Odin

by Diana L. Paxson

  As we have seen, before Odin comes to Gunnlödh as a lover, he is Bölverk, who tricks the thralls into killing one another. In the sagas, he is often accused of treachery and deception. Admittedly, some of those who complain are kings who have vowed themselves to the god and are now trying to get out of the deal, but Odin's other identity as Ygg, the Terrible One, cannot be denied. We recognize and respect these aspects of the god. If we are wise, we do not use these names to invoke him, but it would be hypocritical as well as dangerous to ignore them.

  Glapsvidh, the Seducer

  I say this openly, for I know both sexes.

  A man's mind is fickle with women.

  When we speak most fair, our thoughts are most false

  Which deceive the hearts of the wise.

  —Hávamál 91

  Odin says it himself—he has a bad reputation with women. He called himself Bölverk when he destroyed the thralls and got the help of Gunnlödh's uncle in his quest for the mead of poetry, but it is as Glapsvidh the seducer that he takes the form of a serpent to penetrate the mountain. One does not have to be a Freudian to interpret the imagery. I have shared my own interpretation of what happened next in the poem that precedes chapter 6, but even the lore agrees that it was a seduction rather than rape.

  In Hávamál 104–110, Odin discusses how he reached the cavern in which Gunlödh guarded the cauldrons and carried the holy mead away. He boasts of his achievement, but he accuses himself of rewarding her goodwill with evil and leaving her with a heavy heart and, worse still, of breaking an oath to do it.

  On an oath ring I know that Odin swore,

  how shall his troth be trusted?

  Suttung he robbed and took his sumble [the mead].

  And sorrow to Gunnlödh.

  —Hávamál 110

  Odin's dealings with giantesses seem to have been more or less on equal terms, but his relationship with Rind, who was either a goddess or a human princess depending on whether you are reading Snorri or Saxo, is among the worst examples of the means being excused by the end. His purpose was to beget his son Váli, the destined avenger of Baldr. According to the skjald Kormák Ögmundarson, “seidh Yggr til Rind”—“Ygg worked seidh on Rind” (Skaldskaparmál 2).

  In book three of Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, we get the full story. After the death of Balderus, Othinus (Odin) goes to Ruthenia, where he adopts several disguises to court the princess Rinda. She rejects him in all of them, but when Odin inscribes runes on a piece of bark and touches her with it, she goes mad. This would be a rune spell, but taking the shape of a woman healer called Wechsa would definitely be classed as seidh. In that form, he tells the king that his daughter can only be cured by a medicine whose effect is so violent, she has to be tied down. Once Rind is immobilized, he rapes her.

  According to the Baldrsdraumar, this is the only way Baldr can be avenged. When the resulting child, Váli, is only one day old, he fulfills the prophecy made by the Völva and slays Höd, by whose shot Baldr was actually killed.

  The Stirrer of Strife

  Odin can also be accused of ill treating men. In Lokasenna 22, Loki charges Odin with giving victory to the weak rather than rewarding the better warriors. Actually, if we examine the stories told about both Odin and Loki in the lore, we find that Loki's mischief generally results in benefits to the gods. It is Odin whose history includes deceptions and betrayals.

  The hero Starkad is another whose story is known both from the sagas and the Gesta Danorum. In King Gautrek's Saga 7, he is the sworn champion of Vikar, king of Agder in Norway, whom he has served since he was a boy. When they are on the way to attack another kingdom, the winds turn against them, and they have to anchor near some islands. Divination indicates that to get a wind, they must sacrifice a man to Odin. Unfortunately, when they draw lots, the choice falls on the king. Nobody likes that idea, so they decide to wait till the next day to decide what to do.

  That night, Starkad is wakened by his foster father, Hrosshársgrani (“Horsehair moustache,” elsewhere given as a name of Odin), and follows him to a clearing where eleven men are sitting. They hail Hrosshársgrani as Odin and declare that they are met to decide the fate of Starkad. Because Starkad's grandmother preferred a giant (also named Starkad) to Thor, the god (or the man possessed by Thor) declares that Starkad will have no descendants. Hrosshársgrani/Odin replies that he will have the lifespan of three men, to which Thor counters that Starkad will commit a foul deed in each one. The two gods continue trading gifts and curses, and when all is done, Starkad finds out that his first foul deed is to send the king to Odin as the lot required. Hrosshársgrani/Odin gives him a spear that appears to be a reed and sends him back to bed.

  In the morning, the king's men decide to hold a mock sacrifice, and Starkad tells them to find a tree with a slender branch and get him a piece of stretchy calf gut.

  “Your gallows is ready for you now, my lord,” he said to King Vikar, “and it doesn't seem too dangerous. Come over here and I'll put a noose around your neck.”

  “If this contraption isn't any more dangerous than it looks,” said the king, “then it can't do me much harm. But if things turn out otherwise, it's in the hands of fate.”

  After that he climbed up the stump. Starkad put the noose round his neck and climbed down. Then he stabbed the king with the reed-stalk. “Now I give you to Odin,” he said.

  At that Starkad let loose the branch. The reed-stalk turned into a spear which pierced the king, the tree stump slipped from under his feet, the calf guts turned into a strong withy, the branch shot up with the king into the foliage, and there he died. Ever since, that place has been known as Vikarsholmar. (Pálsson and Edwards 1985)

  Not too surprisingly, this makes Starkad a “much-hated man” in Norway. The poem he wrote while in exile expresses his pain

  Against my will I gave to the gods

  My true lord Vikar high on the tree:

  Never such pangs of pain for me

  As when my spear slipped into his side.

  With the best will in the world, I find it hard to interpret Vikar's death and Starkad's pain as anything but collateral damage from a competition between two gods, unless it is intended as a caution against trying to outwit fate. King Vikar is portrayed as a model ruler, so perhaps this is Odin's way of inviting him to Valhalla.

  If Ragnar Lothbrok of the Vikings! TV series is an Odinic hero, it is probably the god in his aspect of Bolverk who is writing his script. The series concatenates Viking history from the late 8th through the 10th centuries, linking figures separated in time and space into a single storyline. Ragnar, unable to get men to help him punish King Ecbert for killing the colonists the Vikings had left in England, seeks his own death there, knowing that his sons will be bound to avenge him. The “Great Army,” that according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was led by Ragnar's sons, conquered much of Northeast England. It was eventually defeated by Afred the Great (who in the TV series is still a child). The peace terms established the Danelaw under Viking control.

  In chapter 7, Odin was praised as the giver of victory, but what happens when he turns against you? In the Saga of Hrolf Kraki and His Champions 46, King Hrolf and his picked warriors are riding through the countryside. They stop at the steading of a man who calls himself Farmer Hrani (“Blusterer”), who offers the king a sword, a mail coat, and a shield. When the king calls them “monstrous” and refuses to take them, the farmer, offended, responds, “You are not being so clever in this matter, King Hrolf, as you probably think you are, and you are never as wise as you imagine.”

  After this, the king decides it is best to leave. As they go riding down the road, Bodhvar Bjarki, the greatest of his heroes, gets to thinking:

  “Sense comes late to fools, and so it comes to me now. I fear we've not been terribly wise, for we turned down what we should have taken, and chances are we've turned down victory.”

  King Hrolf says, “I suspect the same, because this must have been old Odin, and he certainly w
as a one-eyed man.”

  “Let's turn back as fast as we can,” says Svipdag, “and see.” They go back now, and by then both farm and farmer had disappeared.

  Bodhvar observes that perhaps they should avoid fighting in the future because it's unlikely to go well for them, in which he is quite correct. The plot thickens, and soon King Hrolf and his champions are embroiled in what will be their final battle.

  Once more Bodhvar comments:

  “Here have many men assembled against us, nobles and commoners, who press from all sides, so that shields can hardly hold them back, but I can't spot Odin here yet. I have a strong suspicion he'll be lurking round here somewhere, dirty treacherous devil that he is, and if anyone could point him out to me, I'd squeeze him like any other miserable measly little mouse, and I'll have some none too reverent sport with that nasty venomous creature, if I get a hold of him, and who wouldn't have hate in his heart, if he saw his liege lord treated as we see ours now?”

  Hjalti said, “It is not easy to bend fate, nor to stand against nature.” And with that their talk was done. (Saga of Hrolf Kraki and His Champions 51)

  As poems like the Eiriksmál and the Hákonarmál make clear, Odin harvests heroes for Valhalla, for “the wolf gapes ever at the gates of the gods,” and if the Viking delight in warfare does not provide sufficient carnage, as Ofnir, Odin is quite capable of inciting more.

  The Sörla Thattr, a tale from the medieval Flateyjarbók, presents a slightly euhemerized story in which the goddess Freyja is a concubine of Odin. She has acquired the splendid necklace (Brisingamen) by sleeping with the four dwarves who created it. Odin orders Loki to steal it from her and bring it to him. In a version of the story mentioned in Skaldskaparmál, the gods Heimdall and Loki fight in the form of seals. Heimdall wins and returns the necklace to Freyja.

  In the version of the story told in the Sörla Thattr, to regain the necklace Freyja must use her magic to cause two kings and their armies to engage in an endless battle. This is accomplished when King Hedin abducts King Högni's daughter Hild. For 143 years, they fight to the death each day and rise with the dawn to repeat the battle, until a Christian retainer of King Olaf Trygvasson arrives. His blessing is apparently enough to put the combatants to rest.

  This eternal battle reflects the daily combats of the einherior at Valhalla. It may represent a clouded memory of Odin's division of the slain with Freyja, or it may be just another device to gather warriors to fight at Ragnarök.

  Baldr

  There is one more deed that might be counted as a betrayal, and that is the death of Baldr. When Baldr starts having bad dreams, Odin rides to Hel to consult the Völva who is buried by the eastern gate. She not only says who will kill Baldr, but as we have seen above, she tells Odin who will avenge him. In his description of Baldr's funeral, Snorri says that Odin took his death hardest of all, because he knew how much Baldr would be missed (Gylfaginning 49), but despite the Völva's prediction, his father does nothing at all to prevent the tragedy.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about Baldr's ending is the question with which a disguised Odin wins the riddle contests with the wise giant Vafthruthnir: “What did Odin himself say into the ear of his son before he mounted the pyre?” (Vafthruthnismál 54)

  This is the great unanswered question in the Old Norse lore, which has not prevented modern Heathens from wondering. One of the more popular speculations starts with the fact that although Baldr is dead to the world we know, in the global reset that takes place after Ragnarök, both he and his slayer will return to reign. Only in Hel can he be preserved until that time comes. This is the knowledge that keeps Odin silent, the grief that he forever bears.

  I considered putting the discussion of “wod” in this chapter, but it seems to me that it is not in his moods of frenzy that Odin is most terrible, but in the moments when he is most dispassionate, subordinating all his other aspects to the claims of overriding Need.

  Ygg in the Modern World

  I like to think that when the old gods were forbidden and the temples pulled down, Odin went underground, surfacing from time to time to inspire the ferment of invention that led to the scientific method and the modern world. In the 19th century, Victory father and the Wanderer appeared in the operas of Wagner. In 1936, Jung described the return of Ygg in his disturbing essay, “Wotan.”

  Jung characterizes Wotan as “a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. . . . He is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.”

  And he is, in Jung's view, the expression of the furor teutonicus. “Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of Civilization like a cyclone and blows it away”(- Jung 1936).

  To continue Jung's analysis, “All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. But what a so-called Fuhrer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country [Switzerland].” To Jung, writing in 1936, this was a specifically German phenomenon. In 2016, we saw that a state of fury focused on a charismatic leader can possess large numbers of people in the United States as well.

  To call the Terrible One an archetype does not mean he is not real or perhaps even sometimes necessary. But Odin's other aspects must be summoned to balance his power.

  Prisons are another environment in which the Bale-worker may appear. Odin is one of the most popular gods among incarcerated Heathens. Prison art shows him heavily muscled and impressively armed. Given the extent to which our perceptions can be shaped by our environment, I find this comment from Rory Bowman illuminating.

  My strongest and most direct experiences with such a spirit have been decidedly unpleasant. The strongest of these came the only time I was in jail. I was in for just over 100 hours, and had dreams about 72 hours in of a strong sense of a spirit that seemed to present as Odin. It was fairly foul-tempered and hostile to Jahweh and both Christians and Jews. I didn't want anything to do with it, but was quite surprised to have such a strong experience, especially in that setting.

  I have since done some “in-reach” work in state prisons, and have felt a similar force “inside,” but not as strongly or distinctly. Based on those experiences, I have a sense that there is something inside prisons which identifies as Odin, and which is not kind but mostly self-serving and very interested in recruiting. I suspect that force may be what many racist “Odinists” are connecting to, and I want nothing to do with it. I want whatever it was which presented to me as Odin in those contexts to stay far away from me, and I plan to keep a conscious and respectful distance away from it. What my direct experience leads me to think of as a visceral experience of “the Odin force” is nothing I want anything to do with, because I think it is looking for pawns and weapons rather than kinsmen and allies.

  For many years, the Heathens who were doing prison work tended to be those who viewed Heathenry as a Northern European religion that could serve as the focus for a “White” identity, sometimes a necessity in institutions where prisoners are controlled by encouraging them to divide up along ethnic lines. For the same reason, most inclusive Heathens avoided prison ministry. More recently, the realization that some of these people may want to interact with other Heathens when they get out has inspired an increasing number of Heathens who are not racists to work with them.

  When I turned my correspondence with a prisoner into a book (Working Within), I discussed how to practice as an individual. Improved laws protecting prisoners' religious rights have allowed the development o
f prison kindreds, and for several years I have been conducting services in a federal institution twice a year. It is an environment that puts a high value on Odin's strength and power. His fury, though attractive, is a danger.

  Compelling as Odin may be, he is not for everyone. In describing his search for a patron deity, Olin Hemingway wrote,

  Of course, I wanted it to be Odin. He's got all the best lines and all the best toys and the best seat at the best hall in the best world. . . . There is an undeniable coolness factor involved, from the eight-legged horse to the magical spear to the ineffable wisdom that must accompany the empty socket beneath that wide-brimmed hat.

  Long story short, it was Freyja who reached out and inexplicably proved herself to me, and I've been with her ever since, so it is from that vantage point that my opinion of Odin has moved from stories to scripture, so to speak. In him, I see tale after tale of bad behavior, with the same consequence that those of Yahweh had upon his people. I see him starting wars, disregarding his word, being kind of a d*** to his sons, competing against his wife and taking my lady from her home as hostage (something no other being in the nine worlds could do). I see him being taught the art of seidh, and compelling her to (yet again) cause interminable war. Indeed, for the most part, I identify the Æsir as a group with death and dismemberment and other undesirable things, just as I look upon the Vanir as members of a house with beauty, plenty and life.