The seeker
An eye, a head, nine nights on a tree
Odin is the god who always wants to know more, and pays for it. He gave an eye to drink from Mímir's well. He keeps Mímir's head, embalmed with herbs, and it tells him hidden things. He rides down to the underworld to wake a dead seeress and question her about BaldrGod: Baldr. The shining son of Odin, whose death foretells Ragnarök, and he spends whole poems, Vafthrúdnismál and Grímnismál, matching his lore against a giant's and pouring it out before a king, each time under a false name. Every morning his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, fly out over the world and come back to tell him what they have seen.
His greatest prize is the runes, which he won by a sacrifice of himself to himself. The poem Hávamál, “the sayings of the High One”, has him tell it in his own voice:
I know that I hung on a windy tree nine whole nights, wounded with a spear and given to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no one knows from what roots it runs.
No one gave him bread or drink; he peered down, took up the runes, screaming, and fell back. The tree is usually taken to be Yggdrasil, whose name probably means “the horse of Ygg”, one of Odin's names: the poets called the gallows the horse of the hanged.
Father of the slain
Valhalla, the valkyries and seiðr
Odin is a god of war, but not a fair one. His valkyries choose who falls in battle, and the best of the dead, the einherjar, go to Valhalla, where they fight each other every day and feast every night on the boar Sæhrímnir, cooked every day and whole again by evening. They are his army for Ragnarök, and because he needs them he lets good men die. In the heroic legends he gives victory and takes it back: in his last battle the sword of Sigmund the Völsung breaks on Odin's spear. Half of the fallen, Grímnismál says, go not to him but to FreyjaGod: Freyja. Goddess of love, gold and seiðr, who takes half the slain.
He was a god of kings and poets rather than farmers. The skalds called their art Odin's mead, and he was the master of seiðr, a magic of trance and shape-changing which, Snorri says, brought such unmanliness that men could not practise it without shame; in Lokasenna LokiGod: Loki. The trickster of the gods, their helper and their undoing throws it in his face. His sacrifices could be men. Adam of Bremen, writing about 1075, says the Swedes sacrificed to Wodan when war threatened, and in Gautreks saga King Víkar is hanged and stabbed at once, given to Odin as the god had given himself.
Worship and memory
Kings, place names and the thirteenth century
Odin's cult was narrower than his myths. Places named after him are common in Denmark and southern Sweden, where Odense was once Óðinsvé, “Odin's sanctuary”, but rare in Norway and almost absent from Iceland, whose settlers named their farms and sons after ThorGod: Thor. God of thunder, who guards gods and men with his hammer. The jarls of Hladir traced their line to him, almost every Anglo-Saxon royal house traced its pedigree to Woden, and English still keeps his day, Wednesday.
The Christian writers of the thirteenth century explained him away. Snorri Sturluson, in Ynglinga saga, makes him a king from Asia who led his people north and, dying in Sweden, had himself marked with a spear-point to claim all who fell by weapons; Saxo Grammaticus makes him a sorcerer who passed himself off as a god. The myths give him no such ease. He is the son of a giant's daughter and one of three brothers, and everything he gathers, the runes, the mead, the dead warriors, the answers of seeresses, is gathered against Ragnarök, where the wolf is waiting.