Odin

Odin is the most complex figure in the Norse pantheon — a king of gods who behaves less like a warrior-chief than a restless seeker of hidden knowledge. He traded an eye at Mímir's well for a single drink of wisdom, hung himself from the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights, pierced by his own spear, to seize the runes, and stole the Mead of Poetry from the jötnar. He wanders Midgard in disguise as a one-eyed, grey-bearded traveller in a broad hat, testing hospitality and gathering intelligence for the doom he knows is coming.

From his high seat Hliðskjálf he sees across all the worlds. His ravens Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) fly out each dawn and return with news; his wolves Geri and Freki flank his throne; his eight-legged horse Sleipnir carries him between worlds. Half of those slain in battle come to his hall Valhalla, chosen by his valkyries, to fight and feast until they march out beside him at Ragnarök — where Odin himself is fated to be devoured by the wolf Fenrir, and avenged by his son Víðarr.

The god who pays for everything

The Eddas never show Odin receiving wisdom as a gift. Every scrap of knowledge he owns has a price tag, and he always pays. This is the thread that binds his scattered myths into a single character: a king who knows the world will end, who knows he cannot prevent it, and who spends the whole of mythic time buying whatever advantage can be bought.

He is the eldest of the sons of Borr and the giantess Bestla, and with his brothers Vili and Vé he killed the primordial giant Ymir and built the world from the corpse — sky from skull, mountains from bones, sea from blood. Walking the new shore, the three brothers found two trees and made from them the first humans, Askr and Embla, Odin giving them breath and life. So the god of the dead is also, at the very beginning, the giver of life — and every human carries his loan.

Why did Odin sacrifice his eye?

Beneath one of Yggdrasil's three roots lies Mímisbrunnr, the well of Mímir, in which wisdom and understanding are hidden. In Gylfaginning, Snorri tells it plainly: Odin came asking for a single drink, and Mímir would not give it until the god laid an eye in the well as a pledge. Völuspá's seeress needles him with it — she knows where his eye is hidden, down under the bright water, where Mímir drinks his mead each morning.

Why an eye? The myth never explains, and that silence is part of its power. What it shows instead is an exchange of sight for insight: the god gives up half of ordinary seeing to gain the kind that matters. Ever after, the one eye is his signature — the mark by which disguised wanderers in the sagas are recognised too late, after the old man in the hall has already given the cursed sword or the winning advice and gone.

Even the well's keeper serves him past death. When the Vanir beheaded Mímir after the Æsir–Vanir war, Odin embalmed the head with herbs, sang spells over it, and kept it as a counsellor. On the eve of Ragnarök, Völuspá shows him in murmured conference with Mím's head one last time.

The hanging on the world-tree

The strangest and most quoted of Odin's myths comes from his own mouth. In Hávamál, the "Sayings of the High One," he speaks of hanging on the windswept tree for nine full nights, wounded by a spear, given to Odin — "myself to myself" — on a tree of which no one knows where its roots run. He was given no bread, no drinking horn. He peered downward, took up the runes, took them screaming, and fell back.

It is a sacrifice with no priest and no altar, the god making himself both offering and recipient. What he seized in that moment of extremity were the runes — not merely letters but the carved keys to power over the world, the magic later taught to gods, elves, dwarves, and humankind (see Odin's sacrifice). Hávamál follows the hanging with a catalogue of the spells he won: charms to blunt blades, break fetters, quench fire, calm seas, win women, and make the hanged dead walk and talk with him. That last one is no ornament — Odin the gallows-god, Hangaguð, harvests knowledge from corpses, and in Baldrs draumar he rides down to the gates of Hel to wake a dead seeress and interrogate her about his son's nightmares.

The theft of the Mead of Poetry

Poetry itself, the Norse said, was stolen goods. When the Æsir and Vanir made peace, they sealed it by spitting into a vat, and from the spittle shaped Kvasir, the wisest of beings. Two dwarves murdered him and brewed his blood with honey into the Mead of Poetry; through a chain of killings the mead passed to the giant Suttungr, who hid it inside a mountain under the guard of his daughter Gunnlöð.

Skáldskaparmál tells how Odin got it back, and it is a portrait of the god at his most ruthless. Calling himself Bölverkr, "Evil-worker," he engineered the deaths of nine mowers, worked a summer's labour for Suttungr's brother in payment for one sip, was refused, bored into the mountain as a snake, spent three nights with Gunnlöð, and drained all three vats in three draughts she granted him. Then he turned into an eagle and flew for Asgard with Suttungr in eagle-shape behind him, spitting the mead into the gods' waiting vessels as he crossed the wall. Ever since, poetic skill is Odin's gift, and a poem is a share of the theft — though Snorri adds, with a poet's malice, that the dribble Odin let fall outside the wall is the portion of bad poets.

Lord of Valhalla and the ecstatic god

Odin's very name comes from óðr — frenzy, inspiration, the surge that possesses poets, prophets, and berserks alike. Ynglinga saga in Heimskringla describes him as a master of shape-shifting and of seiðr, the ecstatic fate-magic he learned from Freyja — a craft so entangled with womanhood that practising it exposed the Allfather to charges of unmanliness, which Loki duly hurls at him in Lokasenna. Odin absorbs the insult and keeps the power. He would rather be shamed than ignorant.

As Valföðr, "father of the slain," he presides over Valhalla, where the einherjar fight all day, rise whole at evening, and feast on the boar Sæhrímnir and mead from the goat Heiðrún. Odin himself eats nothing at the feast; he gives his food to his wolves and lives on wine alone. The arrangement looks like paradise and functions as conscription — he is stockpiling an army. This is also why Odin is such a treacherous patron in the heroic sagas: he grants victory to favourites like Sigmund and Starkad, then abruptly claims them, because a hero is worth more to him dead in Valhalla than alive in the world. Half the slain, it should be said, are not his at all — Freyja takes her pick first, for Fólkvangr.

He is also a god of contests of knowledge. In Vafþrúðnismál he stakes his head in a riddle-match with the giant Vafþrúðnir and wins by the one unanswerable question — what did Odin whisper in Baldr's ear on the pyre? In Grímnismál, tortured between two fires in a king's hall, he recites the geography of the heavens before revealing himself, too late for his tormentor.

At Ragnarök

Odin knows exactly how he dies, and rides out anyway. When Heimdallr sounds the Gjallarhorn, Odin rides first to Mímir's well for counsel, then leads the einherjar onto the plain of Vígríðr in a gold helmet and a fair mail-coat, carrying Gungnir. He makes straight for Fenrir — the wolf he ordered bound in the deed that cost Týr his hand — and the wolf, grown so vast its jaws scrape sky and earth, swallows him whole. Víðarr avenges him at once, tearing the wolf's jaws apart. Völuspá calls Odin's death the "second grief of Hlín," Frigg's sorrow after Baldr's. The Allfather's long arms race ends the only way he ever knew it would; the point, the myths suggest, was never to win but to meet the end knowing everything.

In the primary sources

Odin dominates the Poetic Edda: Hávamál is framed as his own wisdom-speech and contains the hanging; Völuspá is a prophecy delivered to him; Grímnismál and Vafþrúðnismál are built around his disguises; Baldrs draumar sends him to Hel; he duels wits with Thor in Hárbarðsljóð and trades insults in Lokasenna. In the Prose Edda, Gylfaginning presents him as Allfather and narrates the eye, Valhalla, and Ragnarök, while Skáldskaparmál gives the Mead of Poetry in full. Ynglinga saga in Heimskringla makes him a euhemerised migrating king from Asia, ancestor of Scandinavian dynasties, and Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum tells earthier, often scandalous versions of his wanderings.

Legacy

Wednesday — Old English Wodnesdæg, "Woden's day" — still carries his name, as do place-names like Odense in Denmark and Wednesbury in England. Worshipped across the Germanic world as Woden and Wotan, he was the patron of kings, poets, outlaws, and the battle-dead; Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies traced themselves to him even after conversion. He rides on through Wagner's Wotan, through Wednesday itself, and through every modern retelling that reaches for the image of the one-eyed wanderer in the broad hat.