Hi, I’m Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford.
I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder,
previously at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Who is Óðinn, the chief god of the Norse pantheon?
Popular culture has a clear idea about who he is,
and he’s often presented as kind of a grandfatherly
figure, but in fact he’s a very complicated
and in many ways dangerous figure
in the actual Old Norse sources,
especially our principal sources for Norse mythology:
the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda and the mythical sagas.
Now, the Poetic Edda is a compilation of poems
written down in Iceland in the 1200s, based on an oral
tradition that stretches back to the Viking Age,
while the Prose Edda is the work of one author,
Snorri Sturluson, writing in the 1220s in an effort to
remember all that he could of Norse mythology
in order to explain traditional Norse poetry styles.
And then we have some mythical heroic sagas, such as
The Saga of the Volsungs, or
The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, which present myths
in which Óðinn interacts with human heroes,
and reveals much of his own personality.
Now Óðinn’s name may give us an initial peek
into his character: 'óðr', an adjective in Old Norse,
means “mad”, and has the same ambiguity as
English “mad”, meaning either “crazy” or “angry”.
So Óðinn is simply “the mad one”, whether crazy
or angry, either one fits him pretty well.
Now Óðinn is on a constant quest for wisdom and
knowledge, because he wants to learn something,
anything, that might help him prevent or forestall
his fate at Ragnarǫk.
Ragnarǫk is the great battle between gods and giants,
in which all of the gods, including Óðinn, will be killed.
Now Óðinn knows, thanks to the prophecy in the poem
Vǫluspá in the Poetic Edda, that the wolf Fenrir
will kill him at Ragnarǫk.
And so he travels around the world in disguise--
of course, his disguise is basically himself:
he is an old man, typically dressed in gray with
a wide-brimmed hat and one eye,
and he disguises himself as an old gray-haired man
with one eye, often dressed in gray.
And he’ll give off his name as something like
Bǫlverkr, “evil-doer”, or Hárbarðr, “gray-beard”,
something either suggestive of his personality
or his appearance, and typically, in some way,
get people killed. Now what he’s trying to do is harvest
people for his army in Valhǫll, his hall
which is the hall of those killed in battle;
‘val’ meaning “men killed in battle”
and ‘hǫll’ meaning “hall”.
And once a man has died in battle and gone to Valhǫll,
he spends the rest of eternity till Ragnarǫk
fighting every day with the other warriors in Valhǫll,
being killed by them and killing them in turn,
being resurrected in the evening for a great feast,
and then going back to fight again the next day.
Óðinn’s methods of harvesting these men are
often very direct. For a period he will often favor
a particular warrior if he’s getting a lot of people killed,
because that’s something Óðinn likes;
he wants people getting killed in battle so they can go to
Valhǫll, the only way for a dead man to go there.
For instance, it is said that the great legendary Danish
king Harald War-Tooth had a pact with Óðinn,
in which Óðinn had made him impervious
to weapons of iron and steel.
Feeling like he was essentially immortal,
because of course that’s what weapons are made of in
the Viking Age, Harald War-Tooth led a number of
campaigns, conquered many rival kingdoms,
and of course instigated the death of thousands of men
in battle. But as he began to get older,
Óðinn decided it was time to harvest him, and so
Harald War-Tooth gets into his chariot
and is about to ride off to battle, when
who should he see as his charioteer but a man that he’s
never seen before: an old man, dressed in gray
with a wide-brimmed hat and one eye, presumably.
He turns around and beats him to death
with a wooden staff.
Or consider the hero Sigmundr from The Saga of the
Volsungs. Blessed by Óðinn with a fantastic sword
that was able to cut through rock,
as Sigmundr too grew older, he found himself engaged
in battle against an enemy, and as he rode into
the front ranks of the enemy, he saw coming at him
an old man dressed in gray, with a wide-brimmed hat
and one eye. And this man brought his spear,
Óðinn’s traditional weapon, to the fore,
and Sigmundr swung his sword-- a gift from Óðinn itself,
of course, shattered it on the spear,
and of course was killed in the ensuing battle.
Now Óðinn’s spear is called Gungnir.
It was made by dwarves, and is said to never miss
a target that it is aimed at. His horse, Sleipnir,
has eight legs, and is said to be faster than any other
horse. Meanwhile he has two wolves, Geri and Freki,
roughly “hungry” and “greedy”, who eat all the food
that Óðinn is served; he lives on wine alone,
according to the poem Grímnismál in the Poetic Edda.
And then his two ravens, Huginn and Muninn;
“thought” and “memory”, fly around the world and bring
Óðinn back the news in the evening. They are often also
seen as representatives of Óðinn himself, appearing
for instance at the scene of sacrifices made to Óðinn,
to symbolize Óðinn’s acceptance of the sacrifice.
Óðinn communicates directly with humankind in
one very memorable and I think particularly important
poem that survives from the oral tradition
of the Viking Age, and that is Hávamál,
“The Words of the High One”, the "High One" of course
being Óðinn. This poem contains not only a lot of
practical advice from Óðinn, which ranges from
everything to the basics: don’t tell more than one person
your secret; to get up early if you need to kill somebody;
but also contains his mysteries, such as the mysterious
passage about his sacrifice of himself to himself on
the world tree Yggdrasill in order to learn the runes.
For more about all these tales, I hope you’ll check out my
playlists on this channel including
Norse Myth: Stories and Beliefs, and Norse Myth:
The Gods, and of course my translation of the
Poetic Edda, which includes two translations of
Hávamál, and my translation of The Saga of
the Volsungs, and my upcoming translations,
The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, and the Prose Edda.
My videos, made in beautiful places for free, are
supported by Patreon donations,
for which I am very thankful.
For now, from beautiful Colorado, I’m wishing you--
all the best.