-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London, 2018), AN INTRODUCTION, pp. ix-xvii AT pp. xii-xiii.
Yes, in Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."
"It's very likely, or at least a workable hypothesis, that there were tribes of people who worshipped the Vanir and other tribes that worshipped the Aesir, and that the Aesir-worshippers invaded the lands of the Vanir-worshippers, and that they made compromises and accommodations."
-op. cit., p. xiii.
Yes, the tribal invasion in Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and the divine war in his War Of The Gods:
"The gods themselves fought the first war that ever was."
-Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods (New York, 1999), I, p. 9.
The human originals of Odin and Thor are in Anderson's The Golden Slave.
Thor rides to the rescue at the climax of Operation Chaos.
The inability of Thor's servant, Thialfi, to outrun personified thought is relevant to meditation - although this is a private observation not really relevant to anything else here.
2 comments:
The Norse pantheon is demonstrably a descendant of the original Proto-Indo-European one.
Eg., Tyr <== Tiwaz <== Diwas(*) == *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr.
That's "Sky Father", linguistically cognate with Vedic Dyaus Pita, Latin Juppiter, Greek Zeus Pater, etc.
One of the problems with tracing relationships like that is that taboo-avoidance operates with a vengeance when people talk about their gods (or demons).
Hence the Jewish prohibition on speaking/writing the name of Jehovah, and instead calling him "Lord" and so forth.
The epithet eventually tends, in pre-literate cultures, to replace the original name -- as "the brown one" replaced "bear" in Proto-Germanic.
So "Thor" is probably descended that way from an epithet-name of Perkwunos, the PIE weather/thunder god, who became Baltic/Slavic Peruns/Perkunas.
Kaor, Paul!
Interesting, that "Thor" was not the original, or derived from an original name of the PIE thunder god. Thor's original name was probably more like "Perkwunnos."
And I don't think "Jehovah" is quite correct. My somewhat vague recollection is that it came from a twelfth century attempt at transcribing into Latin YHWH.
Ad astra! Sean
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