Wodan- Germanic GodDeity"All-Father"

The Fury

Wodan's name comes from Proto-Germanic wōðaz: fury, ecstasy, inspired possession. The same root gave Old English wōð, meaning song and eloquence. Battle-rage and poetic inspiration were the same force.

Tacitus, writing in the first century, described Germanic warriors who went into battle with a frenzy that made them impervious to fear and seemingly to pain. Later Norse sources name these warriors berserkir and úlfheðnar, bear-shirts and wolf-skins, men who fought without armor in states of ecstatic rage, howling and biting their shields. The frenzy was Wodan's gift, his nature flowing into mortal vessels.

He wandered in disguise, wide-brimmed hat shadowing his face, dealing in secrets. He gathered the battle-dead to build his army. He granted victory and revoked it according to his own purposes. Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, described the great temple at Uppsala where an image of Wodan stood armed for war. Sacrifices hung from the trees of a sacred grove nearby: men and animals suspended from the branches in echo of the god's own self-hanging.

The Lombard Name-Giving

The Origo Gentis Langobardorum preserves one of the few surviving continental myths about Wodan. The Winnili tribe faced war with the Vandals, and the Vandal king prayed to Godan (their name for Wodan) for victory. Godan promised it to whichever tribe he saw first at sunrise, positioning himself to face the Vandals' camp.

But Frea, Godan's wife, had her own plans. She told the Winnili women to unbind their long hair and tie it around their faces like beards, then stand facing the east. When Godan awoke at dawn, he saw them and asked, "Who are these long-beards?" Frea answered: "You have given them a name. Now give them victory." By naming them, Langobardi, the Long-beards, Godan had bound himself to their cause. He had no choice but to grant what his own word had created.

Ancestor of Kings

The royal genealogies of Anglo-Saxon England converge on a single divine ancestor: Woden. The kings of Wessex and Northumbria, of Mercia and Kent, all traced their lineages through generations of legendary heroes back to the god. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records these genealogies. Bede mentions the tradition in his Ecclesiastical History. Kingship ran through Woden's blood.

He was not distant. He fathered heroes and set the bloodlines of nations in motion. The Norse Ynglinga saga preserves the parallel tradition, with Odin as ancestor of the Yngling dynasty. Snorri Sturluson, writing in the thirteenth century, recast Odin as a historical chieftain who migrated from Asia and founded the Scandinavian kingdoms, rationalizing as history what had once been a claim of divinity in the royal blood.

The Wild Hunt

On the longest nights of winter, when storms howl across the sky, Wodan rides at the head of the Wild Hunt: a spectral cavalcade of the dead, racing through the darkness with black dogs and wolves, their clamor heard in the shrieking wind. The Hunt rides during the Twelve Nights between Christmas and Epiphany, though older traditions may have placed it differently in the year.

Encountering the Wild Hunt was dangerous. One might be swept up and carried away, driven mad, or struck dead with fright. Yet leaving offerings out for the Host could bring blessing. In Germanic folk tradition, Faithful Eckart ran ahead of the Hunt, warning mortals to take shelter before the spectral host thundered past.

Wodan's name was sometimes replaced in later tellings, by Charlemagne or Dietrich von Bern or the Devil, but the core image held: the god of the dead riding forth on winter nights, the boundary between worlds worn thin by storm and darkness.

The Power of Words

Two surviving charms preserve glimpses of Wodan as he was actually invoked in practice.

The Second Merseburg Charm, in Old High German, recounts how Phol and Wodan rode together into the forest and Balder's foal sprained its leg. Sinthgunt and Sunna attempted healing. Frija and Volla attempted healing. None could mend the injury. Then Wodan spoke over it, "as he well could": bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as if they were glued together. The charm worked. Human practitioners used the same formula afterward, invoking Wodan's original act to mend sprains and fractures.

The Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm records a second act of divine power: "A serpent came crawling, it bit a man. Then Woden took nine glory-twigs, struck the adder so it flew apart into nine pieces." The charm was used to treat snakebite and infection, calling on Woden's precedent.

The Hanged God

The Norse sources preserve what the continental evidence only hints at. In the Hávamál, Odin describes his self-sacrifice: "I know that I hung on a windy tree, nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no one knows from what roots it runs." Starving and pierced, he seized the runes, the sacred alphabet of power, and fell back screaming with the knowledge.

He sacrificed an eye at Mímir's Well, trading half his sight for wisdom drawn from the deepest source in the cosmos. His one eye stares from beneath the wide-brimmed hat. The Merseburg Charm's spoken power, the runes scratched across the Germanic world, the bodies hanging from the trees at Uppsala: the same god, paying the same price.

The Forsaking

When the Saxons were converted to Christianity, their baptismal vow required them to renounce Wodan by name: "Do you forsake Thunaer and Woden and Saxnote and all the demons who are their companions?" Accepting Christ was not enough. The old bonds had to be explicitly broken. Wodan was named alongside the thunder god and a Saxon deity as one of the three powers that held the pagan world together.

Wednesday still bears his name.