Gone Medieval - Odin, Asgard & the Norse Gods

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Dr. Eleanor Janega gets chummy with the gods of Norse Mythology. She's joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington to explore Odin’s quest for wisdom and the heart-wrenching trials he undergoes; Loki's shapeshifting exploits, and the tragic saga of Baldr orchestrated by the wise but fallible Frigg. Through tales of divine intrigue, sacrifice, and cosmic wonder, discover how these myths reflect human nature and societal values.MOREThe Viking Age: what new discoveries revealGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega, King Gilfi is played by Eric Nolan. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were.

And how we got here. I am King Guilfi, mightiest of kings. I once traveled to Asgard seeking to learn from the Norse gods who live there. There was one whom I strove most to understand, for his ways are strange and his hunger for wisdom without end. He is the Allfather, Odin. The highest and oldest of the gods, though he is known by many different names. He is the keeper of secrets, ruler of all things, and birthed war into the world. All earthly knowledge stems from him.

Knowledge I will share with you. If you are willing to listen. Welcome to God Medieval. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. This month on the podcast, we've been delving into the strange and spectacular. spectacular world of Norse mythology, the ancient tales of gods, giants, and the nine realms. To help us tell these stories, we've been joined by King Guilfi, a legendary figure from the Icelandic sagas, who is guiding us through these myths of creation and cosmic mayhem.

Matt and I, meanwhile, have been calling on leading experts to uncover the history that lies behind these legendary tales. In our first episode, we explored how the universe was said to begin, with fire, ice, and giants at the dawn of time. Still to come, we'll meet Thor and Loki, those tricksy gods of thunder and chaos. Explore how to reach the famed, mead-stained hall of Valhalla, and we'll round things off with Ragnarok, the end of the world, when gods and monsters alike will perish.

But today, we'll turn to the All-Father himself and the celestial realm he ruled. Odin, king of Asgard, seeker of wisdom, God of battle and poetry. He's a figure both fearsome and fascinating, and perhaps the most complex of the mall. In a little while, I'll be joined by Professor Carolyn Larrington, expert in Old Norse literature,

to help us unpick both Odin's character and the other Norse gods who bow the need to him. But first, here is King Guilfie to tell us more about how we came to know the one-eyed god. On my travels across the stars, I came before three heavenly kings in the glittering halls of Asgard. They told me much of the realms above and the caverns below. They said there are nine worlds, all held in the branches of a mighty, ash. Igdrasil is its name. The world tree, its leaves are above the sky and its roots plumb the deepest depths. From its boughs the dew falls, from its roots the rivers rise. An eagle sits upon its highest crown, while deep below coils a serpent, gnawing endlessly at its trunk.

Down in those depths lie foreshadowed realms. Nilfheim, A land of mist, Moosebell, the world of flame, Yotenheim, home to the frost giants. And hell, where the dead go to die, up the trunk lie three more worlds, Midcar, Alphheim, and Nidavallir, the land of elves, dwarves, and mortals. Then cradled up top, high among the leaves is where the gods dwell in their splendor. But even here the divine are divided. Two tribes exist and two worlds they own. The tribe Vannir, wise in magic, make their keep in Vanaheim, a world abundant in crop and nature. The tribe Isir, Odin's kin, meanwhile hold fast in their golden fortress of Asgard. Above and below, flame and frost, gods and monsters,

all hang upon Iggdrasil's limbs. The tree draws its strength from an inky black well, whose waters feed its roots and keep it ever living. In that fathomless pool dwell many of the most powerful forces in all the cosmos. Chief among them are the Norns. Three wise maidens who decide the destiny of all living things. With their knives, they carve ruins into the very bark of the world tree, and through those marks their will is carried into every corner of the nine realms.

But Odin, gazing down from his high throne in Asgard, watched them with envy. A ceaseless hunger for knowledge burned within him, and it gave the All Father his purpose. He was willing to pay any price to master the mysteries of life and death. Long ago he had torn out his own eye to drink from a frost giant's well of wisdom. Yet still the Norns and their ruins held power and secrets that even he, the greatest of gods, could not command. Thus, Odin went in search of the power of the ruins possessed, but they do not reveal their secrets to just anyone, only to those who are worthy of such knowledge and fearful insight. And so it was that Odin chained himself to the trunk of Ictersil,

and hung from its branches for nine knights, peering into the shadowy waters below. His side was pierced by the point of a spear, his body buffeted and battered by the wind, as life slowly drained from his feeble limbs, no food did he eat, nor water he drank for nine days and nine nights in the dark. in the dark. But as agony closed, Odin's mind awoke and the ruins revealed their heart. With their mystery unlocked, his binds did snap, and he fell, shrieking from the tree.

He cried, Then begin I to thrive and begin I to get. I grew, and well I was, ruins that shall find and fateful signs that the ruler of gods doth write. The All-Father had gained the power of magic. The world was now his to control. Yet Odin's thirst for wisdom was not still. For in the world there walked another, a goddess whose powers rivaled even his own. Freya of the Vanier,

mistress of dark magic and dread sorcery. She wandered from hall to hall, selling her craft for hire. And wherever she went, desire and envy followed in her steps. At last she came to Asgard itself. There the Isir struck by wonder at her skills, pressed her for her services. Soon they found their own laws, their oaths of kinship, and their honor undone. For each sought selfish gain from her witchcraft.

And when strife and discord rose among them, they cast the blame upon Freya. They named her greedy for gold and sought to destroy her. Three times they seized her. Three times they burned her body in the hall of the gods. Three times she rose again. Reborn from the ashes, unbroken and unbowed. As the poets wrote, The war I remember, the first in the world, when the gods with spears struck down Freya,

and in Odin's hall they burned her body, three times burned and three times born, oft and again, yet ever she lives. Thus the Aisir came to hate the Vaneer, and the Vannir in turn despised the Isir, and so the first war of the world began. On the host his spear did Odin hurl. The world did war first come. The wall that guarded the gods was broken, and the fields of the warlike Vannier were trodden. The icier fought with steel and storm. Their war cry carried on the winds of Asgard. The Vannier answered with coming spells and hidden power, bending faith itself to their will.

Blow for blow, spell, spell the struggle raged. Neither side prevail, and both grew weary of endless strife. At last, the gods laid down their arms and made a truce. Oats were sworn, peace was sealed, with the ancient custom of hostage-taking, Freya, Freer her brother, and North their father crossed into Asgard to dwell among the Issyr. And in turn, the Isir gave to the Vaniard their own. From the ashes of two people, one was made, and peace reigned in Asgard tense forth.

Thus did Odin bind together gods of war and gods of wisdom, though at great cause. For it was he who hurled the first spear and brought strife into the world. He who won the ruins through suffering, and yet set the nine realms aflame with war. Such is the All-Father, a bringer of knowledge, but also of chaos, a seeker of truth, yet never free from envy and hunger. I could tell you of this one-eyed God, of his bargains and betrayals, of the many names he bears. But much have you already heard of Odin's eyes? To learn more, I have once again sought out the wisest in the land.

To help you better understand what I have told. Caroline, thank you so much for being with us at Gone Medieval. It's a great pleasure to be back again. We are talking about really the heavy hitters today. You know, we're talking about the pantheon, a lot of the household names that everyone tends to know. And so I'm going to start you off with a fairly generalized question, which is, who is Odin?

Yeah. Who is Odin? Yeah. So he is, well, it depends who you ask in some ways. In the account of the gods, that we have transmitted through the poetic edda and through other poetry. He's the All-Father. He's the leader of the Norse gods. He's the god of poetry and of war and of wisdom. He's married to Frig and his son is Thor, but Balder is also one of his sons.

And he has a few more like Hermoda and Forseti and so on who aren't quite so important. If you ask the author of the prose edda, however, the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturtleson, very likely, Snorri can't really go along with the idea that the pagan gods were really gods in the same sense as the Christian god. And so Snorri tells us that Othin, along with the rest of the Aisir, the main tribe of gods, is a refugee from Troy. And after the Trojan war was over, you can see. see how this works, I seeer, Asia, right? So they all made off from Troy as fast as they could and made their way up to Scandinavia, where because they had superior Eastern technology and a degree of magic, including shape-shifting, the credulous Scandinavians began to worship them.

So this is an explanation for pagan divinities as known as euhemerism. after the late antique philosopher Euhima, who thought it up as an explanation for how there could be pagan gods when obviously there was only one god and that was the Christian god. And he decided this must be kind of like Roman emperors who decreed that they would be worshipped either in their lives or after their deaths. So a smart and powerful human can persuade other people that he is a god. And so you can either follow Snorri, who has got a very sort of Christian rationalizing explanation here,

or you can go with what's obviously the older and more deeply rooted in Viking religion kind of explanation. I really love Snorri's explanation because it's just so medieval. I love this tracing everything back to Troy. It's like how Britain is founded by Brutus who leaves Troy. They do love a connection. They do. And Thor is a bit hard to explain the way. But because he has a chariot, he's known as Oekuthor, the Thor who drives.

And Okuthor, if you say it really quickly, Ucithor sounds a bit like Hector. So Hector wasn't killed by Achilles at all. No, no, no. He's made it to Scandinavia too. Oh, that's a nicer Hector. Oh, okay. I'm absolutely tickled by this. Sorry, you know, to kind of drive you into a Trojan direction.

We can put that on one side, I think, for the rest of the conversation. I will never put that. I will never put that on one side. That's too good. I suppose my next question is, what does the name Odin mean? Is this sort of like a randomly given name or is there something behind it? It seems to be connected with the adjective, Ozer, which means furious. and his equivalent in old English, for example, is Woden, who gives us Wednesday.

And there does seem to be a fairly strong understanding in Old Norse that the connection with fury exists. Not, I think, the Oden comes over as a particularly furious God. But we do have a Latin gloss that says, actually, for the English version, Woden, Ides furor. that is fury. But it may be that he's capable of producing a kind of battle craziness in warriors, connected with his function as god of war. And so it may be that that's the furious element. I suppose this leads me to my next question,

which is what are the main attributes of Odin? Because it does strike me as odd, considering him to be furious. I suppose I associate fury a bit more with Thor. But then again, you know, I'm not an expert. You're right that Thor gets more furious in person, as it were, whenever he's confronted with giants who are defying him in some way when he needs to smash them with his hammer. And it's more, I think, as in quite a lot of aspects of the myth of Othin,

it's his capacity to induce things in other people rather than necessarily performing behaviours himself. So he's normally depicted as being old and being one-eyed. And the reason why he's one-eyed is one-eyed is one that we'll come back to in the moment, I imagine. He travels around mankind much more often than any of the other gods who mostly don't seem to be bothered about mankind. But Othin is a patron of kings. And so he likes to go recruit heroes, promote them to kingship,

and then take them off finally to Valhalla when the time comes. And he can be recognised. Well, of course, in the myths, humans tend not to recognise him. And it's only a bit later on, they kind of think, oh, I wonder if that old one-eyed man with the hood pulled down over his brows or wearing a broad brimmed hat was Othin. Well, he seems to have behaved in quite a tricksy fashion, so he probably was. But of course, stories depend on you're not realizing that at the time.

Obviously. I think that this is quite interesting too, because he's got this real connection with the world and people. And part of that also is, as you mentioned, you know, he's this god of poetry. And so we have this inspiration not just in a... fury sort of way, but also he could be responsible for inspiring men to do great things with literature as well, I suppose. Yes, and he's often invoked by poets. He's the god who poets mention as being the god who gives them inspiration, probably the god that they worship, though. That's not always all that clear. And we have quite a complex myth about how the myth of poetry came

into being. But essentially Othin got wind of the fact that the giants had this barrel full of poetry, which they clearly weren't making use of. And it was squirreled away in a cavern below a mountain being guarded by a giant maiden. And in an extremely elaborate ploy, Othin manages to get access to the mountain. He bores his way in with a kind of of auger-like tool, changes himself into a snake, because shape-changing is one of his attitudes, wriggles into the mountain, takes on some kind of form which is presumably quite attractive because he seduces the girl who's looking after the mead and she promises him that he can have three sips of the mead. But of course, and in some versions there are three barrels of the

meet and some it's just one. But with the three sips, he drains the whole lot, turns into an eagle and takes a quicker way out than crawling back through the passage, and flies off, pursued by the girl's father, the giant Sutungar, also in eagle form. And so Sutunger is chasing Othin, and he's getting closer and closer to Oskarar, the home of the gods. And the gods can see that this is a kind of neck and neck race. So they build a huge bonfire in the courtyard of Ausgarder.

And Othen whizzes over the wall. But in his haste, as Snorri Sturtleson tells us, ejects some of the mead backwards. So he kind of excretes the mead out. And this mead is what bad poets use for inspiration. But he flies over the bonfire and spews up all of the good. Mead into a huge cauldron where it can be sent off to humans and other gods, the god of poetry, for example. Meanwhile, Paul Sutungar is burnt as he flies into the bonfire and that's the end of him. So the mead of poetry is one of Othin's gifts to mankind, along with the runes, which are the wherewithal

for writing down your poems. And this is a very mysterious part of Othin's life, but he tells us that he hanged himself for nine days and nine nights on Igresif, the world tree, and doesn't eat or drink in that time. So it's a really grueling ordeal. And at the end of this, he says, screaming, I appeared downwards and I saw the runes and I took them. And where the runes came from isn't at all clear in this story, whether they rose up out of the earth. But Othin not only gives mankind poetry, but he also produces this writing technology, which is going to turn out to be so important for, particularly for memorializing people. Runes are most often used on memorial runesstones across Scandinavia. And this is a real intrical part of his character, is the seeking of knowledge or seeking of ways to express that same thing,

which this ties into the reason he lost his eye, correct? That's right. He's the god of wisdom, and so he's interested in wisdom in all its forms. And if you are being reductive, you might say that what he's most of all interested in is trying to see if anybody in the universe knows a different narrative for the future. Does anybody know of a storyline, we might say, in which Ragnarok is not. going to happen. The end of the world is not going to come. And so Othin goes to speak. He enters a wisdom contest with the giant, which he wins, but the giant confirms the Ragnarok story. And he speaks to various other people, searasses and so on, to try to find out, is this fate inescapable?

And it looks like it is. And Mimir is. one of the Aisir, who at close to the beginning of the reign of the gods, another group of gods called the Varnir, and that's the group that Freer, Freya, and the sea god Njöder belonged to, the Issyr and the Varnir start a war, which nobody can win, because the Isir have lots of great weapons, but the Varnir seem to have the gift of resurrection. So after a while, they decide this isn't getting anywhere.

And they agree on the hostage swap. Not a hostage in a sense of taking somebody and treating them badly, but rather just we'll have some of your guys in our society and you can have some of ours and that will keep the peace between us. And so Mimir and somebody called Heinir, you know, the Aisir, go to live among the Varnir. But then Hainir comes back again saying, this hasn't gone terribly well on our part

because the Vanir kept inviting Mimir, who is so very wise and me to our councils. And Mimir would have great ideas, but Heineer just kept saying, let others decide. And so the Varnier thought Heinir was a bit useless. And for possibly out of annoyance, cut off Mimir's head.

I would have cut off Heinir's head myself. But they cut off Mimir's head. head and send it back to Hainir, with Hainir, to the gods. I imagine with a kind of rude note attached. And Oden is quite disturbed by this head of his friend returning in this way. So he embalms it, wraps it in herbs, and puts it in a well at the bottom of the stem of the world tree. And there he can go and consult it.

But in order, for the first time, it seems that. activate this connection with the head, he has to make a sacrifice. And so he sacrifices his eye, which is to be found in the well with the head. How all of this works is not at all clear, but it looks as if it's that kind of sacrificial logic of you give up something that's very valuable to you and you'll get something valuable in return. You lose one of your eyes, but you gain insight of a kind of mystical kind into the workings of the universe. So that's why Othen only has one eye.

So we've got one eye, a head and a well, shape-shifting abilities. But he's also got a bit of a menagerie, doesn't he? He's got his ravens, he's got wolves, these sorts of things. His very important ravens Huguenin, whose names mean something like thought and memory. And they fly out across the world every day, gathering information and bringing facts or news, let's say, back to Othin. And where other people might have hunting docks, you can imagine something like Irish wolfhams in the hall of a Norwegian king. Othin has a couple of wolves called Gehri and Frecki, which means something like,

fierce one and Ravana and so they sit by his side when he's at his high seat in Valhuk Valhalla Yeah this it's a pretty good deal I think if I could have two ravens

that came and brought me all the information I needed every day I'd be pretty happy about that also I think we should be calling more pet dogs after these wolves I think Frankie is a good dog name

in fact is a really good dog's name right I know a lot of dogs who are called Freya and not enough dogs who are called Frecky. So this is a call to action audience. Let's go. Let's move out. Frecky is the ideal. It can also be used generally as an old Norse common term for wolf.

Perfect. Wonderful. If you don't want to call your dog Wolf, call it Frecky. There you go. So there is a lot, I think that it would be fair enough to say that Odin's a super enigmatic figure. You know, he's got a lot of contradictory traits about him. You know, he's the god of war, but he's the god of poetry. He is the king of the gods, but he's also really intensely interested in what's going on with humans and the most interested in kind of keeping this equilibrium going. Is there something that we're supposed to be reading? Are we supposed to understand him as, I don't know, a fairly

anigmatic individual? Yeah, I think that's probably true that we would read him as enigmatic, but I think what that boils down to is he has many different functions. And one of the most important aspects, and again, this is something that we find in later Christian writing about him, but it's extremely important, is that he's an ancestor. He's the ancestor of the kings of Norway. And his equivalent Woden turns up in the genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon kings, somewhere after Adam and Noah. But before Henghis and Horser, you have Woden.

And so Othen is seen as being an ancestor. And of course, this ties up a little bit with the whole Trojan business. He's given a role in the human world, which ties in. into kingship and being interested in law as LAW law as well as being interested in magic. And this is why he turns up so often in human affairs in an enigmatic way. And if you're a young man, if you're the hero Sigurther, for example, and you're trying to pick the best horse out of your uncle's stud to be your horsey companion through life. and a mysterious hooded man with one eye comes and stands beside you and says,

I would take that one if I were you. Then you take that advice because you know that this is probably someone who knows what they're talking about. And indeed, Granny is descended from Othun's horse Sleapnear, but he just has the regular number of legs, not eight legs. So Sigurther very wisely makes that choice. But Sigurther, depending on what his mother has told him, Sigurter might also reflect on the fact that he's born posthumously to his father. His father dies in battle while his mother is pregnant with Sigurther, precisely because Othin has appeared to Sigmunder and said time is up. You now, you're getting on in years and we need you in Valhalla to train with the other. Ayn Heria, the other dead heroes for the army that will fight at Ragnarok.

And so Othen is very multifaceted in this relationship with kings. He will come and say, you're my chosen one and you should have this throne, but he also takes it away from you. I suppose that that's sort of the deal, though, isn't it? I mean, it mentioned the way that he has to trade his own eye for wisdom, I suppose that, you know, his blessing comes with a consummate, you know, downside. Yeah, nothing lasts forever in that case. And there is one poem in which Othin is told mischievously, perhaps, by his wife Frigg,

that one of his protégés, a man called Gere, is behaving rather badly as a king. He's extremely stingy with food when guests come to the hall. and Odin said, I need to go and investigate this. So he disguised himself and goes to Gerey's hall. But sneaky Frigg has sent Geyrather a message saying, watch out for this weird wizard-type character who's going to come to your hall. You'll recognise him because dogs don't bark at him. Have nothing to do with him.

He's very dangerous. And so when this figure turns up, Geyrother asks him, who he is and he won't speak. So Gera places him between two fires. And he sits there for eight days and eight nights without speaking. And he doesn't have any food. He doesn't have any drink. It's again, it's an echo of his ordeal on the wild tree to get the rooms.

And then Gera, the son, gives him a horn of mead. And he starts to speak. And he imparts a lot of mythological information about the names of the whole. halls of the gods and the relationships of some of the gods and so on. And then he embarks on this long list of names because Othin goes by many names, primarily in some ways because he needs to have lots of names to be evoked in poetry, because poetry in Old Norse is illiterative. And so if you want to have an Othin name which will fit in any poetic line, You need a great repertoire of different names.

And so he begins to recite all of these names. And you could imagine if you were filming this, that the camera will pan across to Gere, they're thinking, oh, no, this is Othen. This is my patron. I've been torturing for a week. This can't end well. And in fact, as he comes to the end of his recital,

Gera leaps up to pull him away from the fire and welcome him into the hall. but he trips over his own sword and falls on it and dies. And Agnar, the son, becomes king in his place because Agnar gave Othin the Horn of Mead. Agnar is a generous and wise person. And I always feel a little bit sorry for Gereurda because he's been set up basically by Frig.

Now, Frig has it in for him because there were originally two brothers, Gereather and his brother, who was also called Agnar, and they went down to the beach one day when they were young and got into a boat, or rather, Gherrida persuaded Agnar to get into a boat. Agnar got into the boat and he pushed it away and said, go where the trolls will have you. So Agnar sails that sea gets lost and is rescued by a troll, but he's now stuck with the trolls. Geyrotha gets to be king. And Agnar was Frigg's particular protégé, while Geyrotha was Othens. So this is Frig having kind of long-term revenge for what happened to her protégé. But it's interesting in that story that Frig takes this direct interest, because we then have a great deal of information about her.

And it shows how Othens' protégés are just as sneaky as he is. if need be. They can be deceitful if they have a particular end in view. And Oden is certainly not a god who punishes evildoers, except insofar as they're breaking kind of fundamental codes like hospitality and so on. Can we talk a little bit more about Frigg? Because I think it's very easy to get bogged down when we're talking about Norse myths. You can just spend all day talking about Oden and Thor and Loki. And here's Frigg, she's Odin's wife. What are her own particular attributes? You know, does she have anything that she is the goddess of?

Snorri tells us she's the goddess of marriage and of love, but married love rather than passionate, erotic sexual love, which is Freya's domain. She's said to have a flying coat, which you can use to fly between worlds, it's a kind of turned you basically into a falcon, but she's never said to use it. And really, we don't have very much information about her at all. We see an intervention from her when Othin and Loki are talking about events in the distant past, when they seem to have both sworn blood brotherhood with one another and to have shared in the practice of the slightly disreputable magical practice that's known as Seder.

And as they're talking about this, Frigg says, it's best if you two don't talk about the things that happened in the bygone days. And as readers of that poem, we find ourselves going, why not? We want to know. What do they do? But Frigg is very wise and all-seeing. And her most important story in Old Norse is when the god Balder begins to have bad dreams,

which anticipates his death. And so after Othin has been down to the hall of hell and said, Why is Balder having these dreams about death? And hell says, well, because we're expecting him any day now, We're brewing the beer. We're strewing fresh rushes on the floor for him. Othin goes back and reports this, and it's Frigg who decides that the way around this is to get everything in creation

to take an oath not to harm Balder. And so she goes around asking the rocks and the trees and the stones and the weapons and everything you can think of, except for, as it turns out, the mistletoe. And then when Loki in disguise comes to have a chat with her pretending to be an old woman and says, Did you really ask absolutely everything? And she says, oh yes, but I didn't bother with the mistletoe. It's so slender and flexible.

That's not going to hurt anybody. And so Frigg has this foresight that allows her to make a plan to save Baldur. But she also makes the mistake of admitting. that there's a tiny floor in it. And when Baldera does die, she promises all her favor to anybody who can go down to hell and negotiate to get him back. And one of Oven's sons goes off and comes back and says, everything will have to weep for Balder. So it's Frigg as protective mother, which is the most important aspect of her story, I think, that's preserved in the Norse myths. This is really interesting because in many ways this kind of mirrors, for example, the story of Achilles.

You know, he's almost invincible except for the heel, you know. Baldur is almost invisible, invincible unless you get mistletoe involved. You know, and quite similarly with Frigg, we kind of see these overlaps with, you know, Hera, who's the wife of Zeus and she's, you know, she's the goddess of marriage very specifically. But is this so simplistic? I mean, do Norse gods have a similar sort of domain deity kind of thing? Or are they, they seem a bit more complex in a way than the Greek ones? I think it's partly because we know quite a lot less about them than we do about the Greek gods. Because what we know about the Greek gods is not only a whole huge corpus of stories about them.

But we also know quite a bit about the rituals with which they were. worship, the idea of sacrifice, what kinds of beasts you would sacrifice, which myth was connected to the origin of that ritual and so on. So we have a much more complex picture of Greek myth. And that makes it easier to say, okay, so Demeter is the goddess of fertility and harvest, and then we have the myth of her and Persephone explaining why it is that we have the seasons. But with the... the Norse gods, there may have been, in fact, there surely was much more information, which explained their functions.

And there would have been a whole kind of raft of practices that people use in order to worship the gods. And there will be presumably particular things you would ask the gods for. And we can certainly see at least that the poets are invoking Ovin, for their inspiration. Farmers and seafarers in particular invoking Thor because he's the god of weather. And therefore he has a fertility function as well as making the seas possible to cross. And presumably they also invoke the god Njöder, who is the god at the sea. But is Thor who gets mentioned most of the time.

We don't have too many stories about Njöder. So it's also, I think, quite likely that people in different parts of Scandinavia worship the gods, a particular god. And so Thor is immensely popular in Iceland because most of the Icelandic settlers came from Western Norway, where place name evidence suggests he was also very popular. Freer and Freya were popular in Sweden. But because Sweden didn't provide anything like so many immigrants to Iceland, it's clear that the people who were writing down the stories in Iceland

didn't have that key Swedish information, though they would have allowed them to tell us much more about Freer and Freya, for example. So there's a regional dimension to this, which means that the functions of some of the gods are pretty obscure. Do you have any favourite Norse gods among the obscure panes? Theon? Well, I always kind of like Skardy, who starts life as a member of the giants. And she is the goddess, so Snorri tells us, of skiing.

Not that I go skiing, ever, but her domain is in the mountains because she's a giant. And when her father, Thiazi, is killed through the machinations of the gods, he has kidnapped. It has to be said, Thiazzi ends up kidnapping Eitham, the goddess who has the apples of eternal youth. And once those apples have passed into the power of the giants, the gods all start aging and getting very unhappy. And so Loki, who helped Eden to get kidnapped in the first place, is charged to go and get her back. And so he goes to get her back successfully, but Thiasi is killed in the process. And when Skardy finds her father has been killed, she puts on her war gear and she marches into Asgardr and says, I want compensation for my father.

And the gods say, well, what would you like? And how about if you marry one of us? And Skardy, who seems to have a thing for the god Balder, says, yeah, okay, I'll certainly accept one of you as a husband. Then the gods say, well, you can choose your own husband, but you must choose him by his feet. So all the gods go and stand behind a sheet, essentially, and poke their feet out of the bottom. And Skadi looks at all these feet and decides that the cleanest and whitest must be those of Baldr. So she says, well, I'll have this guy. But these feet turn out to be the feet of the sea god, Njöder. Because obviously, if you're a sea god, you will have clean feet.

And so she has some marrying Njöder, and she's not very pleased about this. And so she's not going to go through with the marriage, and she's not going to settle for the death of her father. She says, unless somebody can make her laugh. And so Loki volunteers to do this. And they get a goat with a long beard. And he ties his testicles to the beard. And the goat pulls in one direction. Loki pulls in another. And so we're told nobody could decide who was screaming the most. And as this is going on, he falls into Scardy's lap. And she starts laughing. too. So now she has to go through with this deal and marry Njöder. But the marriage doesn't last because of irreconcilable differences, if you like. She's the goddess of the mountains. She likes

to be up in the mountains. He's the god of the sea. His palace is by the seashore. And she says when she's in his palace, she can't sleep because of the noise of the seagulls. And he says when he's in her hall up in the mountains, he can't sleep because of the sea. He can't sleep because of the howling of the wolves. So they go their own separate ways eventually. And she marries somebody else. I like this because we have these real differing domains for all of these varying gods,

which I suppose brings me on to my next set of questions, which is about, I suppose, the topography of deities. Because I was going to ask about Asgard, you know, this is kind of the place that I imagine the gods living, But the gods are everywhere? Is that right? Well, Aska, if you like, is the whole domain of the gods. So we could think of it as a kind of country where the gods live or where the Aisier gods live.

The Varna gods live in Varneheimer, which is somewhere else, on the same kind of horizontal plane, we might imagine. But within Ausgader, as it might be within Norway, each god has their own territory. And so they have differing names. And within the territory, the god has a principal hall, again, as a Scandinavian chieftain. So it's that kind of model of landholding. And so although Othen is the king over or the lord over all of Ausgharthar as the chief god, His main hall is Valhurt, Valhallaud, where he entertains the dead heroes. But he also apparently goes to drink with Freya in her hall from time to time,

because Freya owns half of the dead with Othin. And we might imagine they sit there drinking and divvying up the dead after every day and say, you take that one, you take that one. and her hall is called Sessa Bekir Sunkin benches, which makes it sound like it might be underwater, but we don't know any more about that. And so the gods do have lots of different territories and some halls with quite speaking names,

quite often names which are associated with light and beauty. Okay, so we've got Asgarda, we've got Van Hemer, how does this work? Are these separate worlds that... They're separate domains, but Heimer does mean world. Gather means more or less the same as modern English yard, or it means enclosed space. So Midgather, the word for the world of the humans in Old Norse myth

is the middle yard, if you like, the middle enclosed space. And so if you imagine the world, World Tree is a kind of huge vertical axis that runs through the worlds. We can imagine Midgather, Ausgather, Jotenheimer, the home of the giants, Fana Heme, or there's no sense that to go from one to the other, you have to go up or down. Up at the top of the tree, we have assaulted animals. There's an eagle whose wings cause the wind. There are some deer who are nibbling on the branches of the world.

tree. And one of the world tree's branches overshadows Valhurt, which is quite convenient because on the roof of Valhalla is this goat, Hadron, who eats the leaves from the world tree and her others give mead. So that keeps the warriors happy. So we have this sort of basic horizontal plane, but then down below the roots of the world tree. the earth, possibly, but exactly what kind of earth it is, isn't very clear. But down at the roots, you've got the well of Mimir, where his head is, you've got the three norms, the divine figures who determine fate, are also at the roots by a body of water.

And then there's the world of the dead, Niproheim, Mist world, where Hell's Hall is down there. Snorri Sertlinson also tells us that the Svartar alvar, the dark elves, are in this lower area too. But what they are, we really don't know. He doesn't tell us anything more about them. I slightly suspect that they're supposed, they've been kind of made up on the basis of being like devils or demon in Christian ideology. And that they're malign forces that live down where hell would be in the Christian model. And that gives you a nice kind of way to connect all of these things. That makes sense.

So I wouldn't put that past Snorri. He's very good at thinking of these sort of rhetorical traps to make Christianity make sense on top of it. Yeah. It's very good. Yes. And thinking they must have had a thing like this. So with Snorri, for example, you can see how he decides that after Ragnarok, when the world comes back, there's also been a kind of last judgment built into this.

So the new world will have some lovely places where the gods are and which are full of light and which are very much like heaven. And then there are places which are horrible, halls with roofs made of woven serpent spines and the serpents are spitting poison. And that's where bad people are. And you think, we don't really have this model of a heaven and the hell in that way

in the Norse ideology that we know about. So he's obviously just decided to punish a lot of murderers and oath breakers and put them in this unpleasant setting after death. I mean, fair enough. It's nice to be able to create an idealized justice system for yourself. I can't put it past him there. But okay, so I suppose my next question is say that I am Odin and I wish to trap.

to Midgard from Asgarder. How do I do that? It's not very clear that Othin, how Othin would do that. Mostly he walks. He's a wanderer. I suppose he can get on his horse slate near, the eight-legged horse and canter off if he wants to. But we don't have accounts that I can think of a slate near turning up in the human world.

So mostly you're just the warren. going about your daily business and suddenly this old man comes into your hall and does something a bit strange and you think, then you respond to it. So, for example, towards the beginning of the story of Sigmundar, the father at the great hero Sigur, his sister is getting married to a king called Siger. All these people have names that begin in the same way. and Sigir is marrying Cygni, Sigmund and all his brothers are there and his father, Volfi, is there as well. And the wedding feast is all going fine, though Signe is not that keen on marrying Sigir particularly. And then an old man in a cloak, looks like he's only got one eye, comes into the hall, he's carrying a sword and he plunges the sword into a great tree that grows up in the middle of Sigir. Hall. So it's kind of a decorative feature, if you like, to have this tree. And it should be

symbolic of the family tree of generations to come and so on. So this man, this old man, drives the sword into the tree and says, whoever can take it out can have that sword. And so, of course, the feast sort of breaks out while all the men have a go at trying to pull the sword that. Siguer is very keen to get it. He's the lord of the hall. He's the bridegroom. But he can't pull it out. But Sigmund can. And Sigmund whisked it out, and this is the sword that through a few incarnations is the one that will kill the dragon, Faup Nair. So that sword is his great sword. And Sigeir says, I'll buy it off you. And Sigmund says, no, no, no, no. That was Odin and he means me to have this sword.

And this unleashes all kinds of disasters for Sigmunders' family, who all get killed by SIGAir one way or another, but Sigmunders survives and takes his vengeance. So what was Othin doing there? He was marking out Sigmundar as his chosen one. It also is no accident that Othin is at some remove Sigmundra's ancestor. He's probably about his great-great-grandfather or something.

And so he's, of course, he's the patron of his line, but he wants to kickstart something here, for Sigmundra to show what a hero he is and also to kind of take Sige's line out of consideration. And Sigmundra does turn out to be a hero. He's mentioned in one poem as being in Valhalla. all ready to go and greet King Eric Bloodax when he dies. He's Sigmundra and Hermoder, I think it is.

One of Odin's sons are told to go to the door and welcome him into Valhalla. So Sigmunders' place is assured. But the sword works as this kind of catalyst to start the strife which is going to prove the metal of the heroes. I suppose that's in keeping with what we expect. from Odin. You know, he seems to be back and forth all the time to the world of the humans. But I suppose also if you're specifically attempting to cultivate an army and Valhalla,

you also need to be doing that cultivation. You need to be involved with the humans on Earth. Yeah. So you've got to be inspecting them and checking them out. And there is one wonderful story, in fact, where there's a hero, a really unpleasant guy called Starcather. And he is a sort of brutish fighter, but he's had a difficult childhood, to be fair,

but he's attached to a king called Vicar, and they're fighting their way around Norway. And then Vicar has a kind of foster father called Horsehair Grani, which is a slightly old name. And one evening, horsehair granny comes to Starcader. and says, I want you to come with me. And they row across a lake to an island.

And there there are 12 thrones, and the 12 of the Aesir gods are sitting there. And, oh, look, horsehair granny turns out to be Ovin. And the god Thor says, I really don't like Starcather, because his grandfather fell in love with a girl that I was interested in and he took her. So I've really got it in for him.

And Thor put some curses on Starcather. And Othin can't, in the classic fairy tale way, you can't take a curse away, but you can mitigate it. So Thor says that Sarcathor will behave very badly in life. And Othin says, but he'll live for 300 years. He'll live three lifetimes. And then Thor says, but he'll commit an appalling deed in each one. And so it goes on like this for good and bad. And then StarCudder is Road Home.

And horsehair granny says, what I need you to do tomorrow is to get King Vikar to play the part of a sacrifice in order to get a wind to sail to the next place you want to go to. And what you need to do is get him to stand on a tree stump, kill a calf, wind the guts of the calf around the neck of King Vida. Take a reed and say, poke him with the reed and say, I'll give you to Othin.

And so Sarkh explains this to Vicar, who says, yeah, yeah, sure, why not? Why not normal, yeah. Why not? Yeah, if that's what it takes to get a wind, I'll do this. And so Vicar stands on the tree stump. But as Sarkather pokes him with the reed, the reed turns into a spear. The calf noose of guts around his neck kind of leaps up over the tree. the stump falls away

and Vicar is both hanged and stabbed which is the classic mark of an Odinic sacrifice so the king is now quite dead and everybody is looking at StarCarder going what the hell and StarCard has sort of tries to explain that this was all supposed to be a mock sacrifice

but he's driven away and that's the first terrible deed that he does and you can see that partly the blame is put there on Thor but it's really Othin who wanted the king to be sacrificed. Yeah, taken maybe off to Valhurtle in this way. And so that's the kind of stunt that Othin will pull on occasion. This is a slightly later story,

but Stargather is an old and well-attested hero. So we have all of these stories of God's interfering, I suppose, with humans. But it doesn't seem to go both ways. it seems as though gods can visit humans. Humans can't necessarily visit the world of the gods, though. And I suppose this might have something to do with the story of the walls around Asgard. And I was wondering if you could maybe lead us out with the story about how those are built, because I think this is a really interesting one.

It's an interesting one. And it goes back to that war that I talked about earlier between the Aisir and the Varnir. So assuming that Auskhar had walls in the first place, which isn't very clear, Now the walls have been destroyed in this battle. And so the gods need a new wall to be built around their territory. And along comes a person who says that he's a master builder and he can build them wonderful new walls in three years. And if he can do that in that space of time,

the only reward he wants is the sun and the moon and the goddess Freya. And the gods think this sounds a bit doubtful. They don't ask Freya, as far as we know. But they say, no, no, we're not going to go with that. But if you can do it in half a season, so over a summer, all by yourself, then you can have Freya, forget the sun and the moon, because he obviously looks like he knows what he's talking about. And the builder says, can I have the help of my stallion to pull the stones along and help me gather the material I need?

And the gods think this sounds quite reasonable. But when only a couple of days remain till the end of the summer, when winter is on them, they realise that the walls are going up at an incredible rate and the master builder is going to fulfil his contract and he's going to take Freya. And so they say to Loki, Loki, you need to get us out of this. It's not clear in the versions we have that Loki sort of recommended this guy, but it sounds quite possible.

And Loki says, okay, leave it to me. And so that night, as the master builder is working, a rather attractive young Philly appears on the edge of the forest and whinnies to the stallion who whips around. and disappears off into the forest with the Philly. And the master builder realizes with the loss of his stallion, he won't be able to complete the contract.

So he falls into a giant rage, the sources say. And at that point, the gods go, ha, he's a giant. And Thor turns up and wax him with the hammer. And so the master builder is killed. So on the one hand, they've got a pretty well-complete. some very good wall without having to pay for it. And if you know your Wagner, you'll see that this is kind of the plot of Das Feingold, the first opera in the ring of the Nibelungen.

But they've also broken the oaths that they gave to the master builder in the first place, because they made a contract with him. They circumvented this contract through Loki's behaviour. and now they are foresworn. And in some readings of Norse Smith, it's this first act of oath-breaking that kind of dooms the gods. They're now locked into this constant enmity with the giants,

which is in the end going to culminate in Ragnarok. Now, that might be a bit kind of too direct to an idea of cause and effect in some ways. I think mythology is usually more complex than that. But the other outcome of this, of course, is that Loki comes back after a while leading this eight-legged foal with him that he's apparently given birth to. And that is Othin's horse Sleapnear, who is the best of horses, we're told in some poems. And that points to Loki's extraordinary role as being the queer god, the one who, is capable of switching genders, of giving birth even,

and of giving birth to an animal. And so that story about the master builder tells us quite a lot about the moral dimension of the world in which the gods of Ausgather and Othens, their leader, kind of exist. Because it's important for everyone to actually keep their oaths. I mean, I think that this is a, it tells us a lot about how society functions and what matters as a general rule of thumb. Well, yes, it's possible to circumvent your oaths, but it even causes problems for the gods when they attempt it. So a lesson for all of us men, I suppose.

Yes. And of course, in an oral society where you don't have. written contracts, how can you deal with any other humans in your social group if you can't trust them to keep their word when they say that they'll deliver you the sword on Wednesday or they will turn up in three weeks time with 50 men to support you to do whatever it is? So that the fundamental nature of oaths in that society is kind of reinforced by this delinquency on the part of the gods. We'll have that story in one poem

and we have it in Snorri Sturtleson as well and it is that that story of the master builder who comes and makes you a brilliant offer to build something that you want is an internationally well-known folk tale though this version that we have is one of the earliest versions that we have in Europe and usually it's okay to swindle the master builder

because he's really the devil And so when he comes along and says, I can build you a church in a year. And usually he says to the person who's the patron of the church, and I'll take you away, you'll be my possession. And I can do with you what I like, unless you can guess my name. And the master builder is fairly sure that the patron won't be able to guess his name. And the patron starts getting very worried, but he wanders on the hillside. and here's a troll or a giant or somebody singing to her child saying, don't worry little baby tomorrow your father, Finn will bring back the eyes and heart of this patron for you to play with.

And he goes, ah, the master's builder's name is Finn. And then a bit like Rumpel's Silskin, he can get out of this. So in most versions of this folk tale, the master builder is, is so evil, it's entirely licit to deceive him. And you also, you do guess his name just by accident. And so the contract isn't broken. But in this story, there is foul play in the story of Othin, Loki and the master builder. And that, I think, is problematic for the way in which the history of the gods develops.

I suppose that's what I find it interesting, though, about pantheons and mythologies of deities, though, because they are these intensely human characters, even if they are, in theory, divine. You know, they have personalities that are conflicting. They don't always do the right thing morally. They are these really malleable characters. And I suppose that I always like that as a way of organizing the world. that's what we're using pantheons and mythologies to do because it kind of explains why the world is so awful. You know, if what we have to look to are these deities who sometimes do the wrong thing themselves, then how can we really ask for the world to be perfectly just as well? You know, I find that that explocates the state of the world in a really useful way. Yeah, the gods are made by humans in their own image. And so it's no wonder in the sense that the gods turn out to be very much like humans,

to have passions, to have hates, to have loves, to be jealous, to be vengeful, to hold grudges, but also to behave nobly on occasion. And so particularly in the kind of story systems that grow up about them, just having God sitting happily and peacefully, just going, oh, I wonder if a human is going to sacrifice to us today. Oh, yes, they have. Oh, good. Yes, you can have luck in battle. That's not going to generate any stories for people to tell. And so you have to have, I think, this kind of very, very pallet of personalities among the gods

in order to generate the kinds of mythological stories that humans can not only enjoy, but also learn from. Well, Caroline, thank you so much for coming on today to share so many of those stories with us. It's been a great pleasure. Thanks once again to Carolyn for joining me and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you haven't already heard our first North Smith episode

about the creation of the world, do go back and listen to Matt's Friday episode. You won't want to miss it. Remember, you can enjoy Unleaders limited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, released weekly and ad-frey podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.