Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 A seated figure in a cloak and long robe, wearing a cap and a necklace of several rows, on a chair whose posts end in beasts’ heads, a bird perched on each arm of the chair, after the silver figure from Lejre

Odin

Odin was the chief of the Norse gods: god of kings, war and the dead, and of poetry and magic, who gave an eye for wisdom. His signs are the spear Gungnir, the ravens Huginn and Muninn, the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the wolves Geri and Freki and the gold ring Draupnir.

Norse gods and their symbols. Also called allfather, odin god, óðinn, odin norse mythology, odin symbol, odin symbols, woden, wotan.

Meaning

Odin (Old Norse Óðinn, said OH-din in English) is the highest of the gods in Norse myth. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda says “he rules all things”, and that the other gods “all serve him as children obey a father”. The Danish encyclopedia Lex names him the god of kingship, war and death, and of poetry too, and traces his name to a root meaning fury, ecstasy and poetry. The National Museum of Denmark calls him the god of war and of the dead, the lord of Valhalla, “the hall of the slain”, worshipped “first and foremost” by kings, warrior chieftains and their men. Nearly everything told about him comes from the Poetic Edda and Snorri’s Prose Edda, which Lex dates to about 1230. Both were written by Christians, and the museum warns that they show “more how Christians perceived” the gods than how the Vikings did. Odin is worshipped today: The Troth, the American Heathen organisation, calls him “one of the most prominent gods in Heathenry today”.

Origin and history

Odin’s name was written centuries before the Eddas. On a gold bracteate of about AD 400 from the Vindelev hoard, found north of Jelling in 2020, Lex reads the runes above a riding prince as “he (is) Wod(i)n’s man”, the oldest known form of the name. A piece of human skull from Ribe, carved with runes in the 700s and probably worn as protection, names Odin clearly as one of three gods. Gotland picture stones of the 700s to 900s show an eight-legged horse that Store norske leksikon takes to be Sleipnir, its rider Odin or a dead warrior on his way to Valhalla. In the 1070s Adam of Bremen described Odin as one of three gods at Uppsala, his image armed with a spear (Lex). Place names keep his cult: Store norske leksikon finds them most often in Denmark and Sweden and hardly at all in south-western Norway or Iceland, and Lex derives Odense, Oens, Oddense and Vojens from Odins vi, “Odin’s sanctuary”. Wednesday is his day too, Old Norse óðinsdagr, a translation of the Latin dies Mercurii, Mercury’s day (Store norske leksikon).

The eye, the tree and the mead

Odin paid for what he knew. In the Eddic poem Voluspo the seeress tells him: “I know where Othin’s eye is hidden, / Deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir”. The National Museum of Denmark gives the usual reading: he has one eye because he gave the other to Mímir to be allowed to drink from the well of wisdom. In Hovamol, Odin himself tells of nine nights on a tree: “With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was / To Othin, myself to myself”, and then “I took up the runes, shrieking I took them”. Lex notes that the tree is usually taken to be the world tree, Yggdrasil. A third story, in Lex, has Odin steal the intoxicating mead of inspiration from a giant, which made him the source of the skalds’ difficult art of poetry.

Spear, ravens, wolves and ring

Store norske leksikon lists what Odin owns. The spear Gungnir never sticks fast, and from the gold ring Draupnir eight rings of equal weight drip every ninth night; dwarfs made both. The ravens Huginn and Muninn sit on his shoulders when they are not flying over the world, and he rides Sleipnir. He gives all his food to the wolves Geri and Freki and lives on wine, as the Eddic poem Grimnismol says: “Freki and Geri does Heerfather feed… But on wine alone does the weapon-decked god, / Othin, forever live.” Lex reads the wolves as the war god’s animals, from the wolves that ate the dead on the battlefield, and the one eye and the ravens, whose names mean “mind” and “memory”, as signs of his magical insight.

Odin or Frigg on the Lejre chair?

The nearest thing to a Viking Age picture of Odin enthroned is a silver figure found at Lejre on Zealand in 2009: 1.75 cm high, 9 grams, probably from the 900s. It shows a person on a chair whose four posts end in animal heads, with a bird on each arm; the strong beaks, Lex says, make them ravens. Roskilde Museum, which shows it at Lejre Museum, calls it Odin on his high seat Hlidskjalf flanked by Huginn and Muninn, and its archaeologist Julie Nielsen calls it a rare physical confirmation of stories known mainly from writing. The Lex entry, written with the museum, is more cautious. From feminine features of the dress it has been proposed that the figure is Odin’s wife Frigg, and the ridge under the nose that would make it a man’s moustache may be a mouth. Strictly, Lex says, the figure shows only a person of high status in Viking society, though Odin seems likely.

Odin worshipped today

The Troth writes that “the Odin we worship today is different” from the Odin of the past. It describes teachers, scientists and scholars who pray to him for success in teaching or learning, and artists who make offerings to him for the inspiration they count as his gift. In Denmark the National Museum describes modern blóts at which Odin “can be invoked for wisdom”, and in Iceland Ásatrúarfélagið prints a calendar with the old names of the weekdays, óðinsdagur among them. The Troth puts Odin first in its list of the gods Heathens most commonly worship.

Odin in modern fiction

Lex sets two modern Odins side by side: the wise, peace-loving but somewhat senile Odin of the Marvel universe, and the cunning, shabby Mr. Wednesday of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel American Gods.

See also

Huginn and Muninn, Sleipnir, Yggdrasil, Baldr, Bragi, Thor.

Sources

  1. Odin (Lex), Morten Warmind, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
  2. Odin (Store norske leksikon), Hallvard Magerøy and Ellen Næss, Store norske leksikon
  3. Odin-figuren fra Lejre, ca. 950 (Lex), Kasper H. Andersen and Tom Christensen, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
  4. Odin fra Lejre skal på mission i rummet, ROMU (Roskilde Museum)
  5. The Viking gods, National Museum of Denmark
  6. The old religion, National Museum of Denmark
  7. The old Nordic religion today, National Museum of Denmark
  8. The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation), Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (trans.), 1916, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Internet Archive), Gylfaginning, chapter XX
  9. The Poetic Edda (Bellows translation), Henry Adams Bellows (trans.), 1923, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Project Gutenberg), Voluspo, stanza 29; Hovamol, stanzas 139–140; Grimnismol, stanza 19
  10. Onsdag (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
  11. Odin (The Troth), The Troth
  12. The Gods (The Troth), The Troth, table
  13. Vor siður (Ásatrúarfélagið), Ásatrúarfélagið
  14. Odin (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

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