All Norse Deities

This group holds the deities of Norse and wider Germanic religion, known chiefly from Icelandic sources, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, written down in the thirteenth century, after conversion, and from earlier scattered evidence. The gods fall into two families, the Aesir and the Vanir, once at war and later reconciled.

The browser will find Odin, the one-eyed god of war, wisdom and poetry; Thor, the thunder-god and defender of the world; the fertility deities Freyr and Freyja; the trickster Loki; and figures bound to the coming doom of Ragnarok. The atlas notes that the surviving myths were recorded by Christian authors and that pre-Christian belief must be reconstructed with care.

What distinguishes the Norse gods is a cosmology shadowed by its own ending: the world-tree Yggdrasil, the nine worlds it holds, and the foretold destruction of the gods at Ragnarok, from which a renewed world emerges. The gods are powerful but mortal, bound by fate.

These figures were revived in the modern Heathen and Asatru movements and are objects of contemporary devotion as well as historical study; the entries distinguish the medieval literary record from later and modern reconstruction.