Odin: All-Seeing, All-Knowing...Allfather

Odin is the god of a lot of different things, not all of which seem to go together. For example, he is a god of war, of the sky, of death...and of poetry. I guess all those other things would provide material for poems, right? Odin is considered the father of all gods (hence the name Allfather). His wife is named Frigg, and two of his sons are Thor and Balder, although there are others.

If you’ve seen pictures of Odin, or seen him in a certain movie or two, you’ve probably noticed that he wears an eyepatch. Sadly, as far as I know Odin is not a god of pirates. Nor was his eye lost in a glorious battle against the frost giants. Instead, Odin voluntarily gave his eye to a being named Mimir.

I talked about the wells that water Yggdrasil in my last post. If you remember, one of the wells was kept by a being named Mimir I promised to talk about in this post. Mimir was a god that was sent to an opposing army as part of a hostage exchange. He ended up getting his head cut off. The severed head was then sent back to Odin, who preserved the head, allowing it to speak. Anyone else having creepy flashbacks to the Governor and Woodbury? Yeesh.

Anyway, Mimir was a very wise god, and he imparted his wisdom to Odin whenever asked. This wasn’t enough for Odin, though, so he traded one of his eyes to Mimir in exchange for possessing the knowledge himself. Odin’s eye is somehow placed at the bottom of the well by Mimir (seriously, how does a body-less head do that? And why?), making me NEVER want to drink from it.

So now you know that Odin is not a pirate (sorry to crush your hopes and dreams.) He does, however, have some awesome animal companions (no, not a parrot. Sorry again.) We’ve previously discussed Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse whose mother was Loki. Odin also has two wolves named Geri and Freki.

Because of this, Norse warriors believed a wolf on the battlefield to be a good sign from Odin. He also had two raven companions named Hugin and Munin, who flew around the world gathering information for him. This is yet another instance where Marvel got it right. My favorite scene from the Avengers (which is saying a lot) is when Thor kidnaps Loki from the plane and is talking with him. At the start of their conversation, two ravens can be seen flying past. SO cool.

Odin can often be found wandering Midgard (i.e., Earth) in various myths. He always wears a cloak and wide-brimmed hat when he does so, and frequently offers his aid to mortal heroes.

In fact, Odin is often seen as a benefactor to humans. He welcomes slain heroes in his palace of Valhalla, where he feasts them until the day of Ragnarok; he provided knowledge of runes to mankind; it was because of him that mead which grants the gift of poetry was spilled on Midgard, allowing humans to become poets.

Odin was a wise and just king who was kind to his subjects and ruled well. Unfortunately, his reign was not to last, for the Doom of the gods was fast approaching. Next time we’ll be talking about Ragnarok, so come prepared for a depressing post. As always, leave your questions and comments below, or feel free to email me. Until next time!