novels by Poul Anderson and SM Stirling;
Marvel comics and films;
The Sandman and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
He is a prominent character in Anderson's The Broken Sword, Hrolf Kraki's Saga and War Of The Gods.
A future research project could be to compile a list of Odin's characteristics as disclosed in these modern works. Two immediate insights:
Anderson's Odin is devious, in keeping with the Eddas;
in The Sandman, when the ghost-ravens, Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory, are away, Odin, sitting in Gladsheim, can neither think nor remember but, as soon as they return, he instantly knows all that they have seen - is this Gaiman's deduction from the Eddas or is it explicitly stated there?
4 comments:
It's Gaiman. The Eddas aren't detailed enough, so it's a fair enough speculation, but I don't think a Norseman would have come up with it.
Illuminating! Thanks!
Paul:
Just an note: Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World saga (a trilogy, followed decades later by three prequels) includes a godlike Power who's pretty obviously meant as the origin of the Odin legends — and others. He's referred to "by a variety of names, among them Raven." In his first appearance in the trilogy, he's in fact accompanied by a pair of large ravens. Among Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest coast, Raven was a trickster god ... and the trilogy begins on that coast, or rather, where it was at the height of the most recent great ice age.
An appendix to the latest, though earliest set, of the prequels says of Raven "he was seen as an archetypal trickster, strange and capricious, often apparently brutal or callous when some greater end was in view; yet often intervening with extraordinary and unexpected kindness in matters that might seem altogether small. He might not help a famine-hit city, yet restore a child's lost toy. On the rare occasions he is recorded as speaking to men, his words are often on the same theme: that the ways of destiny are devious and strange, and that not even to him were all ends clear."
David,
Gods live in literature.
Paul.
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