Gods And Saints

Yesterday evening, we raised £250 for the hospice. This is relevant to recent blog discussion of gods and saints because St John is the patron of the hospice and Odin leads departed souls into the hereafter. Pagans, and imaginative authors like Poul Anderson, mix mythologies.

I liked a passage in The Long Ships when Vikings made offerings to Odin, Aegir and St John because the (stolen) bells of St John's Cathedral kept their fleet together in a fog. In another scene, a group waiting for a pagan priest to arrive to bless a field found that their prisoners included a Christian priest so they got him to perform a blessing on the ground that "These priests are all the same."

An alternative mythology in an alternative history might have saints in the Eddas. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol aborts a divergent timeline in which a goddess movement would have prevented the Christianization of Northern Europe. That movement might have generated myths about a war between the Goddess and an invasive God.