are also composed of animal-heads. Together, the animal-heads on the feathers form a mask on the back of the bird. The birds have powerful beaks and fan-shaped tails, indicating that they are ravens. The brooches were intended to be worn on each shoulder, after Germanic Iron Age fashion. Archaeologist Peter Vang Petersen comments that while the symbolism of the brooches is open to debate, the shape of the beaks and tail feathers confirms the brooch depictions are ravens.

The Oseberg tapestry fragments, discovered within the Viking Age Oseberg ship burial in Norway, features a scene containing two blackbirds hovering over a horse, possibly originally leading a wagon as a part of a procession of horse-led wagons on the tapestry. Excavations in Ribe, Denmark have recovered a Viking Age lead metal-casters mold and 11 identical casting-molds. These objects depict a mustached man wearing a helmet that features two head-ornaments. He notes that "similar depictions occur everywhere the Vikings went—from eastern England to Russia and naturally also in the rest of Scandinavia.

A portion of Thorwald's Cross a partly surviving runestone erected at Kirk Andreas on the Isle of Man depicts a bearded human holding a spear downward at a wolf, his right foot in its mouth, and a large bird on his shoulder. This is evident from the sagas and some rune stones, upon which the gods are depicted with human forms. However, even if the gods appeared as human, it was crucial that the Vikings never forgot their great importance.

They needed to do all they could to avoid the wrath of the gods and therefore regularly held sacrificial ceremonies in their honour. The supreme god is Odin. Odin is the god of war and of the dead.

All Vikings who died in battle belonged to him. They were collected by his female handmaidens, the valkyries. Odin was first and foremost worshipped by kings, warrior chieftains and their men. It was the requirements of these people that he could satisfy. Thor was the most popular of all the gods. He was a god of war and fertility. Thor was worshipped by most Vikings — he was the god of the people.

He was comprehensible and could be trusted, in contrast to his father Odin, who could be completely unpredictable. Loki is crafty and not to be trusted.