Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Child Of

This page groups deities by their divine parent, the genealogical link myths use to connect one god to another. The Greek poet Hesiod's Theogony is the clearest ancient example of this kind of divine family tree, its very title glossed by Wikipedia as meaning "the genealogy or birth of the gods". Browsing by parentage lets a visitor trace how a mythology builds its gods into generations rather than treating each one in isolation.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
The gods of Norse and wider Germanic religion. The corpus is overwhelmingly Icelandic and overwhelmingly post-conversion: the Eddic poems and Snorri's prose were written in a Christian society two centuries after Iceland accepted Christianity, and what they preserve is shaped by that. Roman ethnography, place-names, bracteates and runic inscriptions are what check them. 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
Iceland, Norway and the Scandinavian world, from which nearly the whole surviving mythological corpus comes 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
The continental and Anglo-Saxon Germanic peoples, whose gods are attested far more thinly, mainly in place-names, Roman notices and a handful of charms 2
Attestation
Era of Attestation
Germanic gods are named by Roman writers from the first century CE; the surviving mythological corpus is the Icelandic Eddic and skaldic poetry and Snorri's prose, of about 1200. 2
Veneration Today
The pre-Christian cult ended with conversion; no continuous worship links it to the present. 2
Veneration Today
Venerated in the modern Heathen and Asatru religions, which are movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and describe themselves as such. 3
Directory
Category
Deities 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Norse gods and symbols have been claimed by white-nationalist groups. Heathen organisations in Europe and North America have repudiated that use publicly and by name, and the dispute is a documented feature of the modern movement rather than of the medieval sources. 3
Learn More
The gods of the Norse world

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.

A cosmos under threat

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.

Child Of
Filter Results6 entries

Baldr

Child Of
1 entry

Frigg

Child Of
1 entry

Loki

Child Of
1 entry

Njord

Child Of
2 entries

Odin

Child Of
5 entries

Sif

Child Of
1 entry
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Dictionary of Northern Mythology
Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall, D. S. Brewer, 1993IntroductionView the Source
3. American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religion Movement
Jennifer Snook, Temple University Press, 2015chs. 5-6
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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