Norse Pantheon

Late sources for an older religion

Almost everything told about the Norse gods comes from Iceland in the 13th century, two hundred years after the island's conversion to Christianity around 1000 CE. The Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous mythological and heroic poems preserved mainly in the Codex Regius (c. 1270), includes Völuspá, the seeress's account of the world from creation to Ragnarök, and Hávamál, the sayings of Odin. Some of these poems are probably much older than the manuscript. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c. 1220) is a handbook for poets that retells the myths in systematic prose; it is the source of many familiar details, but Snorri was a Christian scholar organising inherited material, and scholars read him with care.

Other witnesses

Older and independent evidence is patchier: skaldic poems composed for Viking-age rulers and quoted in the sagas, runic inscriptions, picture stones on Gotland, carvings such as the Thor fishing stones at Altuna and Gosforth, place names across Scandinavia that preserve the names of Thor, Odin, Frey, and Ullr, Adam of Bremen's description (c. 1075) of a temple at Uppsala with images of Thor, Wodan, and Fricco, and, much earlier, Tacitus's Germania (98 CE) on the religion of the continental Germanic peoples. Saxo Grammaticus's Latin Gesta Danorum (c. 1200) retells some of the same figures as ancient kings.

Æsir and Vanir

The sources describe two groups of gods, the Æsir (Odin, Thor, Frigg, Týr, Baldr, and others) and the Vanir (Njörðr, Freyr, Freyja), associated with fertility, wealth, and the sea. They fought a war that ended in a truce and an exchange of hostages, after which the Vanir lived among the Æsir. Whether that war reflects a historical merging of cults is an old scholarly question with no settled answer.

The world and its end

The cosmos is organised around the ash Yggdrasil and its nine worlds. Völuspá tells how the gods order the world from the body of the giant Ymir, how Baldr is killed, and how Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, will bring Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent, Surtr's fire, and the deaths of Odin and Thor, before a green earth rises again from the sea. How much of that ending reflects Christian influence is debated. Religious practice itself, blót sacrifice, feasting, and oath-taking, is known mainly from saga descriptions written long after.