Norse

The Norse gods come in two families that fought each other first. The Aesir and the Vanir are described as having gone to war and then settled, exchanging hostages, which is how Njord, Freyr and Freyja come to live among the Aesir. Nothing else in the north European material is arranged quite like this, and the settlement rather than the war is the structural fact: the pantheon is a merger.

Odin rules, though the nature of his rule is strange. He is a king who travels in disguise, buys knowledge by mutilation, and is preoccupied throughout with an ending he already knows is coming. Thor is more widely worshipped, judging by names and amulets, and the gap between who is chief in the poetry and who is chief in practice is a real feature rather than an inconsistency.

There is no creator god. The world is assembled from the body of a killed giant, Ymir, and the gods are makers and organisers rather than originators. Time in this pantheon runs toward a catastrophe in which most of the named figures die, and a small remnant of gods and of humanity survives into what comes after.

Human beings do not become gods here. The dead go to Odin's hall or to Freyja's field or to Hel, and the einherjar who train in Valhalla are being kept for a battle, not promoted. What the living owed the dead was cult of a different kind, given to ancestors and to the land, and that is a separate thing from membership of the pantheon.

Nearly everything systematic that is known about the Norse gods was written down in Christian Iceland, two centuries or more after the conversion, by men who did not worship them. That single fact should govern how the material is read.

Snorri Sturluson is the reason a coherent Norse mythology exists at all. His Edda was written as a handbook for poets who needed to understand the old allusive vocabulary, and it is organised, explanatory and immensely readable. It is also a thirteenth-century reconstruction by a Christian politician, framed at the start with a rationalising account of the gods as migrant human kings. Where Snorri is the only source for something, it is genuinely uncertain whether he recorded a tradition or tidied one.

The Poetic Edda, preserved chiefly in a single Icelandic manuscript, is older in language and less organised, and it is the closest thing to a pre-Christian voice in the corpus. Skaldic verse is older still and harder, and because its metre resists alteration it preserves divine names and kennings with unusual reliability, even when it says almost nothing about what they meant.

Outside Iceland the evidence is fragmentary but independent, and it is worth more than its bulk suggests: Adam of Bremen on the temple at Uppsala, Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark, runic inscriptions, place names, picture stones, amulets and grave goods. Where those agree with Snorri, confidence rises. Where they do not, it is Snorri who is the outlier.