Odin

The earliest description in this corpus of Norse worship as a going concern. Adam has three statues in the temple at Uppsala and glosses this one as fury — the god invoked for war, given the middle place in his account after Thor. He is writing from hearsay, a century and a half before either Edda, and calling the whole business the rite of demons while he describes it.

A man rather than a god, in the corpus's fullest case of euhemerism. Saxo's Othinus is a magician taken for a deity across Europe, who is driven into exile in disgrace when his own conduct becomes indefensible and whose place is taken by a substitute in the interval. A god deposed by his colleagues for embarrassing them is a demotion nothing in the Norse material itself supplies.

The systematic account: the Allfather at the head of a cosmology Snorri sets out in order, with the world made from Ymir's body and the names of Odin listed as a poet's resource. The tidiness is the thing to watch — Snorri is a Christian antiquarian arranging material that the poems leave ragged, and the corpus holds both so the arrangement can be seen as his.

Wins the runes by self-sacrifice on the windswept tree; questions the dead; takes half the slain to Valhalla.

“I ween that I hung on the windy tree, Hung there for nights full nine.”