This page groups deities by whether their existence in belief is considered fully mythological, debated, or grounded in a historical cult that can be traced. Wikipedia defines historicity as "the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality of being part of history instead of being a historical myth, legend, or fiction." Browsing this way helps a visitor separate gods with a documented historical cult from ones known only through later literary retelling.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingThe 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 CoveredIceland, Norway and the Scandinavian world, from which nearly the whole surviving mythological corpus comes 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredThe 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 AttestationGermanic 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 TodayThe pre-Christian cult ended with conversion; no continuous worship links it to the present. 2 Veneration TodayVenerated in the modern Heathen and Asatru religions, which are movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and describe themselves as such. 3 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNorse 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.
Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record
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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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