God On The Margins Dislocation and Transience in The Myths of Óðinn

God on the Margins: Dislocation and Transience in the Myths of Óðinn
Author(s): Kevin J. Wanner

Source: History of Religions , Vol. 46, No. 4 (May 2007), pp. 316-350
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/518812
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to History of Religions
This content downloaded from

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Kevin J. Wanner G O D O N T H E M A RG I N S :
D I S L O C AT I O N A N D
T R A NS I E NC E I N TH E
M Y TH S OF Ó DI N N
space, time, and the history of religions

The works of Mircea Eliade are suffused by a concern with religious
conceptions of space and time, above all with the ways in which myths,
rituals, and symbols serve to link the profane with the sacred, to maintain
humanity’s connection to the cosmic center and eternity. In The Myth of
the Eternal Return, Eliade claims to demonstrate how “archaic ontology—
more precisely, the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from
the behavior of the man of the premodern societies”—seeks to ground
human institutions and practices “in a reality that transcends them.”1
Indeed, Eliade argues, it is only to the extent that these are held to par-
ticipate in transcendent reality that they are considered real at all. In
terms of space, this means that significant loci “are invested with the
prestige of the Center,” and regarded as an “axis mundi . . . the meeting
point of heaven, earth, and hell.”2 In terms of time, this means that a sig-
nificant event or action is associated with a “divine model, an archetype,”
and “acquires effectiveness to the extent to which it exactly repeats an act
performed at the beginning of time by a god, a hero, or an ancestor.”3 In
1
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 3, 4.
2
Ibid., 12.
3
Ibid., 21, 22.
ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0018-2710/2007/4604-0002$10.00

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
History of Religions 317
Eliade’s view, myth and ritual are preeminently means by which archaic
humanity, or homo religiosus, erases history and the terror it generates
through a return to illo tempore, the pristine moment of creation. The
effect and purpose of assimilating human and terrestrial phenomena to
cosmic centers and aboriginal events are to transport them “from the
ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity” and provide them with “a
meaning and transhistorical justification.”4
Eliade’s preoccupations have continued to inform the interests of
scholars of religion. While some persist in using his categories and ideas
about sacred space and time uncritically, others have suggested ways in
which they ought to be modified or replaced. The most trenchant critiques
have been directed at his notions of sacred space, particularly his privi-
leging of symbolism of the center. Leading this charge has been Jonathan
Z. Smith, whose first tentative challenge to Eliade was raised in his 1972
essay “The Wobbling Pivot,” wherein he likens himself to “the pygmy
standing on the giant’s shoulders but without the attendant claim of
having seen further.”5 Smith would grow more confident in works such as
To Take Place (1987), in which he contends that in the ancient Near East,
the context to which he traces the roots of Eliade’s thinking about sacred
space, the “language of ‘center’ is preeminently political and only sec-
ondarily cosmological. It is a vocabulary that stems, primarily, from archaic
ideologies of kingship and the royal function. . . . [While] it cannot be
claimed that the pattern of the ‘Center’ is a fantasy . . . the burden of
proof has shifted to those who will claim that a particular cultural con-
struction represents a ‘Center’. The ‘Center’ is not a secure pattern to
which data may be brought as illustrative; it is a dubious notion that will
have to be established anew on the basis of detailed comparative en-
deavors.”6 If the center cannot be considered a universal pattern, Smith
suggests that at least two models or “maps” are needed to understand how
space is conceptualized religiously: “a locative vision of the world (which
emphasizes place) and a utopian vision of the world (using the term in
its strict sense: the value of being in no place).”7 Smith also labels these
orientations “cosmological conviction” versus “cosmic paranoia,” the
former referring to outlooks in which “the meaning of life is rooted in an
encompassing cosmic order in which man, society and the gods all par-
ticipate” and in which it is humanity’s purpose to align itself “with the
great rhythms of cosmic destiny and order,” the latter to those in which
4
Ibid., 18, 147.
5
Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 90.
6
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 17.
7
Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 101.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
318 God on the Margins
“man is no longer defined by the degree to which he harmonizes himself

and his society to the cosmic patterns of order; but rather to the degree
to which he can escape the patterns.”8 Smith’s correction or extension of
Eliade’s thought in this regard has been most important for drawing atten-
tion to the ways in which myths can speak for those operating from or with
an interest in valorizing the periphery as much as for those concerned with
defending the center, as well as locate meaning not only in the cosmos-
as-it-is but in the cosmos-as-it-should-be.
While chiefly a revision of Eliade’s thinking on space, Smith’s system
of maps does not ignore the dimension of time. Among the groups that
Smith identifies as utopian in outlook are various brands of gnostics and
cargo cults, the following of Jim Jones, and yogic reform movements of
ancient India, all of which are marked as much by apocalyptic expec-
tations or otherworldly soteriologies as by spatial or social marginality.9
In other words, such groups share a conviction that the peripheral position
they are forced to endure in this world will be compensated for on a higher
plane or rectified in a world to come. As such, Smith’s critique leaves
Eliade’s ideas about sacred time largely untouched: rather than challenge
the locative claim that human values and institutions are anchored in an
objective order, the utopian perspective shifts such orders’ location from
the here-and-now to the elsewhere-and-elsewhere.
In this sense, Smith’s utopian map functions very much like Peter
Berger’s “self-transcending” or “messianic-millenarian” theodicies, those
that offer “religious legitimation of anomic phenomena” (i.e., those that
threaten a culture’s nomos, or worldview) through individual absorption
into pantheistic reality or by interpreting present misfortune “by reference
to a future nomization.”10 What is more, while Berger’s focus in The
Sacred Canopy remains assiduously anthropological as opposed to onto-
logical, he is generally supportive of Eliade’s ideas about how religion
functions to provide a sense of permanence and meaning to otherwise
transient and meaningless existence.11 The most potent form of nomization
is, for Berger, cosmization, and religion is, in turn, cosmization’s most
effective mode, involving the equation of nomos, or meaningful order, with
cosmos, the order of reality; its primary function, he writes, is to “ground
8
Ibid., 132 (here quoting Cornelius Loew, Myth, Sacred History, and Philosophy: The
Pre-Christian Religious Heritage of the West [New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1967], 5),
133, 139.
9
Ibid., 309; Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112–17.
10
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(New York: Anchor, 1967), 55, 63, 69.
11
Echoing Eliade, Berger speaks of religion and the “socially established nomos” it protects
as components of “a shield against terror” and “the danger of meaninglessness” (ibid., 22).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
the socially defined reality . . . in the ultimate reality of the universe, in

reality ‘as such’. The institutions are thus given a semblance of inevita-
bility, firmness and durability that is analogous to these qualities as
ascribed to the gods themselves.”12 This vision of religion as an instru-
ment of transcendentalization/eternalization par excellence that, when
effective, cloaks historical, that is ephemeral and contingent, phenomena
in a sacred, that is, enduring and absolute, aura has remained prevalent,
even among some who have otherwise sought to distance themselves
from the Eliadean paradigm. To take a notable example, Bruce Lincoln
has described religion as “a human discourse that constructs itself as
divine and unfailing” as well as “that discourse [along with associated
practices and institutions] whose defining characteristic is its desire to
speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally tran-
scendent and eternal.”13
Despite, then, their differences on many issues, all of the above theorists
make two basic claims: the first is that religion characteristically seeks to
ground human or historical orders in a (or, from the typical religious per-
spective, the) cosmic order; the second is that the latter order is equally
characteristically regarded by the religious as eternal and absolute (though
religious systems differ as to whether this order is present or deferred,
immanent in this world or located outside or above it). These theorists
posit, in short, that a defining feature of religious worldviews is their
roughly Platonic dualism, their propensity to split “reality” in two, into a
realm of becoming, that is, this world or the world of matter, and a realm
of being, that is, the other world or the world of spirit or mind, and to
assign value and meaning intrinsically to the latter and only derivatively
to the former. For whether we are considering religious conceptions of
space or of time, the central concern remains the assignation of meaning
(Eliade and Berger) or legitimacy/authority (Smith and Lincoln) to human
phenomena and institutions, effected through their assimilation to a center,
transcendent models, or eternal archetypes.
In this article, it is my aim to question whether claims to centrality,
transcendence, and permanence ought to be considered essential to the
category “religion” by focusing on a set of materials that most would
label as religious, but which nevertheless seem to me to posit a world
and operate according to principles far removed from Platonic meta-
physics. The materials that suggest to me the need for this reevaluation
are associated with Norse paganism, the traditions of pre-Christian
12
Ibid., 36.
13
Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16, and “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the
Study of Religion 8 (1996): 225.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
northern Europe as preserved mainly in medieval Scandinavian and,

above all, Icelandic sources. In particular, I will focus on myths of the
chief god ÓDinn, material that, I will show, is dominated by motifs not of
centrality and eternality but of spatial marginality, social liminality, and
ephemerality. This examination will fall into four parts: first, as a foun-
dation for analysis I will provide an overview of the sources for, charac-
ter of, and scholarship on ÓDinn. Second, I will describe and offer some
preliminary discussion of the ways in which ÓDinn’s myths consistently
place the god, in spite of his paramount status in the Norse pantheon and
cosmos, in situations of dislocation and peril. Third, I will do the same
for the ways in which ÓDinn is portrayed in his myths as engaged in a
persistent yet ultimately—and explicitly—futile effort to combat his own
and his order’s transience. Fourth and finally, I will seek to provide some
sociologically grounded responses to two major questions posed by ÓDinn
and the quality of his mythos, the first of which is of primary relevance
for studies of medieval Norse culture, the second for general theory about
religion: First, why is the central character of Norse myth, as well as the
patron deity of such central figures of medieval Norse society as kings
and poets, so consistently placed at the center of myths that themselves
center around themes of spatial, social, and temporal marginality? Second,
given the pervasive assumption among scholars that religion aims to equate
nomos with cosmos, what is one to make of a mythos that goes out of its
way to depict the gods and the world they have constructed and over which
they rule not as absolute and eternal but, quite the contrary, as contingent
and transient?
óD& inn: sources, character, and scholarship

The sources for ÓDinn are varied but can be lumped into several basic
categories.14 None, it should be noted at the outset, can be regarded as
purely pagan; since literacy advanced into the north alongside Chris-
tianity, all of our sources are subject in composition and/or recording to
some degree of Christian influence and interpretation. My use of the terms
“myth” and “mythology” is thus loose. Essentially, I treat any text in which
ÓDinn appears or is described as contributing to his mythos, whatever
14
I do not deal with the nonliterary sources for ÒDinn, mainly rune stones and place names,
in this article. Although much of this material is by its nature older than the literary sources
on which I focus and thus can be supposed to provide less mediated access to pre-Christian
Norse religion, it is of less use for reconstructing ÓDinn’s mythos, with which I am chiefly
concerned, rather than his cult. At any rate, this material tends to reinforce the portrait of
ÓDinn’s followers that I present in the final section of my article, namely, that this god was
of most importance to a narrow but politically and culturally elite segment of Norse society.
For a recent discussion of pre-Christian religion and cult based largely on this data, see Eric
Christiansen, The Norsemen in the Viking Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 259–68.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27n 1976 12:34:56 UTC
degree of pagan authenticity it might be judged to have. This seems to

me a valid approach given how consistent ÓDinn’s major character traits
and narrative tropes remain across the sources.
Probably the most valuable type of source material for ÓDinn is poetry,
both eddic and skaldic. “Eddic” refers to verse that is typically anonymous,
emphasizes mythological or legendary themes, is narrative or dialogic/
didactic in form, and employs simpler meters and diction; six eddic lays
prominently feature ÓDinn, and he appears or is mentioned in many of the
others.15 While individual poems are notoriously hard to date, the extant
corpus of eddic verse likely falls within the ninth to thirteenth centuries,
the same that produced skaldic verse.16 “Skaldic” applies to verse that is
typically ascribed to a named poet or skáld, focuses on historical persons
or events, and employs highly ornate meters and diction; ÓDinn most often
figures in these poems as an element of kennings, circumlocutions that
frequently reference myth.17 Closely linked to the verse sources is the Ice-
lander Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, an early thirteenth-century mythographic
and poetic treatise in which pagan myth and cosmology are presented in
prose form and within a euhemeristic frame.18
Next, there are sagas that depict something of ÓDinn’s character and
deeds; these include so-called fornaldarsögur, or sagas of ancient times,
which, though many are late (thirteenth- and fourteenth-century), depict
the god as a god, most often as he intervenes in human affairs, as well as
skáldasögur and konungasögur, sagas of poets and kings, which mainly
describe how historic skalds, most of them Icelandic, and kings, most of
15
Those featuring ÓDinn are Völuspá, Hávamál, VafÂrúDnismál, Grímnismál, and Hár-
barDsljóD—these five appearing in the Codex Regius, the main, mid-thirteenth century manu-
script of the eddic poems—as well as Baldrs draumar. All references to eddic poems are
to Gustav Neckel, ed., Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern,
5th ed., rev. Hans Kuhn, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1962). For translations, see Lee M.
Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda, 2nd ed., rev. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962);
and Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
16
For a recent general survey of the features and history of eddic verse with references to
the more important secondary studies, see Terry Gunnell, “Eddic Poetry,” in A Companion to
Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 82–
100; for skaldic, see Diana Whaley, “Skaldic Poetry,” in McTurk, Companion to Old Norse-
Icelandic Literature, 479–502.
17
For example, veDr Hárs (weather of Hárr, i.e., ÓDinn) = battle, or fengr Yggs (bounty of
Yggr, i.e., ÓDinn) = poetry. The first kenning is from a verse of Eyvindr skáldaspillir Finnsson
found in Skáldskaparmál (The language of poetry; the second major section of Snorri’s
Edda) 48; see Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skáldskaparmál, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols.
(London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998), 1:66. The second is used in verse 31
of Snorri Sturluson’s Háttatal, the third major section of his treatise; see Snorri Sturluson,
Edda: Háttatal, ed. Anthony Faulkes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 17.
18
Eddic poetry receives its name from Snorri’s treatise. The edition of the Edda used is
Anthony Faulkes’s four-volume edition; for citations, see nn. 17 and 27. For a translation,
see Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1987).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
them Norwegian, conceived of and related to ÓDinn.19 ÓDinn and other

pagan gods are often subjected in these texts to explicit reinterpretation,
either, as in sagas of missionary kings, demonization or, as in Snorri’s
Ynglinga saga, historicization.20 Finally, there is a limited set of Latin
sources such as Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae
pontificum (ca. 1070) and Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (early
1200s) that provide information on cultic practices and/or mythological
traditions relating to ÓDinn.21
Alongside the many studies that focus on specific aspects of ÓDinn, his
mythos, and cult, there have been a number of encyclopedic treatments that
take into account most if not all of the sources described above.22 Three
common classifications of ÓDinn emerge from such synopses: first, he is
a god of poetry, runes, spells, and other forms of knowledge arcane and
practical; second, he is a god of war or, more precisely, a god of battle-
field stratagems who determines or influences the outcome of war; third,
he is a god of the dead. In line with his functions, ÓDinn was a patron of
poets, warriors, kings and nobility, and, though this is less certain in terms
of the reality of cult and practice, magicians or shamans.23 As to his status
19
On classifications and dating of saga genres, see Kurt Schier, Sagaliteratur (Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzlersche, 1970).
20
Ynglinga saga is the first saga in Snorri’s compilation of kings’ sagas, Heimskringla
(Circle of the world), written ca. 1225–35; for an edition, see Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla,
ed. Bjarni ADalbjarnarson, 3 vols. (Reykjavík: HiD íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941–51); for a
translation, see Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee
M. Hollander (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).
21
For an edition of the former, see Adam von Bremen, Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte,
ed. Bernard Schmeidler, 3rd ed. (Hanover: Hahnsche, 1917); for a translation, see Adam of
Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis J. Tschan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1959). For an edition of the latter, see Alfred Holder, ed., Saxonis
Grammatici Gesta Danorum (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1886); for a translation, see Saxo
Grammaticus, The History of the Danes: Books I–IX, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson, trans. Peter
Fisher, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996).
22
Some of the more exhaustive are found in Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsge-
schichte, 2 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1957), 2:27–106; the very old but still useful
H. M. Chadwick, The Cult of Othin: An Essay in the Ancient Religion of the North (London:
C. J. Clay, 1899); E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of
Ancient Scandinavia (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), 35–74; and H. R. Ellis
Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (London: Penguin, 1964), 25–32, 40– 41,
48–72, 140–58.
23
The shamanic qualities of ÓDinn’s character and mythos, particularly as they relate to
his reputation as a practitioner of seiDr, a potent but scandalous form of magic with antiso-
cial and effeminate associations, has been a recurrent preoccupation of scholars (for primary
sources identifying ÓDinn as seiDr practitioner, see Lokasenna 24 and Ynglinga saga 7).
Many have argued for or against the view that the figure of ÓDinn reflects Norse ideas about
Finnish, or Saami, religious practice. While ÓDinn’s association with seiDr and the nomadic,
far-northern Saami no doubt contributed to his marginal character—as Thomas A. DuBois
writes, the shaman and seiDr user are both “liminal figures . . . whose sacral powers arose in
part from their choice to assume a marginal, even pariah-like existence” (Nordic Religions
in the Viking Age [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 54)—I have not

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
among the gods, the sources identify ÓDinn as their head and father, while
also reporting his occasional discord with other deities, especially Êórr.24
There are also duplications of function between ÓDinn and other gods
(such as Êórr being also a god of war) that have been taken as evidence
of development; specifically, it has been argued that ÓDinn is an import
from continental German into Scandinavian religion and/or that he was a
lesser god who rose to the top of the ranks in the ninth and tenth centuries
owing to his adoption and promotion by an emerging cultural and political
elite.25 Finally, there is near consensus on the significance of the god’s
name. Adam of Bremen writes of “Wotan, id est furor,” and scholars concur
that the root behind the deity’s name is *woÂ-, from whence comes
German Wut, Anglo-Saxon wod, Old Norse óDr, and so on, all terms for
“high mental excitement,” fury, ecstasy, or inspiration.26 ÓDinn’s name thus
calls attention to a common link between his adherents: the professional
success of poets, warriors, and magicians depended, at least in principle,
upon their accessing of otherworldly power and inducing states of in-
spiration or frenzy.
ÓDinn’s activity in the myths is frequently framed in reference to rag-
narök, the “doom of the gods” or, if one adopts Snorri’s spelling ragnarøkr,
stressed this element in this article, in part owing to considerations of space but also because
it has been extensively discussed by others, and because I doubt whether this aspect of the
god’s mythos is reflective of his cult in the same way as his associations with kings and
poets. Major studies include Dag Strömbäck, Sejd: Textstudier i nordisk religionshistoria
(Stockholm: Geber, 1935); Åke Ohlmarks, Studien zum Problem des Schamanismus (Lund:
Gleerup, 1939); Peter Buchholz, “Shamanism: The Testimony of Old Icelandic Literary
Tradition,” Mediaeval Scandinavia 4 (1971): 7–20; Jere Fleck, “The ‘Knowledge-Criterion’
in the Grímnismál: The Case against ‘Shamanism,’ ” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 86 (1971): 49–
65; and John Lindow, “Myth Read as History: Odin in Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga Saga,” in
Myth: A New Symposium, ed. Gregory Schrempp and William Hansen (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 107–23. For a recent overview of the debate as well as discussion of
ideological perspectives that underlie scholarly positions, see Stefanie v. Schnurbein, “Sha-
manism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory between Ideological Camps,” trans. Brian
Currid, History of Religions 43, no. 2 (2003): 116–38.
24
This conflict is most obvious in the eddic poem HárbarDsljóD, though Gautreks saga 7
is also fairly explicit about it; for an edition of the latter, see Wilhelm Ranisch, ed., Die Gau-
trekssaga in zwei Fassungen (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1900); for a translation, see Hermann
Pálsson and Paul Edwards, trans., Gautrek’s Saga and Other Medieval Tales (London: Uni-
versity of London Press, 1968). Many have seen in the occasional discord between ÓDinn and
Êórr a reflection of social or class tensions.
25
Both theories are very common; see, e.g., arguments presented in Chadwick, Cult of
Othin, 49–56; DuBois, Nordic Religions, 57–58; Jan de Vries, “Contributions to the Study of
Othin,” Folklore Fellows Communications 94 (1931): 43–46, and Altgermanische Religions-
geschichte, 2:46– 49; and Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North, 64–70.
26
Adam of Bremen, Hamburgische Kïrchengeschichte 4.26r, 258. On ÓDinn’s name and
related names and terms, see Chadwick, Cult of Othin, 66–67; de Vries, “Contributions to
the Study of Othin,” 30–31, 53; and Einar Haugen, “The Edda as Ritual: Odin and His
Masks,” in Edda: A Collection of Essays, ed. Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1983), 6.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
their “twilight.”27 He is often described by the sources and scholars alike

as attempting to gather information about and prepare for the coming
assault of the jötnar (sing. jötunn), or giants, and their monstrous kin
against the œsir and vanir (sing. áss, vanr), the two tribes of gods, and
their allies. Another prominent theme in ÓDinn’s myths is the ambiguous
nature of his relations with his closest followers, elite warriors (above all
kings) and poets. As I will describe further below, ÓDinn was notorious
for withdrawing support from his favorites, bringing about sudden and
disastrous reversals of fortune. While the sources tend to justify this habit
by the god’s need to amass a phantom army in preparation for ragnarök,
scholars have dwelled on its moral valences: what sorts of judgments, they
ask, were passed on ÓDinn’s actions and motives, and by whom? E. O. G.
Turville-Petre provides a rather extreme response to such questions, stating
that in “the sources in which he is most fully described, he was evil and
sinister,”28 while Jan de Vries takes a more measured view, writing that
the “heathen warrior, who could experience the changeable luck of war
in every battle, likely scarcely brooded over ÓDinn’s unfaithfulness . . .
but the poetry of the later age became indignant at the fact that a god
could act so faithlessly, and more sharply emphasized the god’s insidious
character.”29 While de Vries assigns moral condemnation of ÓDinn mainly
to Christians, others have suggested that the god’s late ascension to the top
of the divine ranks and displacement of other deities (and their adherents)
generated resentment against him even in pagan times. As Thomas A.
DuBois writes, “Tellingly, ÓDinn’s apparent rise to power in the Scandi-
navian pantheon finds reflection in recurrent images of him as a crafty,
usurping, duplicitous deity, lacking in many accounts the unambiguously
admirable qualities of Êórr.”30 (Of course, this ignores the fact that the
latter deity was often depicted as an impulsively violent near imbecile.)
While it is possible that ÓDinn’s late blooming and/or the conversion
account for the sources’ ambivalence toward him, I will in what follows
steer clear of judging or rationalizing the god’s fickle character and instead
emphasize the ways in which his ethical grayness ties into a much broader
pattern of liminality. ÓDinn’s myths are marked by instances of treachery,
but also by themes of travel, exile, and disguise; he plays the role of regi-
cide, but also of hall guest, hostage, impostor, and rapist. Considering the
27
See the glossary entry for this term in Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfag-
inning, ed. Anthony Faulkes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 132. Snorri’s form of the term has
influenced modern adapters of the mythos, most notably Richard Wagner.
28
Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North, 51.
29
“Der heidnische Krieger, der was wechselnde Glück des Kampfes in jeder Schlacht er-
fahren konnte, hat über Odins Untreue wohl kaum gegrübelt . . . aber die Poesie der späteren
Zeit hat sich darüber empört, daB ein Gott so treulos handeln konnte und den tückischen
Charakter des Gottes schärfer betont” (de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:57).
30
DuBois, Nordic Religions, 58.
One Line Long

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
overall character of ÓDinn’s mythic itinerary, the most pressing question

seems to me to involve not so much his adherents’ reactions as their iden-
tities: why does the god especially attached to northern society’s dominant
cultural and political agents, as well as to the primary consumers and
producers of our sources, so often skirt or push beyond territorial or moral
boundaries? Or, to rephrase the question in terms of the issues raised at
the outset of the article: if ÓDinn is elite paganism’s central figure—and
thus, according to an understanding of religion as tool of legitimation,
the chief symbolic guarantor of Norse political, moral, and conceptual
orders—why is he consistently made to operate from marginal positions?
In considering these questions, I will concentrate on those myths that best
illustrate the themes and patterns I wish to describe. The examples on
which I focus are, however, neither isolated nor idiosyncratic, and ref-
erences are given in the notes to episodes that could be substituted for or
which complement those discussed.
myths of spatial dislocation and social marginality

Alongside Smith, another scholar of religion who has paid a great deal
of attention to religious and cultural “maps” is Michel de Certeau. In
The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau draws a useful distinction
between two forms of practice, strategies versus tactics. A strategy he
describes as “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that
becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business,
an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a
place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which
relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers
or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and
objects of research, etc.) can be managed.” A tactic, on the other hand,
de Certeau defines as
a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation

of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The
space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain
imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. . . . It must vigilantly
make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of
the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be
where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.
In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.31
According to these definitions, ÓDinn emerges from the sources as more

tactician than strategist. To be sure, he has places to call his own: as a god,
31
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 35–37.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
he is one of a divine trio who formed the cosmos out of the body of the
murdered giant Ymir. He and his allies then inhabit ÁsgarDr, the garDr or
enclosure of the œsir, which stands opposed to Jötunheimar, the homes
of the jötnar. Within ÁsgarDr on the plain of Gladsheimr sits Valhöll, the
“hall of the slain” where ÓDinn hosts the einherjar, the war dead whom
his valkyrjur (sing. valkyrja) or “choosers of the slain” collect from the
battlefield, and he is attached to other dwellings, such as Válaskjálf and
Sokkvabekkr.32 Finally, he is said to possess HlíDskjálf, a panoptic seat or
mountain shelf from which he can view happenings in all worlds.33 As a
human, ÓDinn is described by Snorri as having come originally from Troy
in Turkey, “near the world’s middle,” and to have established realms for
himself and his sons throughout Europe, eventually settling in Sweden,
while Saxo places him originally in Byzantium.34 It would seem, then, as
if ÓDinn, whether imagined as god or man, controlled plenty of loci from
which to set and pursue a strategic agenda.
And yet, little in our sources indicates that ÓDinn is meant to occupy
or symbolize a clearly defined or stable “center,” cosmic or other. While
my discussions will focus on the extent to which the myths place ÓDinn
in areas outside of his control, the identification of this or that context as
marginal in the Norse cosmos is, it should be stressed, always relative.
Kirsten Hastrup, who has written extensively on Norse conceptions of
space, argues otherwise. In her view, the Norse possessed “a cosmo-
logical model of concentric circles” in which “the cosmos was divided
into MiDgarDr and ÚtgarDr. MiDgarDr was the central space . . . inhabited
by men (and gods), while ÚtgarDr was found ‘outside the fence’ . . . and
inhabited by giants and non-humans. . . . The opposition between centre
and periphery had connotations of familiar versus foreign . . . [as well
as] reflected the opposition between ‘the social’ and ‘the wild.’ ”35 This
32
Snorri provides an overview of the ordering of the cosmos and of mythic topography in
Gylfaginning 3–19. Many of the details mentioned derive from Grímnismál, especially from
verses 6–7 (Válaskjálf and Sokkvabekkr), 8–10, 18–19, 21–23, and 25–26 (Valhöll and the
einherjar). Some of the account of ÓDinn’s and his brothers’ use of the body of Ymir to form
the world is from VafÂrúDnismál.
33
HlíDskjálf as ÓDinn’s seat is not mentioned in eddic poetry, but it is named in the prose
introductions to Grímnismál and Skírnismál; in Gylfaginning 17, Snorri places this seat in
Válaskjálf (and in Gylfaginning 9 in Troy; see next note).
34
“Nær miDri veröldunni” (Snorri Sturluson, Prologue 3, Faulkes ed., 4). Snorri places
ÁsgarDr, home of the human œsir, similarly in Ynglinga saga 2. For Saxo, see Gesta
Danorum 1. Translations of primary sources unless otherwise noted are my own, though I have
consulted and in many cases stuck closely to Anthony Faulkes’s translation and glossaries
for Snorri’s Edda and to Larrington’s translation of the eddic poems (for full citations of
Faulkes see nn. 17, 18, 27, and for Larrington see n. 15).
35
Kirsten Hastrup, “Cosmography,” in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip
Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf (New York: Routledge, 1993), 109, and Culture and History in
Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change (Oxford: Clarendon,
1985), 147– 48.
One Line Long

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
division of the Norse cosmos into central and peripheral zones is, how-
ever, drastically overstated. As Margaret Clunies Ross has argued, any
centrality that the gods possess is owed to “the insistently pro-god narra-
torial point of view of myth rather than, as Hastrup has argued . . . a
named division into MiDgarDr, ‘Middle Enclosure’ and ÚtgarDr, ‘Outer
Enclosure.’ ”36 Clunies Ross further points out that while the former term
is common enough in the sources, the latter is never used by poets and
exactly once by Snorri, in a story that has Êórr travel east over the sea to
the land of ÚtgarDa-Loki, less a giant than a malevolent counterpart to the
already ambiguous trickster “god” Loki.37
Aron Gurevich provides what is in my view a better description of the
Norse cosmos as “an aggregate of farmsteads inhabited by people, gods,
giants, and dwarfs,” wherein different sets of beings are thought of as in-
habiting their own civilized zones.38 Nothing suggests, moreover, that the
halls of giants—or men, for that matter—are any less cultured or com-
fortable than those of the gods. Indeed, the many myths in which gods
visit giants to secure, among other things, knowledge, a wife, a cauldron for
brewing their mead, and a venue for their feasting suggest the opposite.39
Whether, then, one is thinking in topographical or cultural terms, the
Norse cosmos lacks a clear axis mundi.40
More important, however, than ÓDinn’s lack of control over a definite
cosmic center is the fact that he spends so little time in those centers over
which he exercises clear control. In Völuspá (The Völva’s prophecy) it is
36
Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern
Society, vol. 1, The Myths (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), 51.
37
Ibid.
38
Aron Ya. Gurevich, “Space and Time in the Weltmodell of the Old Scandinavian People,”
Mediaeval Scandinavia 2 (1969): 45.
39
For example, ÓDinn travels to VafÂrúDnir’s hall to gain knowledge in VafÂrúDnismál,
Freyr sends his servant Skírnir to the farm of the giant Gymir to gain GerDr as a wife in
Skírnismál, and Êórr and Tyr visit Hymir in HymskviDa to procure a cauldron to be used at
Ægir’s feast in Lokasenna.
40
While Eliade would assign this role to Himinbjörg, according to him the “celestial
mountain . . . where the rainbow (Bifrost) touches the dome of heaven” (Mircea Eliade,
Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed [New York: Meridian, 1958], 100;
see also Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 12), such an exalted position for this site has no
support in the sources: the name appears once in poetry as the hall of the minor áss Heimdallr,
and Snorri describes it as a watchman’s perch that stendr á himins enda (“stands at heaven’s
end [or edge]” [Snorri Sturluson, in Gylfaginning 17, Faulkes ed., 20]). Even if one follows
many Norse scholars in regarding the tree Yggdrasill as a sort of cosmic pillar, it must be
admitted that no one class of beings can lay claim to its center. According to Snorri, “three
roots of the tree hold it up and spread extremely widely. One is among the œsir, and another
among the frost-giants. . . . The third stands over Niflheim [i.e., Hel]” (“Êrjár rœtr trésins
halda Âví upp ok standa afar breitt. Ein er meD Ásum, en önnur meD hrímÂursum. . . . In
ÂriDja stendr yfir Niflheimi” [Snorri Sturluson, in Gylfaginning 15, Faulkes ed., 17]), while in
the eddic lay Grímnismál, Snorri’s source for this account, its roots lie in the homes of Hel,
the frost giants, and humans. In both sources, the œsir are described as having to ride over
Bifröst or wade across rivers to attend court at a well feeding the tree’s roots.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
told that “war, the first in the world, began between the œsir and vanir
when Gullveigr, a female of uncertain origin, was burned “in Hárr’s [the
High (or Blind) One’s] hall,” and in Hávamál (Sayings of Hárr) ÓDinn is
said to declaim wisdom from his hall, and giants are said to have once
visited him there.41 From Snorri’s Edda, there is the “master builder” tale,
in which ÓDinn and the other gods unwittingly enlist a jötunn to repair
ÁsgarDr’s defensive wall, which had been damaged in the first war.42 Other
than these apparently primordial events, nothing much happens involving
ÓDinn in his “proper locus.” Most of the time, he is found operating in or
moving through the territory of others, whether giants, humans, or beings
such as Hel, goddess of the underworld of the unprivileged dead. And
while it is true that movement, peril, and conflict are the elements of any
good story—it was not for nothing that J. R. R. Tolkien subtitled his
first novel of Middle-earth “There and Back Again”—it is unlikely that
dramatic considerations alone can account for the dominance of themes
of dislocation in ÓDinn’s myths. The god’s character and activity are fun-
damentally peripatetic. In VafÂrúDnismál (Sayings of VafÂrúDnir) ÓDinn
repeats seven times the refrain “Much have I traveled, much have I
essayed, much have I tested the powers,” and his names include many
that evoke long days on the road: Gangleri (Travel-Weary or Vagabond),
VáfuDr (Wayfarer), Vegtamr (Way-Tamer), Gestr and Gestumblindi (Guest,
Blind-Guest).43 In Gylfaginning (The deluding of Gylfi), the main mytho-
graphic section of Snorri’s Edda, King Gylfi of Sweden, who has come
to inquire from the human œsir, or invaders from Troy, about the gods
whom they worship, exclaims upon hearing a list of ÓDinn’s names, “A
great many names you have given him. And by my faith, that would require
a great deal of learning to give the details and explanations of which events
have given rise to which of these names.”44 One of Gylfi’s hosts confirms
that “some events behind these names were performed in his journeys and
41
“fólcvíg fyrst í heimi . . . í höll Hárs” (Völuspá 21, in Edda, Neckel ed., 5; Hávamál 109,
111, 164). Here and below, I make no attempt to indicate line divisions in citations of poetry.
42
Gylfaginning 42.
43
“FiölD ec fór, fiolD ec freistaDa, fiolD ec reynda regin” (VafÂrúDnismál 3, 44, 46, 48, 50,
52, 54, in Edda, Neckel ed., 45, 66–68). Gangleri is a name for ÓDinn given in Grímnismál 46,
Vegtamr in Baldrs draumar 6, VáfuDr in Grímnismál 54 (“Wayfarer” is the translation of this
name suggested by Lee M. Hollander in his The Poetic Edda, 64, while Richard Cleasby and
GuDbrandur Vigfússon suggest “Waverer” in An Icelandic–English Dictionary, 2nd ed., with
a supplement by William A. Craigie [Oxford: Clarendon, 1874], 684; and Beatrice La Farge
and John Tucker give “waverer” or “roamer” in their Glossary to the Poetic Edda Based on
Hans Kuhn’s Kurzes Wörterbuch [Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992], 274). ÓDinn is called gestr
in VafÂrúDnismál 19, and Gestumblindi in HeiDreks saga ok Hervarar 9; for edition and
translation of the last, see Christopher Tolkien, ed. and trans., Saga HeiDreks Konungs ins
Vitra: The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (London: Thomas Nelson, 1960).
44
“Geysi mörg heiti hafi Âér gefit honum. Ok Âat veit trúa mín at Âetta mun vera mikill
fróDleikr sá er hér kann skyn ok dœmi hverir atburDir hafa orDit sér til hvers Âessa nafns”
(Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 20, in Faulkes ed., 22).
One Line Long

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
made into stories, and you will not be able to be called a wise man if you
cannot tell about those great tidings.”45
Integrally linked to the role of traveler in the medieval north was that
of hall guest. The source that best conveys the connection between these
roles and of each with ÓDinn is the eddic lay Hávamál. Punctuated by
allusions to the god’s quests for knowledge, magic, and sex, much of this
poem consists of advice on travel and hall etiquette dispensed by a wise
figure, presumably though not always explicitly ÓDinn. For example, the
first verse warns, “All entrances, before one goes forward, he should spy
out, he should peer about; because one cannot know, where enemies sit
ahead in the hall.”46 ÓDinn is qualified to give such counsel owing to his
own experiences as hall guest: the plots of several eddic poems revolve
around the feasting of ÓDinn and the gods by the (probably) giant Ægir,
and the prelude to the Völsung legend narrated in several sources has
ÓDinn, Loki, and Hœnir lodge with a man named HreiDmarr. 47 These
stories are atypical, however, in that they have ÓDinn arriving at halls
openly (if not always expectedly), sociably, and with companions. More
often he travels alone, in disguise, and with covert and hostile intent. Traits
of ÓDinn that obscure his identity within the stories but which would have
signaled to audiences his appearance were his hooded cloak, beard, and
(though this likely never helped his disguise much) missing eye. Aside
from the mere fact of his having so many aliases, some of his names ref-
erence his propensity to travel incognito: Grímr and Grímnir (Masked,
Masked One), Svipall (Changeable), Fjolnir (Concealer), SiDhöttr (Long-
Hood), and (as he ironically introduces himself on one occasion) “HárbarDr
[Grey-Beard] I am called, seldom do I hide my name.”48 Perhaps the para-
digmatic story of a disguised ÓDinn on a hostile mission in VafÂrúDnismál,
in which ÓDinn as GagnráDr (Against-Counsel) visits VafÂrúDnir’s hall
45
“sumir atburDir til Âessa heita hafa gerzk í ferDum hans ok er Âat fœrt í frásagnir, ok
muntu eigi mega fróDr maDr heita ef Âú skalt eigi kunna segja frá Âeim störtíDindum” (ibid.).
46
“Gáttir allar, áDr gangi fram, um scoDaz scyli, um scygnaz scyli; Âvíat óvíst er at vita,
hvar óvinir sitia á fleti fyrir” (Hávamál 1, in Edda, Neckel ed., 17). Other typical lines read:
“Wits are a necessity for one who roams widely”; “When a wise and silent man comes to a
homestead seldom does shame befall the wary”; and “No better burden can a man carry on
the road than a store of common sense” (“Vitz er Âörf, Âeim er víDa ratar”; Âá er horscr oc
Âögull kømr heimisgarDa til, sialdan verDr víti vorom”; “ByrDi betri berrat maDr brauto at,
enn sé manvit mikit” [Hávamál 5, 6, 10/11, in Edda, Neckel ed., 17–18]). Translation of
Hávamál 6 and 10/11 from Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 15.
47
Lokasenna is set at a feast in Ægir’s hall over which ÓDinn, though a guest, presides,
while HymskviDa centers around Êórr’s efforts to procure a cauldron capable of brewing the
drink for this feast; Ægir’s feast for the œsir is also mentioned in Skáldskaparmál 33. The
visit of ÓDinn, Hœnir, and Loki to HreiDmarr is narrated in Völsunga saga 14 (for edition
and translation, see Völsunga saga: The Saga of the Volsungs; the Icelandic Text according
to MS Nks 1824 b, 4o, ed. and trans. Kaaren Grimstad [Saarbrücken: AQ-Verlag, 2000]), the
prose introduction and first nine verses of Reginsmál, and Skáldskaparmál 39– 40.
48
“HárbarDr ec heiti, hylc um nafn sialdan” (HárbarDsljóD 10, in Edda, Neckel ed., 79).
The first five names appear alongside many others in Grímnismál 46– 48.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
“to contend in ancient matters with that all-wise giant.”49 The contest
ends when the god poses the unanswerable (to any but him) question,
“What did ÓDinn himself say into the ear of his son, before he was placed
on the pyre?” to which the giant replies: “That is known to no man, what
you in days of old said into your son’s ear. . . . Now I’ve bandied my
word-wisdom against ÓDinn; you will always be the wisest.”50 That ÓDinn
waits until he has delivered the knowledge contest’s coup de grâce to reveal
his identity underscores the tactical nature of his undertaking: his disguise
permits him entry into space controlled by another and gives him the time
needed to maneuver into a position of strength.
The elements of antagonism and danger present in ÓDinn’s visit to
VafÂrúDnir are more pronounced in other tales of his journeys, in which,
rather than “traveler” and “hall guest,” ÓDinn plays the more sinister roles
of “exile” and “hostage.” The theme of exile comes forth most starkly in
Saxo. In book 1 of his history, Saxo writes that ÓDinn “was believed
throughout Europe, though falsely, to be a god. He had the habit of
staying more frequently than anywhere at Uppsala.”51 Northern kings
made a golden effigy of ÓDinn and sent it to him, only to have his wife
Frigg seduce a craftsman into melting and recasting the statue as orna-
ments. “Stung by this double embarrassment,” ÓDinn “took to exile replete
with an honest shame, thinking he would thereby obliterate the stain of his
disgrace.”52 ÓDinn returned to power, but in book 3 of the Gesta Danorum
he is made to undergo a second, less voluntary exile. After he employed
a series of disguises and ruses to rape the princess Rinda and conceive on
her Bo, the fated avenger of his son Baldr, the other “gods, whose prin-
cipal residence was reckoned to be at Byzantium, perceived that Odin had
tarnished the honour of his divinity by these various lapses from dignity
and . . . ensured that he was ousted from his preeminence, stripped of his
personal titles and worship, and outlawed.”53 After a decade or so, “the
49
“forvitni micla qveD ec mér á fornom stöfom viD Âann inn alsvinna iotun” (VafÂrúD-
nismál 1, in Edda, Neckel ed., 45). Translation from Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 40.
50
“hvat mælti ÓDinn, áDr á bál stigi, siálfr í eyra syni?”; “Ey manni Âat veit, hvat Âú í
árdaga sagDir í eyra syni. . . . Nú ec viD ÓDin deildac mína orDspeki, Êú ert æ vísaster vera”
(VafÂrúDnismál 54, 55, in Edda, Neckel ed., 55).
51
“Ea tempestate cum Othinus quidam Europa tota falso diuinitatis titulo censeretur, apud
Vpsalam tamen crebriorem diuersandi usum habebat”; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 1,
in Holder ed., 25. Translation from The History of the Danes, trans. Fisher, 1:25.
52
“Duplici itaque ruboris irritamento perstrictus, plenum ingenui pudoris exilium carpsit,
eoque se contracti dedecoris sordes aboliturum putauit”; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum
1, in Holder ed., 25. Translation from The History of the Danes, trans. Fisher, 1:26.
53
“At dii, quibus precipua apud Bizantium sedes habebatur, Othinum uariis maiestatis
detrimentis diuinitatis gloriam maculasse cernentes, collegio suo submouendum duxerunt.
Nec solum primatu eiectum, sed eciam domestico honore cultuque spoliatum proscribendum
curabant”; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 3, in Holder ed., 80–81. Translation from
The History of the Danes, trans. Fisher, 1:78.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
gods finally took pity on Odin’s harsh exile. Reckoning that he had com-
pleted a severe enough sentence they restored him from filthy rags to his
former splendour. . . . There were some, however, who believed he did not
deserve permission to be reinstated in his rank because, through adopting
actors’ tricks and women’s duties, he had brought the foulest of slurs on
their reputation.”54 While it is tempting to dismiss much of Saxo’s char-
acterization as so much Christian condemnation of a discredited pagan
deity, the substance if not all of the detail of what he describes is con-
firmed by other and older sources, and scholars generally consider the
tradition of ÓDinn’s exile(s) early.55
There are two occasions when ÓDinn is taken hostage by a host. The
first is in the frame narrative of the eddic poem Grímnismál (Sayings of
Grímnir), in which ÓDinn visits the court of GeirrøDr to settle a dispute
between himself and Frigg over the king’s purported lack of hospitality.56
When ÓDinn arrives calling himself Grímnir, GeirrøDr, who had been
54
“tandem Othinus, diis atrocitatem exilii miserantibus, satis iam graues penas dedisse
uisus, squaloris deformitatem pristino fulgoris habitu permutauit. . . . Extitere tamen, qui
ipsum recuperande dignitais aditu indignum censerent, quod scenicis artibus et muliebris
officii suscepcione teterrimum diui nominis opprobrium edidisset”; Saxo Grammaticus,
Gesta Danorum 3, in Holder ed., 81. Translation from The History of the Danes, trans.
Fisher, 1:78.
55
See n. 43 of Davidson’s commentary to Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes,
2:32. In Heimskringla, Snorri, also writing in a historical vein, describes a similar period of
absence for ÓDinn: “ÓDinn had two brothers. One was named Vé and the other Vili. Those
brothers of his ruled the kingdom when he was away. It happened one time, when ÓDinn had
gone far away and tarried a long while, that his return seemed to the œsir past hope. Then his
brothers took to dividing his inheritance, but his wife Frigg they both took possession of. A
little later ÓDinn came home. He then took back his wife” (“ÓDinn átti tvá brœDr. Hét annarr
Vé, en annarr Vílir. Êeir brœDr hans styrDu ríkinu, Âá er hann var í brottu. Êat var eitt sinn, Âá
er ÓDinn var farinn langt í brot ok hafDi lengi dvalzk, at Ásum pótti ørvænt hans heim. Êá tóku
brœDr hans at skipta arfi hans, en konu hans, Frigg, gengu Âeir báDir at eiga. En litlu síDar
kom ÓDinn heim. Tók hann Âá viD konu sinni” [Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga 3, in Heim-
skringla, Bjarni ADalbjarnarson ed., 1:12]). That ÓDinn’s wife slept with his brothers is also
attested in Lokasenna, where Loki proclaims: “Shut up, Frigg! . . . you have always been man-
crazy, when, ViDrir’s [ÓDinn’s] wife, you allowed both Vé and Vili into your embrace”
(“Êegi Âú, Frigg! . . . hefir æ vergiorn veriD er Âá Véa oc Vilia léztu Âér, ViDris qvæn, báDa í
baDm um tekit” [Lokasenna 26, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101]). There is also a perhaps related
tradition about the goddess Freyja, who, to quote Gylfaginning, was married to that man who
is named ÓDr. . . . ÓDr went away to long distances. . . . Freyja has many names, and that is
because she gave herself various names when she went among unknown peoples to look for
ÓDr” (“Hon giptisk Âeim manni er ÓDr heitir. . . . ÓDr fór í braut langar leiDir. . . . Freyja á
mörg nöfn, en sú er sök til Âess at hon gaf sér ymis heiti er hon fór meD ókunnum ÂjóDum at
leita ÓDs” [Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 35, in Faulkes ed., 29]). Though a shadowy fig-
ure, ÓDr is probably to be identified with ÓDinn (see de Vries, “Contributions to the Study of
Othin,” 33–39, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:87–88). Finally, it is worth noting
that not just ÓDinn but certain of his royal offspring suffer periods of exile and outlawry: for
example, in the first chapter of Völsunga saga, ÓDinn’s son Siggi kills a thrall and is declared
an úlfr, a “wolf ” or “outlaw.”
56
In the case of this and other eddic poems, references to prose introductions or interludes
refer to text appearing in the Codex Regius (see n. 15 above).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
warned to beware a treacherous visitor, has “him tortured to make him

speak and set him between two fires, and he sat there eight nights.”57 In
part a meditation on how not to treat a guest, in part an excuse for ÓDinn
to recite cosmological and mythological names useful for constructing
kennings, or circumlocutions employed in skaldic verse, the poem ends
when GeirrøDor, finally recognizing his hostage, leaps up to free him, trips,
and is impaled on his own sword. The second instance of ÓDinn as captive
occurs in the several sources that describe his visit to HreiDmarr.58 It is told
that before ÓDinn and his companions come to HreiDmarr’s house, Loki
killed an otter, which the œsir offer to share as a meal with their host. Un-
fortunately, the otter was really Otr, son of HreiDmarr, and so the aggrieved
host and his remaining sons take the gods captive, threatening to kill them
if they fail to fill up as well as cover entirely their slain kinsman’s pelt
with gold.
What is perhaps most striking about tales of ÓDinn’s captivity is that,
as in the case of his contest against VafÂrúDnir, there is never any sense
that the peril he faces is less than real. He seems truly to be at the mercy
of his captors/hosts, and his life (or at least well-being, if one takes his
foreknown date with the Fenrisúlfr at ragnarök seriously) seems genuinely
to be at stake. And yet ÓDinn is a god—and not just any áss, but the head
deity as well as chief architect of the cosmos—while those threatening him
are giants or humans, beings who by most measures ought to be regarded
as his inferiors. ÓDinn’s disadvantages, however, seem to have less to do
with an objective ranking of his and his opponents’ powers than with the
fact that he is operating tactically, on, that is, someone else’s turf.59 Though
a god, ÓDinn is rarely in a position to accomplish or attain anything by
fiat. Rather, he relies on practices that “are tactical in character . . . vic-
tories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ (whether the strength be that of
powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.),
clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things . . . maneuvers, poly-
morphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.”60 While
Norse myth was unlikely to have been on de Certeau’s mind when he wrote
these words, they nonetheless aptly summarize ÓDinn’s modus operandi.
57
“Konungr lét hann pína til sagna oc setia milli elda tveggia, oc sat hann Âar átta nætr”
(Edda, Neckel ed., 57). Translation from Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 51.
58
See n. 47 above.
59
Interestingly, however, the balance does not shift much in ÓDinn’s favor even when he
is at home. On several occasions, as when Loki crashes the feast of the gods ÓDinn is helping
to host at Ægir’s (see n. 47 above), or when jötnar such as the master builder or Hrungnir in-
filtrate ÁsgarDr (Gylfaginning 42 and Skáldskaparmál 17), ÓDinn is compelled by the con-
straints of hospitality to put up with unwelcome and disruptive guests. In each of these cases,
it is left up to Êórr, with his seeming freedom from or utter lack of concern for social nice-
ties, to expel or eliminate the intruder.
60
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
ÓDinn is not, like the Christian god, a deity who makes one excursion from
his heavenly sphere to place himself willingly at the mercy of his creatures
to obtain a foreseen, certain, and absolute victory; on the contrary, he is
a vagrant god operating time and again on and from the margins, making
the best tactical use of the situations that arise, and fighting a reactionary
battle against eventual but certain defeat. There is nothing “transcendent”
about him.
myths of transience
ÓDinn’s myths express the motif of transience and ephemerality mainly
through their preoccupation with the god’s own. If there is a thematic
thread running through the tales of ÓDinn, it is his struggle to counteract
fate, both his own and that of the world he set in order. Norse religion is
not alone, of course, in its having an eschaton. What sets it apart from
many others, however, is its comprehensiveness: as the Norse apocalypse’s
name in either of its forms suggests, when the day of reckoning arrives,
divine beings and realms will prove just as finite as human ones.61 From
informants he encounters or summons, ÓDinn learns that it will be his fate
at ragnarök to fall in battle against Loki’s offspring the Fenrisúlfr (the wolf
Fenrir). While the sources agree that a new world will emerge from the
cosmic conflagration that consumes the old—though whether this rebirth
is of genuine pagan origin or to be attributed to Christian influence has
been the subject of perennial debate—none indicates that ÓDinn has any
place in it.62
The theme of northern “fatalism,” evident not just in the mythology
but in legendary materials such as Beowulf and versions of the Völsung/
Nibelungen cycle, has been often discussed by scholars. Indeed, as Paul
C. Bauschatz describes, it is “almost a cliché to refer to early Germanic
61
On the forms of this name, see n. 27 above.
62
The most important sources for Norse cosmic history are Völuspá, in which a völva or
female spirit is summoned by ÓDinn to tell him of the beginning and end of things; VafÂrúD-
nismál, in which ÓDinn quizzes VafÂrúDnir on this same topic; and Gylfaginning, which
supplies a prose synopsis of information culled from both poems, here narrated by the human
œsir from Troy to King Gylfi. Major studies of ragnarök include Axel Olrik, Om Ragnarok
(Copenhagen: G. C. Gad, 1914); John Stanley Martin, Ragnarök: An Investigation into Old
Norse Concepts of the Fate of the Gods (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972); and John McKinnell,
Both One and Many: Essays on Change and Variety in Late Norse Heathenism (Rome: Il
Calamo, 1994). The survivors of ragnarök differ between Völuspá and VafÂrúDnismál. In
the former, Baldr and his slayer HöDr, both sons of ÓDinn, are reborn, and Hœnir is mentioned
as present; there is also a reference to the coming of “a powerful, strong one” (“inn ríki . . .
öflugr” [Völuspá 65, in Edda, Neckel ed., 15]) in a half-stanza that has been the subject of
much controversy (Ursula Dronke, for example, omits it from her edition of the poem on the
grounds that it is almost certainly a later, patently Christian interpolation; see Ursula Dronke,
ed. and trans., The Poetic Edda, vol. 2: Mythological Poems [Oxford: Clarendon, 1997],
152–53). In the latter, ÓDinn’s sons ViDarr and Váli and Êorr’s sons Magni and MóDi survive,
along with two humans, Líf and LífÂrasir.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
people as gloomy, humorless, and fatalistic,” and most have come to regard
their mythos as one in which nothing is able to “transcend the tyranny of
the insubstantial. . . . This lack of eternality is, from a Christian point
of view, ‘gloomy’—it is peculiarly un-Christian to conceive of heaven
as not permanent.”63 Such a worldview is also, of course, distinctly un-
Platonic. As Augustine of Hippo, history’s foremost Neoplatonic Chris-
tian spokesman, writes of God in his Confessions: “In you are the constant
causes of inconstant things. All mutable things have in you their immutable
origins. In you all irrational and temporal things have the everlasting causes
of their life.”64 From the perspective of the Greek Academy or Christian
theology the notion of impermanent divinity is not just troubling or gloomy,
but incoherent—the ever-shifting world of experience simply must be
grounded in an unvarying realm of abstract being. Otherwise, as Plato in-
sists, one is left with the possibility of opinion but never of knowledge.65
While of the theorists discussed at the outset of the article, Eliade alone
appears to share Plato’s ontological and epistemological suppositions, all
seem to agree that these are distinctive of religious worldviews in general.
As Lincoln writes in the third of his “Theses on Method,” it ought to be
the job of the historian of religions to discuss “the temporal, contextual,
situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses,
practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as
eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine.”66 But if it is indeed religion’s
aim to legitimize human and historical orders by anchoring these in divine
and cosmic orders, then what are we to make of a religious system in which
the latter are as subject to instability and impermanence as the former?
While distressing from a Platonic/Christian standpoint, the German
sense of doom and gloom has not always been viewed negatively; indeed,
for many romantics and nationalists it has proved a point of perverse,
even Promethean, pride. Condemnation and celebration aside, a number
of explanations for this fatalism have been proposed. These range from
seeing in it a reflection of the oppressive northern clime and attendant
dread of nature, to a meditation on the tendency for feud to spiral out of
control in a society bereft of effective executive powers, to a “real world”
63
Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), xi.
64
“et apud te rerum omnium instabilium stant causae et rerum omnium mutabilium in-
mutabiles manent origines et omnium inrationalium et temporalium sempiternae vivunt
rationes” (bk. 1, chap. 6, in Augustinus Confessiones, ed. M. Skutella [Stuttgart: B. G.
Teubner, 1981], 6–7); translation from Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7.
65
See, e.g., Plato’s Phaedo 65a–67b, where he has Socrates distinguish between sense
perception and true, that is, timeless and abstract, knowledge.
66
Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” 225.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
reaction on the part of heathen Scandinavians to the encroachment of

Christianity and impending extinction of indigenous tradition.67 While
there is likely no single magic bullet that could lay this question to rest,
I will in this article’s final section discuss some social factors that in my
view help to account for Norse religion’s air of uncertainty.
First, however, to establish that ÓDinn’s mythos is characterized by
motifs not only of spatial or social but also of temporal marginality, I
will describe in this section the extent to which his character and stories
are marked by the themes of death, fate, and sacrifice. As mentioned, two
of ÓDinn’s main activities are his questing for knowledge and his gathering
of dead nobles and warriors in Valhöll. Both form part of the god’s prep-
arations for ragnarök and thus are tied to the motif of impermanence. As
to the first activity, though the connection is not always explicit, ÓDinn’s
gathering of knowledge is usually interpreted as an effort to forestall the
apocalypse or mitigate its effects.68 Among his information-gathering tools
are HlíDskjálf and the ravens Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory)
that he sends out each day to collect intelligence about happenings in the
worlds.69 Above all, ÓDinn seeks wisdom from the dead, whose access to
the past grants them certain knowledge of the nonpast or future.70 What-
ever one makes of attempts to link giants to the dead, certain of ÓDinn’s
67
The first possibility is suggested in McKinnell, Both One and Many, 38. The second is
presented in John Lindow, Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian
Mythology (Helsinki: Soumalainen tiedeakatemia, 1997). The third thesis has most often been
applied to the outlook of the composer of Völuspá, a poem in which the balance of pagan and
Christian elements has been a matter of long debate (see Ursula Dronke, “Pagan Beliefs and
Christian Impact: The Contribution of Eddic Studies,” in Viking Revaluations: Viking Society
Centenary Symposium, ed. Anthony Faulkes and Richard Perkins [London: Viking Society for
Northern Research, 1993], 121–27, and The Poetic Edda, Volume II: Mythological Poems,
93–98).
68
See, e.g., Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes, 1:219–28; de Vries, Altgermanische Re-
ligionsgeschichte, 2:66–75; Haugen, “The Edda as Ritual,” 13–15; and Turville-Petre, Myth
and Religion of the North, 35–50.
69
See Grímnismál 20 and Gylfaginning 38.
70
Bauschatz argues for a binary temporal system among pre-Christian Germans, in which
time is not divided into past-present-future, but past versus nonpast: “The past, as collector
of events, is clearly the most dominant, controlling portion of all time. . . . The past is ex-
perienced, known, laid down, accomplished, sure, realized. The present, to the contrary, is in
flux and confusion. . . . What we nowadays call the ‘future’ is, within the structure of this
Germanic system, just more of the nonpast, more flux, more confusion” (The Well and the
Tree, 139). While I do not agree with Clunies-Ross’s full-scale rejection (Prolonged Echoes,
1:238) of Bauschatz’s theory of “Germanic” time, insofar as I find Bauschatz’s discussions
about the determining power of the past upon the “nonpast” useful, it seems unwarranted
to jettison the idea of the future entirely when considering Norse myth, given that ÓDinn is
depicted in a number of sources trying to forestall events that he knows will occur but have
yet to begin. Among the dead whom ÓDinn consults are the völur (sing. völva) or female
spirits whom he raises in Völuspá and Baldrs draumar, the detached head of the wise Mímir
(see Ynglinga saga 7), and hanged men (he is called HangaguD in Gylfaginning 20 and
Hangatyr in Skáldskaparmál 1 and 2, both meaning “God of the Hanged”).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
journeys into Jötunheimar are also clearly aimed at gaining knowledge or

the means to preserve and transmit it.71 Finally, ÓDinn himself undergoes
self-sacrifice and perhaps even death to attain wisdom: in Hávamál, his
hanging and perhaps dying on the ash Yggdrasill allow him to take up and
possess the sacred runes, and the motif of the god’s blindness is linked to
his having deposited one of his eyes in a well—itself probably symbolic
of the past—at the foot of the tree in return for prophetic insight.72
As to the second activity, while the sources do not all agree in making
ÓDinn exclusively the host of those fallen in battle, descriptions of Valhöll
stress this idea, and there is nearly always a class dimension to his involve-
ment with the dead.73 Kennings for battle or the war dead that employ
ÓDinn’s names are ubiquitous in skaldic poetry, and there is a subgenre
of court panegyric that trumpets the arrival of slain kings in Valhöll.74 The
god’s reception of dead warriors is frequently described in terms of sac-
rifice. The sagas present accounts of kings and war leaders who dedicate
those they intend to slay to ÓDinn, often by casting a spear over an
opposing force, an act that mimics that of the god in the war between the
œsir and vanir.75 In so doing, a warrior ensured that, win or lose, he would
make a proper sacrifice to his deity. There are also instances where kings
or important men are offered up more directly to ÓDinn. The most well-
known account of a royal sacrifice is in Gautreks saga, a relatively late
fornaldarsaga. In it, the warrior-poet StarkaDr is a favorite companion of
the successful Viking king Víkarr. Returning from an expedition, the king
and his men “suffered a great head wind. They turned to prophecy to get
a fair wind, and it so fell out that ÓDinn wanted to receive a man by
71
VafÂrúDnismál has been interpreted as a fact-finding mission regarding ragnarök, and
Hávamál 104–10 and Skáldskaparmál G57 describe ÓDinn’s procurement from the jötunn
Suttungr of a magical mead, “whoever drinks from which becomes a poet or scholar” (“hverr
er af drekkr verDr skáld eDa frœDamaDr” [Faulkes ed., 3]; translation from Snorri Sturluson,
Edda, trans. Faulkes, 62).
72
Hávamál 138–41; on ÓDinn’s forefeiture of his eye, see Völuspá 28 and Gylfaginning 15.
73
In HárbarDsljóD (Song of HárbarDr), a poem in which Êórr and a disguised ÓDinn trade
insults over a river, the latter declares that “ÓDinn has the earls, those who fall in battle, and
Êórr has the race of thralls” (“ÓDinn á iarla, Âá er í val falla, enn Êórr á Âræla kyn” [Hár-
barDsljóD 24, in Edda, Neckel ed., 82]), while in Grímnismál it is reported of the goddess
Freyja that “she chooses half the slain each day, and ÓDinn has half ” (“hálfan val hon kyss
hverian dag, enn hálfan ÓDinn á” [Grímnismál 14, in Edda, Neckel ed., 60]). On exceptions
to Valhöll’s door policy, see de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:377–78.
74
For example, we read in Eyvindr Finnsson’s Hákonarmál that “Gautatyr [ÓDinn] sent
Göndull and Skögull to choose among kings, who of Yngvi’s kindred [royalty] should with
ÓDinn fare and in Valhöll dwell” (“Göndul ok Skögul sendi Gautatyr at kjósa um konunga,
hverr Yngva ættar skyldi meD ÓDni fara ok í Valhöll at vesa” [Eyvindr Finnsson,
Hákonarmál 1, in Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems, ed. and trans. N. Kershaw (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1922), 104]).
75
See Chadwick, The Cult of Othin, 7–8, for a list of sources in which a spear is cast over
an enemy host. For ÓDinn’s doing so over the vanir, see Völuspá 24.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
hanging, chosen by lot from the army. . . . King Víkarr’s lot came up.”76
The king and his men decided to hold a mock hanging and stabbing to
appease (or fool) ÓDinn. StarkaDr, however, is instructed by his foster
father Hrosshársgrani, who has been revealed to him to be ÓDinn in
disguise, on how to make the sacrifice real, and the king ends up being
killed by calf ’s guts that transform into a noose and a reed that becomes
a spear during the crucial moment in the ceremony. Such betrayal by
ÓDinn of a former favorite is far from singular. While at times such epi-
sodes are accompanied, as scholars’ emphases on moral appraisal might
lead us to expect, by condemnation of the god’s actions or motivation,77
just as often no negative judgment is made; instead, the turnabout in
fortune is accepted or even justified. In Völsunga saga, for instance,
ÓDinn appears in the midst of a battle being fought by his own scion Sig-
mundr and uses his spear to break Gramr, the sword that he had earlier
given to the king. As he lies dying, Sigmundr laconically states: “Odin
no longer wants me to wield a sword. . . . I fought battles as long as he
wanted me to.”78
Berger has suggested that a central function of religion is its “integra-
tion into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations
in which the reality of everyday life is put in question. . . . [It] maintains
76
“fekk andviDri mikit. Êeir felldu spán til byrjar, ok fell svó at ÓDinn villdi Âiggja mann
at hlutfalli at hanga ór hernum . . . kom upp hlutr Víkars konungs” (Gautrekssaga 7, in
Ranisch ed., 28).
77
For example, in what is likely one of the older eddic lays, the warrior Dagr declares
apropos the internecine strife in which he is embroiled, “ÓDinn alone causes all evil, because
he bore runes of strife between kinsmen” (“einn veldr ÓDinn öllo bölvi, Âvíat meD sifiungom
sacrúnar bar” [HelgakviDa Hundingsbana önnur 34, in Edda, Neckel ed., 158]); in Lokasenna,
Loki says to ÓDinn that “often you gave, that which you should not give, victory to the less
worthy” (“opt Âú gaft, Âeim er Âú gefa scyldira, inom slævorom, sigr” [Lokasenna 22, in Edda,
Neckel ed., 101]), and ÓDinn in replying does not disagree; and in the tenth-century skaldic
encomium Eiríksmál, when rumor of King Eiríkr blóDøx’s death reaches Valhöll one among
the einherjar asks ÓDinn, “Why did you deprive him of victory when he seemed to you to be
brave?” (“Hví namt Âu hann sigri Âá er Âér Âótti hann snjallr vera?” [Eiríksmál 6, in Anglo-
Saxon and Norse Poems, Kershaw ed., 96]).
78
“Vill ÓDinn ekki at vér bregDum sverDi síDan. . . . Hefi ek haft orrostur meDan honum
líkaDi” (translation and text [spelling, capitalization, and punctuation normalized] from Völ-
sunga saga, Grimstad ed., 118–19). As another example, in Eiríksmál, while some among
the einherjar are upset that ÓDinn has betrayed such an illustrious king, they seem to accept his
explanation that he has done so because the time of ragnarök “cannot be known . . . the grey
wolf peers at the gods’ abode,” and the poem ends on a triumphant note: “ ‘Hail to you, Eiríkr,’
said Sigmundr, ‘You shall be welcome here! . . . Which warriors follow you from battle?
‘There are five kings,’ said Eiríkr . . . ‘I am myself the sixth’ ” (“ ‘Âví at óvíst er at vita,’ sagDe
ÓDenn, ‘sér ulfr enn hösve á sjöt goDa.’ ‘Hæill Âú nú Æiríkr,’ kvaD Sigmundr, ‘væl scalt Âú
hér kominn! . . . hvat fylgir Âér jöfra frá eggÂrymu?’ ‘Konongar eru v,’ sagÂi Eiríkr . . . ‘ec em
hinn sétti sjalfr’ ” [Eiríksmál 6–8, in Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems, Kershaw ed., 96, 98]).
A similar happy ending is found in HelgakviDa Hundingsbana önnur, in which Helgi, the
kinsman slain by Dagr, is made ÓDinn’s virtual coregent in the warrior’s afterlife (HelgakviDa
Hundingsbana önnur 39 and preceding prose interlude, in Edda, Neckel ed., 158–59).

78.ff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of

an all-encompassing sacred reality.”79 Applying this insight, it might be
argued that ÓDinn’s function as god of war and death was primarily the-
odical, insofar as his feasting of slain warriors until world’s end recon-
ciled those facing the prospect or reality of defeat and violent death to their
fate. Thus, while ÓDinn’s decision that an illustrious warrior should die
in battle could on one level be seen as a stab in the back, it was also a
flattering and even necessary determination. As long as a king or hero
won battles and killed others, he served ÓDinn’s purpose by swelling the
ranks of the einherjar; eventually, however, if he were really any good,
the god would wish to add him to their number. Rather, therefore, than
soft-pedal what to many observers have seemed the perfidious acts of
an im- or amoral god, the sources tend to be direct and unapologetic in
describing this dimension of his character. As Snorri perhaps sums it up
best in describing the relationship of ÓDinn and kings in Ynglinga saga:
“to some he gave victory, and some he summoned to himself. Either choice
seemed good.”80 In considering, moreover, this theme in light of ÓDinn’s
more general associations with death and sacrifice, moral questions seem
largely beside the point. The myths in which ÓDinn turns his back on
storied warriors—while simultaneously, of course, welcoming them into
his company—appear in their wider context less meditations on the cost
of shattered loyalties or the unreliability of an inferior god (though they
may be these in part) than reflections on the fleeting nature of power and
all ordered systems. They are one more way in which ÓDinn symbolizes
transience.
óDinn, poets, and kings

In this last section, I return to the two questions posed at the outset of
my account of major motifs in the myths of ÓDinn. To rephrase the first
slightly: if ÓDinn was, arguably, Norse religion’s central figure and, more
certainly, god of the late pagan political and cultural elite, why does he so
often in myths produced and consumed by this elite occupy or operate from
marginal positions? Second, how might or ought the transient quality of
the Norse cosmos and its principal guardian modify the conviction that a
major function of religion as cultural practice is to supply an eternal and
transcendent—in short, unassailable—foundation for ephemeral and
human institutions and values? While, to repeat an earlier point, these
questions are framed in such a way that the first is of most use for attain-
ing insight into the construction and reception of ÓDinn’s mythos within its
79
Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 42, 44.
80
“Gaf hann Âá sumum sigr, en sumum bauD hann til sín. Êótti hvárrtveggi kostr góDr”
(Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga 9, in Heimskringla, Bjarni ADalbjarnarson ed., 1:22).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
medieval Scandinavian context and the second for assessing arguments

about the claims of religious orders to objectivity and permanence, they are
not unrelated. Above all, determining whether, for whom, and why ÓDinn’s
myths held meaning is a necessary preliminary to assessing their relevance
to a consideration of general definitions and functions of religion. Further-
more, while the former question applies mainly to motifs of dislocation and
thus theory about religious conceptions of space and the latter to motifs
of transience and thus theory about religious conceptions of time, the issues
they address are not easily separable. For whether one is speaking of space
and centers or of time and eternity, the essence of the standard claim re-
mains that religions provide anchors to the absolute. As Eliade puts it
in a phrase to which none of our scholars would likely object, religion
provides for “the legitimization of human acts through an extrahuman
model.”81 The problem that remains, however, is just what sort of model
this is or has to be.
Before addressing these questions, it must be admitted that in studying
Norse materials we are dealing with a “mythology” in only a very restricted
sense. While in any attempt to describe a religion or one of its dimensions
there is the risk, to quote Lincoln, that we will “mistake the ideological
positions favoured and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of
the group as a whole,” the perspective we have on Norse paganism may
be more limited than usual.82 In this case, we do not have anything like a
comprehensive data set providing insight into beliefs and values at all
levels of a culture, but rather the partially fossilized remains of a tradition
as it was envisaged and recorded by a narrow and elect fragment in an era
of social and religious transition. What we have, in essence, is a poet’s-
eye view of Norse myth, whether accessible directly in the work of eddic
and skaldic composers or at one remove, as in the poetics of Snorri or the
sagas and histories that rely heavily and often explicitly on verse tra-
ditions.83 Or, to consider the problem from the side of the consumer, the
vast majority of these works we know to have been produced for royal,
noble, or other elite patrons. Rather than argue, then, that this material
somehow represents the common ideology or ethos of the Norse “people,”
I will limit myself in what follows to suggesting ways in which the ÓDinnic
motifs described above reflect the social situation, outlook, and interests of
poets, their patrons, and those who later preserved and adapted their work.
Whether this lessens or vitiates this material’s potential for contributing
81
Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 27.
82
Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” 226.
83
It is doubtful whether any meaningful social distinction can be drawn between eddic and
skaldic composers. See John Lindow, “Mythology and Mythography,” in Old Norse-Icelandic
Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 32–33.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
to the formulation or critique of general theories of religion/mythology is

a question I will take up at the end of the article.
It has often been assumed that elite members of a society, in addition
to favoring conservative ideologies that help to preserve the status quo,
will value and promote symbolism of the center. As Smith explains, how-
ever, this assumption holds only for certain kinds of elites:
A locative map of the world . . . guarantees meaning and value through structures
of congruity and conformity. Students of religion have been most successful in
describing and interpreting this locative, imperial map. . . . Yet, the very success
of these topographies should be a signal for caution. For they are largely based on
documents from urban, agricultural, hierarchical cultures. The most persuasive
witnesses to a locative, imperial world-view are the production of well organized,
self-conscious scribal elites who had a deep vested interest in restricting mobility
and valuing place. . . . In most cases one cannot escape the suspicion that, in the
locative map of the world, we are encountering a self-serving ideology which
ought not to be generalized into the universal pattern of religious experience and
expression.84
Once one has gotten past the presumption of a universal conjunction

between locative maps and social elites (let alone the notion that all
people everywhere privilege the center), the way is open to see how the
myths of ÓDinn, with their radical and often overdetermined symbolism
of marginality, reflect or express the social realities and interests of their
major producers and consumers. For insofar as they fulfilled their norma-
tive roles, poets and kings were, like their god, perpetual travelers and
guests.
As for poets, known skalds were after 900 almost exclusively Ice-
landers. 85 Iceland was intensively settled from 870 to 930 largely by
Norwegians who, according to Iceland’s earliest historians, rejected and
fled the centralization of royal authority being pursued by King Haraldr
hárfagri (Fairhair).86 It remained a land with neither king nor court until
84
Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 292–93.
85
For discussion of Icelanders’ virtual monopolization of skaldic court poetry from this
date, see, among others, Faulkes’s introduction to his Edda translation, xii–xiii; Roberta Frank,
Old Norse Court Poetry: The Dröttkvœtt Stanza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978),
23; Hans Kuhn, Das Dróttkvœtt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), 284–85; E. O. G. Turville-
Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 43, and Myth and Religion
of the North, 21.
86
The two most important sources for the period of Iceland’s settlement are Ari Êorgilsson’s
Íslendingabók (ca. 1122–23); and Landnámabók (Book of settlements; early 1100s), the
original version of which Ari may also have had a hand in producing (see Ari Êorgilsson,
The Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók), ed. and trans. Halldór Hermannsson (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1930); and Finnur Jónsson, ed., Landnámabók I–III: Hauksbók.
Sturlubók. Melabók (Copenhagen: Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 1900).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
its acceptance of Norwegian sovereignty from 1262 to 1264. While there

may have been possibilities during these centuries for Icelandic poets to
ply their craft at the farmsteads of goDar (sing. goDi ), or chieftains, at
home, those who aspired to the position of hirDskáld, or court poet, had
little choice but to travel to Norway, Denmark, or Sweden and seek out
patrons among an ever-shifting network of kings and nobles. Such am-
bition is so common in the sagas that John Lindow has coined the term
“poet’s travel pattern” to refer to tales in which an Icelandic protagonist
“relies on verbal skill to obtain, maintain, or regain a favoured position
with the monarch,” and there can be little doubt that the sources in this case
reflected social realities.87 The poet was not the only roving partner in this
exchange, however. The first thing an aspiring hirDskáld newly arrived on
the shores of the Scandinavian mainland, or sometimes the British Isles,
had to ascertain where a king and his hirD were currently at. Snorri’s Óláfs
saga helga (Saint Óláfr’s saga) describes how two skalds, a father and son,
entered into the service of King Óláfr Haraldsson at different times and
places:
ÊórDr Sigvaldaskáld was the name of an Icelandic man. He had for a long time
been with Earl Sigvaldi and later with Êorkell the Tall. . . . He met Óláfr when
the king was raiding in the west and became his man, and followed him after-
wards. . . . Sigvatr was ÊórDr’s son. . . . When he was nearly a grown man he
went abroad with merchants and came by ship in the fall to Trondheim. . . .
That same winter King Óláfr came to Trondheim. . . . And when Sigvatr heard
that his father ÊórDr was there with the king, then Sigvatr went to the king, met
his father ÊórDr and stayed there a while.88
More than two centuries later, Snorri, himself an aspiring court poet, was
in a situation similar to that of the skalds of his saga. During a two-year
visit to Norway in 1218–20, he and his desired patrons King Hákon
87
John Lindow, “Skald Sagas in Their Literary Context 1: Related Icelandic Genres,”
in Skaldsagas: Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, ed. Russell
Poole (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 219. An interesting study that looks at itinerant and
politically active poets in a much different context, but many of the insights of which can be
applied to that of medieval Scandinavia, is Alan Cameron, “Wandering Poets: A Literary
Movement in Byzantine Egypt,” Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 14 (1965):
470–509.
88
“ÊórDr Sigvaldaskáld hét maDr íslenzkr. Hann hafDi verit lengi meD Sigvalda jarli ok
síDan meD Êorkatli háva. . . . Hann hitti Óláf konung, er hann var í vestrvíking, ok gerDisk
hans maDr og fylgDi honum síDan. . . . Sigvatr var sonr ÊórDar. . . . En er hann var náliga vaxinn
maDr, Âá fór hann útan af landi meD kaupmönnum, ok kom skip Âat um haustit til Êránd-
heims. . . . Êann sama vetr kom Óláfr konungr í Êrándheim. . . . En er Sigvatr spurDi, at ÊórDr,
faDir hans, var Âar meD konungi, Âá fór Sigvatr til konungs, hitti ÊórD, föDur sinn, og dvalDisk
Âar um hríD” (Snorri Sturluson, Óláfs saga helga 43, in Heimskringla, Bjarni ADalbjarnarson
ed., 2:54).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
Hákonarson and Earl Skúli BárDarson stayed at various points and in

various combinations in Túnsberg, Trondheim, Bergen, and Gautland.89
The mobility of Scandinavia’s kings can be traced to the ancient his-
tory and likely prehistory of Germanic social organization, in which the
custom of not having a fixed place of royal residence or single center of
political power runs deep. The Franks, to take a notable example, only
established a royal city in Aachen under Charlemagne, who mimicked in
this not his ancestors but the Roman rulers he was poised to replace in the
west: his capital was thus more of an imperial than a royal affectation.90
As Birgit and Peter Sawyer describe, this rootlessness of Germanic kings
and their followings persisted for some time in Scandinavia: “Even in
the early Middle Ages kings were not solely dependent on the land they
owned. They could claim hospitality for themselves, their retinues, and
perhaps even their agents. . . . This right . . . was so abused that in the late
thirteenth century attempts were made in all three kingdoms to regulate
it. The general obligation to contribute food and materials needed by the
royal household as it traveled from place to place was, in effect, one of
the earliest taxes.”91 Snorri describes Óláfr Haraldsson making such rounds
in the early eleventh century:
[Óláfr] sent other men to Uppland with that message to prepare entertainment
[boDa veizlur; veizla here refers to the legal obligation to provide hospitality for
a king and his retinue] for himself, and that he intended that winter to make the
rounds [fara at veizlum] of Uppland because that had been a custom of the earlier
kings to make the rounds of Uppland every third winter. He began the journey in
the fall from Borg. The king went first to Vingulmörk. He arranged the journey
such that he received hospitality [taka veizlur] up in the neighborhood of the
forest districts and he summoned to himself all of the inhabitants.92
89
These movements are reported in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar 53 and 59, in Sturla
ÊórDarson, Hákonar Saga and a Fragment of Magnús Saga with Appendices, ed. GuDbrandur
Vigfússon (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1887), and Íslendinga saga 35 and 38, in vol. 1
of Sturlunga Saga, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason, and Kristján Eldjárn, 2 vols.
(Reykjavík: Sturlunguútgáfan, 1946).
90
As Judith Herrin writes: “Since Charles had inherited the tradition of an itinerant court
and had spent all his reign in movement between one palace or villa and another, the decision
to construct a more permanent residence constituted a break from Frankish tradition” (The
Formation of Christendom [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987]), 446; see also
the literature cited by Herrin on 446– 47 n. 3).
91
Birgit Sawyer and Peter Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reforma-
tion, circa 800–1500 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 91.
92
“sendi hann aDra menn til Upplanda meD Âeim ørendum at boDa veizlur fyrir sér, ok
ætlaDi hann at fara Âann vetr at veizlum yfir Upplönd, Âví at Âat hafDi verit siDr inna fyrri
konunga at fara at veizlumn hinn ÂriDja hvern vetr yfir Upplönd. Hóf hann ferDina um haustit
ór Borg. Fór konungr fyrst á Vingulmörk. Hann háttaDi svá ferDIinni, at hann tók veizlur uppi
í nánd markbyggDinni ok stefndi til sín öllum byggDarmönnum” (Snorri Sturluson, Óláfs saga
helga 73 in Heimskringla, Bjarni ADalbjarnarson ed., 2:100–101). For more on the practice

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
Evidence for the perdurance of perambulatory kingship in Scandinavia

in the Middle Ages is archaeological as well as literary. Stefan Brink sum-
marizes recent assessments of northern political and social structures in
and prior to the medieval period based upon excavations of royal banquet
halls situated in so-called “central place complexes”:
In the political system that can be discerned in Viking-Age Scandinavia, power

seems to have been exercised through the itineration of a political leader (king,
chieftain, deputy, etc.) between different centres of power, where political, legal
and maybe religious matters were dealt with. This has been called an ambulatory
or itinerant kingship. . . . This itinerant exercise of power in the prehistoric and
early medieval Scandinavian societies had as a consequence that the king never
had any permanent control over the whole realm at the same time. The autonomy
of the different provinces and settlement districts was remarkably strong . . .
during the whole of the Middle Ages.93
Further, Brink states that while it has proven “possible to find the (main)
sites for both a superior king and for petty-kings and chieftains of the Late
Iron Age in especially eastern Scandinavia . . . these individuals probably
never were geographically static. What we find are probably the sites of
the hall-buildings of these leaders,” all of which “were most certainly never
actually lived in.”94
So long as kings presided over and poets sought entry into circum-
ambulatory courts that for their settings and very materialization relied
upon the labor and hospitality of others, and which were integral to main-
taining authority in a political system that was decentralized, diffuse, and
and conventions governing royal processions in all of the Scandinavian kingdoms as well as
of chieftains in Iceland, see the entry for “Gästning” in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk
middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1961),
6:2–19.
93
Stefan Brink, “Political and Social Structures in Early Scandinavia: A Settlement-
Historical Pre-study of the Central Place,” Tor 28 (1996): 239– 40.
94
Stefan Brink, “Social Order in the Early Scandinavian Landscape,” in Settlement and
Landscape: Proceedings of a Conference in Århus, Denmark, May 4–7 1998, ed. Charlotte
Fabech and Jytte Ringtved (Moesgård: Jutland Archaeological Society, 1999), 433, and
“Political and Social Structures in Early Scandinavia,” 247. Brink also supplies a good ex-
ample of literary testimony to continued attention to the infrastructure for itinerant kingship
into the mid-1200s from a near-contemporary report of the reign of Hákon Hákonarson
(r. 1217–63): “hann let gera trehallina i konungsgardi i Nidarosi (he made the wooden hall
at the royal estate in Nidaros), hann let gera veizluhall aa Steig (he made a banqueting-hall
in Steig), hann let gera bu aa Hofi i Breidinn ok veizsluhall . . . , hann let gera veizsluhall i
Husabœ i Skaun a Heidmork ok adra a Ringisakri (he made a farm and a banqueting-hall at
Hof in Breidinn . . . , he made a banqueting-hall in Husaby in Skaun in Heidmork and another
one in Ringisaker)” (Brink, “Political and Social Structures,” 242–43, quoting and translating
from the version of Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar [here titled Saga Hakonar konungs gamla,
or The Saga of King Hákon the Old] in GuDbrandr Vigfússon and C. R. Unger, eds., Flatey-
jarbok: En samling af norske konge-sagaer, 3 vols. (Oslo: P. T. Mallings, 1868), 3:232–33.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
more personal than territorial in basis, it is difficult to see how either group
could develop, recalling Smith’s phrase, a “vested interest in restricting
mobility and valuing place.” Indeed, we first observe such valuing of place
with the arrival in Scandinavia of the type of scribal elite that Smith de-
scribes as promoting locative ideology in the ancient Near East, in this
case churchmen who not only carried with them literacy and continental
culture and connections but helped to foster an urban sensibility among
Scandinavia’s monarchs. As Norwegian historian Knut Helle describes, the
conversion-era reigns from 995 to 1066 of “kings such as Óláfr Trygg-
vason, Óláfr Haraldsson and Harald the Hard-Ruler” were marked not only
by “political unification,” “religious unification,” and “the introduction of
the first elements of a Norwegian church organization” but by a growing
awareness of “the importance of urban centres. The later kings’ sagas
depict them as active promoters of the first Norwegian towns” and as
having played “an important role in giving such places full urban status
in the eyes of contemporaries.”95 Archaeologist Charlotte Fabech also
affirms a causal link between christianization and the privileging of unique
political/religious centers in Scandinavian polities: “As long as the de-
central pagan social system worked, it was difficult for a king to establish
a proper royal centre. . . . The conversion to Christianity . . . legitimised
a concentration of power to fewer sites, and the towns were thus given an
advantage compared to the rural settlement of manors, church villages and
marketplaces. . . . A permanent royal residence and the thought of a capital
town only occurred centuries later.”96
Do such facts and their interpretation suggest, however, that Scandi-
navian elites prior to conversion accepted Smith’s alternative map, the
utopian, that which stresses “the value of being in no place,” “which per-
ceives terror and confinement in interconnection, correspondence and repe-
95
Knut Helle, “The History of the Early Viking Age in Norway,” in Ireland and Scandi-
navia in the Early Viking Age, ed. Howard B. Clarke, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and Raghnall Ó
Floinn (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 258. Elsewhere, Helle describes the appearance of the
“first Norwegian towns,” sites that were not just trade but also political and ideological centers,
as “an indication of a certain degree of royal and ecclesiastical centralization” (“Part 1:
Down to 1536,” in Norway: A History from the Vikings to Our Own Times, ed. Rolf
Danielsen, Ståle Dyrvik, Tore Grønlie, Knut Helle, and Edgar Hovland, trans. Michael Drake
[Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995], 32). Taking a more nuanced view, but one that
extends to the Danish and Swedish kingdoms, archaeologist Johan Callmer writes that while
talk of urban centers and urbanization should not be limited to the period after ca. 1000, it
nonetheless seems that a “new type of town combining the role of centre and trading place
was introduced . . . in the second half of the 10th century” (“Urbanization in Scandinavia and
the Baltic Region c. AD 700–1100: Trading Places, Centres, and Early Urban Sites,” in De-
velopments around the Baltic and the North Sea in the Viking Age: The Twelfth Viking Con-
gress, ed. Björn Ambrosiani and Helen Clarke [Stockholm, 1994], 79).
96
Charlotte Fabech, “Centrality in Sites and Landscapes,” in Fabech and Ringtved, Settle-
ment and Landscape, 470–71.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
tition,” and through which “man turns in rebellion and flight to a new world
and a new mode of creation?”97 Again, it should be noted that Smith’s
maps are temporal as much as spatial: the utopian does not so much
valorize “no place” as relocate privileged space or conditions to a future
time or outside of time, in eternity. Still, from either angle it seems clear
that those who produced and consumed Norse myths, and especially myths
of ÓDinn, were neither locative nor utopian mapmakers. The map of these
Norse mythmakers might best be described as “tactical,” in de Certeau’s
sense of the term: rather than privilege any single, several, or even all of
the cosmos’s multiple and competing centers, the “aggregate of farm-
steads” described by Gurevich, Norse myths valorize the ability, pre-
eminently embodied by ÓDinn, to move through and make use of spaces
controlled by others, with the aims of co-opting resources, defusing threats,
and shifting, if only temporarily, the balance of powers in one’s favor.
Rather than “terror and confinement in interconnections,” such a map’s
makers perceive risk but also opportunity in movement between its
multiple nodes. In terms of time, there is in this tactical map neither “re-
bellion” against the state of things nor a pronounced desire for “flight
to a new world and a new mode of creation.” ÓDinn is not a savior or
messiah who appears to lead alienated adherents out of present chaos or
disenfranchisement into eternal order and power, but a god who joins his
followers in an unrelenting struggle that all are aware can only end in
their own destruction. One finds in ÓDinn’s myths no expectation or hope
that the efforts of even the supreme tactician will result in his ultimate
ascension to the position of strategist, but rather acquiescence to the fact
that he will and must continue to employ tactics until reaching his, and his
world’s, inevitable extinction.
While it would be possible to halt my analysis with the claim that
ÓDinn’s career and character reflect the shared social conditions and in-
terests of poets and kings, it seems to me that his myths also provide evi-
dence for competition between these groups and ambivalence in their
relations. For while poets and kings can be treated as members of a single
stratum of medieval Norse society, they did not share equally in the dis-
tribution of resources and capacities accorded value in their rarefied sphere:
each group had something the other wanted owing to its dominance in
one of two arenas of experience. Simply put, kings held the edge in terms
of space, skalds in terms of time. Recognizing this allocation of advantages
helps us to understand the essence of their transactions: kings provided
poets with a space in which to operate and prosper, while poets supplied
kings with a means to extend their names and reputations in time. Each
97
Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 101, 309.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
side’s desire for what the other had to offer is explicit in the sources.
For example, the ninth-century poet Einarr Helgason recites: “The gold-
sender [poet] lets the getter of land [king] enjoy Yggr’s mead [poetry];
the prince gladdens the host of men, I am permitted to receive his lar-
gesse.”98 And Snorri Sturluson boasts in his Háttatal (List of meters), the
longest and among the latest of skaldic panegyrics, that “the princes’ praise
will live forever unless humanity passes away, or the worlds end.”99 While
the proposed exchange may appear unbalanced insofar as skalds’ contri-
bution is less tangible than what kings had to offer, those involved were
unlikely to have seen it this way—in what is, for good reason, among the
most cited snippets of Old Norse verse, Hávamál intones: “Cattle die,
kinsmen die, you yourself will die the same; but fame will never die, for
him who wins it.”100
Given that poets and kings were at liberty to supply (or not) something
those in the other group highly desired but could not secure for them-
selves, it is worth considering whether myths of ÓDinn provided an arena
wherein not only common interests and perspectives were expressed, but
tensions between these groups played out. The first thing to note in this
respect is that ÓDinn more often assumes a role typical of poets than of
kings, arriving at a hall unannounced, unknown, with something to offer
his host but almost always uncertain of his reception. There emerges,
moreover, from several sources a pattern in which ÓDinn enacts what
might be labeled motif 1 (spatial and/or social marginality) so as to
activate or realize motif 2 (ephemerality of authority). The frame story of
Grímnismál provides one of the clearer examples of this pattern. Its prose
prelude introduces the princes Agnarr and GeirrøDr, who, having been lost
at sea and washed ashore on an island, are fostered by Frigg and ÓDinn,
disguised as a peasant couple. Though GeirrøDr is the younger brother,
ÓDinn conspires to have him take his father’s place as king, while con-
signing Agnarr to a fate “raising children with a giantess in a cave.”101
When ÓDinn later travels as Grímnir to GeirrøDr’s hall, Frigg arranges
matters so that GeirrøDr will suspect his guest of sorcerous ill intent and
seize him as soon as he arrives. ÓDinn’s only relief as he spends the
length of the poem suspended between two fires is provided by the king’s
98
“Gollsendir lætr grundar (glaDar Âengill her drengja), hans mæti knák hljóta, hljót Yggs
mjaDar njóta” (Vellekla 33, in Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning BI: Rettet tekst, ed. Finnur
Jónsson [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912–15; repr., Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1973]), 123.
99
“Âat mun æ lifa nema öld farisk, bragnifinflga lof, eDa bili heimar” (Snorri Sturluson,
Háttatal 96, in Faulkes ed., 38).
100
“Deyr fé, deyia frœndr, deyr siálfr it sama; enn orDztírr deyr aldregi, hveim er sér góDan
getr” (Hávamál 76, in Edda, Neckel ed., 29).
101
“elr born viD gygi í hellinom” (in Edda, Neckel ed., 56). Translation from Larrington,
The Poetic Edda, 51.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
son, also named Agnarr, who according to the prose epilogue assumes
the crown after GeirrøDr falls on his sword.
While it has been doubted whether this narrative supplies the original
context of the poem, the relevant elements are present in the verse as well
as its frame. The motif of disguise remains, as ÓDinn provides a lengthy
list of assumed names before stating his own in the final verse; he clearly
undergoes an ordeal in another’s hall; most important, owing to his (mis)-
treatment as a guest, he ends the reign of a king and inaugurates that of
his heir. As the god declares: “Eight nights I sat here between the fires, so
that no one offered me food, except Agnarr alone, who alone shall rule,
GeirrøDr’s son, the land of the Goths.”102 GeirrøDr’s lack of hospitality
also robs him of a king’s afterlife; as ÓDinn informs him near the poem’s
conclusion, “you lose much when you lose my favour, and that of all the
einherjar.” 103 A similar story is found in HeiDreks saga ok Hervarar,
in which ÓDinn assumes the identity of Gestumblindi, a not-so-clever
adherent who wishes to reconcile with King HeiDrekr. ÓDinn as Gestum-
blindi visits the king and agrees to redeem himself by winning a riddle
contest. When ÓDinn reveals his identity with the (more question than)
riddle about his whispered message on Baldr’s funeral pyre, HeiDrekr
shouts “You alone know that, vile creature!” and tries with his sword to
strike the god down.104 As ÓDinn flies off in falcon’s form (less some tail
feathers), he calls back, “For this, King Heidrek, that you have attacked
me, and would slay me without offence, the basest slaves shall be the death
of you.”105 The curse soon comes to pass, and HeiDrekr’s son Angantyr
takes his place. The fact that HeiDrekr had earlier killed and usurped the
place of his older brother Angantyr while being fostered by the “wisest
of men” Gizurr GrytingaliDi, in whom critics have seen yet another
double of ÓDinn, ties this story even more closely to that which frames
Grímnismál.106
A third example of this pattern is found in Völsunga saga. Here, a royal
wedding feast is interrupted when “a man came into the hall alone . . .
unknown to any . . . he has a spotted cloak over himself . . . and a hood
down over his head. He was hoary and old and one-eyed . . . No one
102
“Átta nætr sat ec milli elda hér, svá at mér mangi mat né bauD, nema einn Agnarr, er
einn scal ráDa, GeirroDar sonr, Gotna landi” (Grímnismál 2, in Edda, Neckel ed., 57).
103
“miclo ertu hnugginn, er Âú ert míno gengi, öllom einheriom oc ÓDins hylli” (Grím-
nismál 51, in Edda, Neckel ed., 67). Translation adapted from Larrington, The Poetic
Edda, 59.
104
“Êat veiztu einn, rög vættr!” (translation and text from Saga HeiDreks Konung ins Vitra,
Tolkien ed., 44).
105
“Fyrir Âat, HeiDrekr konungr, er Âú rétt til mín ok vildir drepa mik saklausan, skulu Âér
inir verstu Ârælar at bana verDa” (ibid.).
106
“manna vitrastr” (ibid., 21). On the parallels and possible relation of these two sources
or stories, see Tolkien’s introduction, xvi–xviii.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
welcomed that man.”107 The newcomer, who is of course ÓDinn, sinks a

sword into a tree growing in the midst of the hall, declaring that whoever
draws it out will have his support. Since ÓDinn later shatters this same
sword as it is wielded in battle by King Sigmundr, the weapon is clearly
meant to serve as a symbol of the god’s bestowal and removal of favor. If
this story is less concentrated in its presentation of motifs than the other
two, the pattern and ideas are the same; in all three, a disguised ÓDinn
appears as a less than welcome guest and, after the lord of the hall and/
or his following fail a test of hospitality and/or trustworthiness, effects a
transfer of royal authority.
My last example is a story that extends this combination of motifs,
having ÓDinn enact motif 1 (marginality) so as to exploit motif 2
(ephemerality) in a way that alleviates motif 1 for another, a warrior-
poet. Örvar-Odds saga is the tale of Oddr Grímsson, nicknamed “Arrow-
Oddr,” whom ÓDinn assists in various guises and situations. In the rele-
vant episode, Oddr, having fallen on such hard times that he has gone into
exile in the woods, clad himself in bark, and repudiated his true name,
happens upon the farm of a certain Jólfr and his wife. The couple take the
“Bark-man” in, and Jólfr, who is ÓDinn, soon offers to help Oddr find a
place in the following of the local king, HerrauDr. As they near the king’s
hall, however, Jólfr grows hesitant: “ ‘Why are you now dragging your
feet?’ said Oddr. ‘Because,’ said the old man, ‘I will be placed in
shackles if I come inside here, and because of this I will be happiest
when I am going away.’ ‘No,’ said the Bark-man, ‘we two shall clear the
way together, and I will not allow anything other than you carrying
on.’ ”108 Once they enter the hall, Jólfr is molested as predicted, but with
Oddr’s help comes before HerrauDr, to whom he introduces his com-
panion. Though Oddr still refuses to provide his name and will not admit
to having any useful skills, the king accepts him into his hirD. When
Oddr’s talents and identity are eventually made known, HerrauDr invites
him to sit “in the high seat next to himself. . . . The king lays such great
honor on Oddr, that he valued no man more than him.”109 In time, Oddr,
107
“maDr einn gekk inn í höllina, sá maDr er mönnum úkunnr at syn . . . hann hefir heklu
flekótta yfir sér . . . ok hött síDan á höfDi. Hann var hár mjök ok eldiligr ok einsynn. . . .
Öllum mönnum fellust kveDjur viD Âenna mann” (Völsunga saga 3, in Grimstad ed., 82–83
[with spelling, capitalization, and punctuation normalized]).
108
“ ‘Hví setr Âú nú fætr viD?’ sagDi Oddr. ‘Êví,’ sagDi karl, ‘at ek em færDr í fjötur, ef ek
kem hér inn, ok verD ek Âví fegnastr, at ek komumst í burt.’ ‘Já,’ sagDi NæframaDr, ‘vit skulum
ryDjast at báDir saman, ok má ek ekki annat en Âú farir meD’ ” (Örvar-Odds saga 24, in For-
naldarsögur NorDurlanda, ed. GuDni Jónsson, 4 vols. [Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan,
1954], 2:301).
109
“byDr honum í hásæti hjá sér. . . . Konungr leggr svá mikla virDing á Odd, at engan mann
mat hann meira en hann” (Örvar-Odds saga 27, in Fornaldarsögur NorDurlanda, ed. GuDni
Jónsson, 2:321).

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
with the aid of magical arrows given him by Jólfr, defeats HerrauDr’s
enemies and is wedded to his daughter, and when the king dies it is he
who succeeds him.
In considering how these stories combine and employ ÓDinnic motifs,
a certain bias emerges. In each, a representative or embodiment of mar-
ginality, whether this is ÓDinn or someone he aids, comes out on top
over a representative or, perhaps more accurately, victim of ephemerality,
namely, a king. In other words, those who lack (initially) control over
space consistently trump those who lack control over time. Of course,
such victories are never absolute, since in overcoming spatial or social
marginality one becomes ever more subject to transience—no transition
from tactician to strategist can be permanent. This point is demonstrated
above all by the doubled use in Grímnismál of the name Agnarr and in
HeiDreks saga of Angantyr, to denote first a victim and second a bene-
ficiary of ÓDinn’s tricks, and between whom in both instances are sand-
wiched kings whom ÓDinn installs only later to remove.110 In addition,
then, to understanding ÓDinn and his career as reflecting the social sit-
uation of poets and kings, as well as a means of symbolically mitigating
the anomic consequences of their shared condition, we may perceive in
them something of a veiled threat or assertion of superiority directed from
the primary producers to the primary consumers of his myths.
Finally, it remains to consider our second overarching question, whether
and to what extent the above observations regarding the myths of ÓDinn
challenge the view that it is the quintessential function of religion to supply
things human, characterized by impermanence, contingency, and unreality,
with meaning or authority derived from things divine, characterized by
eternity, absoluteness, and reality. Though I see no reason to doubt that
pagan northerners looked to their myths as social charters, regarding
mythic figures, events, and patterns as models for and of their own
practice, I find nothing to suggest that the charter or signification thus
supplied was regarded as eternally valid or utterly transcendent. Nor do I
find much to indicate that this was a source of anxiety for the makers and
consumers of the myths. While like any god worthy of the name, ÓDinn
offered adherents an elevated image of themselves, his was a more realistic
than idealized reflection. ÓDinn was a god whose nature and experiences
closely paralleled his followers’ own, up to and including the qualities of
itinerancy and transience. The difference, in short, separating ÓDinn from
humans was quantitative, not qualitative.
110
The ineluctability of transience is also demonstrated by the fact that Oddr, even though
he has a preternaturally long life of three hundred years, eventually succumbs to a cradle-
side prophecy, and by the way in which ÓDinn in the Völsung cycle does not rest until he has
claimed virtually every last member of the tribes he has set at odds.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC
One way to avoid the complications this observation poses for defini-
tions of religion that rest upon a Platonic-Augustinian insistence that a
radical gulf separate spiritual from terrestrial modes of existence is, of
course, to deny that the sources for ÓDinn supply us with insight into
genuine myth or religion. This is essentially what Eliade tried to do with
another set of materials known for its anthropomorphic gods and fatalism:
“Homer,” he writes, “was neither a theologian nor a mythographer. . . .
He had composed his poems for a specific audience: the members of a
military and feudal aristocracy. . . . He avoided evoking religious or myth-
ological conceptions that were either foreign to his essentially patriarchal
and military auditors or in which they took little interest.111 Here, Eliade
rejects the authentic religiosity of the Homeric hymns because they fail
to speak either for or to the insights and hopes of archaic humanity. In so
doing, Eliade commits a fallacy opposite of that which Lincoln cautions
against—rather than mistake an elite ideology for normative religion, he
seeks to disqualify it from religious status altogether. If such materials,
however, are accepted as data for theory about religion, they raise un-
deniably important considerations, such as the implication that religion
or myth need not involve a search for eternal verities or union with un-
changing Being, or that religious legitimation for human action and justi-
fication for human existence are not always grounded in entities or realities
regarded as fundamentally transcendent or Other. In short, the myths of
ÓDinn suggest that, for some religions at least, the realm of becoming is
quite enough to worry about.
Western Michigan University
111
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row,
1963), 149.

78.23.68.5 on Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:10:27 UTC

God On The Margins Dislocation and Transience in The Myths of Óðinn

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

God On The Margins Dislocation and Transience in The Myths of Óðinn

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

God on the Margins: Dislocation and Transience in the Myths of Óðinn

Author(s): Kevin J. Wanner

This content downloaded from

space, time, and the history of religions

ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

“man is no longer deﬁned by the degree to which he harmonizes himself

This content downloaded from

the socially deﬁned reality . . . in the ultimate reality of the universe, in

This content downloaded from

northern Europe as preserved mainly in medieval Scandinavian and,

óD& inn: sources, character, and scholarship

This content downloaded from

degree of pagan authenticity it might be judged to have. This seems to

This content downloaded from

them Norwegian, conceived of and related to ÓDinn.19 ÓDinn and other

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

their “twilight.”27 He is often described by the sources and scholars alike

One Line Long

This content downloaded from

overall character of ÓDinn’s mythic itinerary, the most pressing question

myths of spatial dislocation and social marginality

a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation

According to these deﬁnitions, ÓDinn emerges from the sources as more

This content downloaded from

One Line Long

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

One Line Long

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

warned to beware a treacherous visitor, has “him tortured to make him

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

reaction on the part of heathen Scandinavians to the encroachment of

This content downloaded from

journeys into Jötunheimar are also clearly aimed at gaining knowledge or

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

the socially deﬁned reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of

óDinn, poets, and kings

This content downloaded from

medieval Scandinavian context and the second for assessing arguments

This content downloaded from

to the formulation or critique of general theories of religion/mythology is

Once one has gotten past the presumption of a universal conjunction

This content downloaded from

its acceptance of Norwegian sovereignty from 1262 to 1264. While there

This content downloaded from

Hákonarson and Earl Skúli BárDarson stayed at various points and in

This content downloaded from

Evidence for the perdurance of perambulatory kingship in Scandinavia

In the political system that can be discerned in Viking-Age Scandinavia, power

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from