The gods Iceland wrote down

Almost everything told about the Norse gods was written down in Christian Iceland, two centuries after the conversion. How the site keeps the gods, the texts and the dates of each apart.

7 steps
Deities, Texts
A note at each step

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Not yet reviewed · written 24 September 2026. The notes follow the records; no editor has signed them.

Ólafur Brynjúlfsson [2] · Public domain

Step 1 of 7: Deity

Odin

Widely attested deity in Norse mythology

Odin as the records hold him: widely attested, with a pantheon, a row of poems he appears in, and identifications — with the continental Wōdan and with the Roman Mercury. Each identification is somebody’s equation of two gods, and each is drawn as exactly that.

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Odin Family tree
Prose Edda Text
Poetic Edda Text
Wōdan Deity
Mercury Deity
Thor Deity

Again First seen at step 1

Step 2 of 7: Deity · Family tree

Odin

Widely attested deity in Norse mythology

His family as the accounts tell it: consorts, a long row of sons, and among them names that stand at the head of royal genealogies — Skjöldr, Sæmingr, Sigi, Winta. Medieval dynasties traced themselves back to Odin or Woden. A pedigree that climbs into a god is a claim made in an account, and the canvas draws it that way.

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Unknown author · Public domain

Step 3 of 7: Text

Prose Edda

13th-century Norse work of literature written in Iceland

The Prose Edda, the handbook that gives the gods most of the family they are known by today. Its date is on the source clock, in the thirteenth century: it was written by a Christian Icelander about two hundred years after Iceland adopted Christianity. That date belongs to the book. The beliefs it describes are older, and the book cannot say by how much.

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Step 4 of 7: Text

Poetic Edda

Collection of Old Norse poems

The Poetic Edda, a collection of older poems that survives mainly in one manuscript copied later in the same century. How much older each poem is gets argued poem by poem. The record carries the manuscript’s date, because that is the only date anyone can see.

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Step 5 of 7: Deity

Wōdan

Germanic war deity

Wōdan, the god of the continental Germanic peoples, held as a record of his own and identified with Odin. Related names in related languages are good evidence of a shared inheritance. They are not evidence that an early medieval Saxon and a thirteenth-century Icelander meant the same god.

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Augustin Pajou (French, 1730–1809) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Step 6 of 7: Deity

Mercury

Roman god of trade, merchants, thieves and travel

Mercury, because a Roman got there first. Tacitus wrote that the Germans honoured Mercury above all other gods, and scholars usually read that as Wōdan under a Roman name. It is a Roman writer’s identification, recorded as one — the same habit the free journey follows from Zeus to Jupiter.

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Johannes Gehrts (1855–1921) · Public domain

Step 7 of 7: Deity

Thor

Hammer-wielding Norse god associated with thunder, lightning, storms, oaks, strength, and fertility

Thor, identified in the records with Jupiter, Zeus and Perun. The Roman day of Jupiter became Thor’s day in the Germanic languages, which is how English got Thursday. A weekday name is a translation somebody made, and the site records it as an identification, not as proof that every thunder god is one god.

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