He sent this loss upon him, and so destroyed the friendship between them. Now he has no pleasure in worshipping Odin, ‘ yet’, he adds. ‘ Mimir’s friend given me recompense for my woes: he gave me an art’ (that of poetry) ‘ free from fault and said’.
As the above will show, there is a real difficulty in reconciling the historical statements as to the worship of Odin and Thor with the relative positions assigned to them in the old mythology. The explanation which seems to clear away this difficulty in the most satisfactory manner is 5the suggestion that Thor and Odin really belong to different stages in the development of Scandinavian religion. On this view Thor was originally the chief god, and to a certain extent continued to hold this position to the end. His supremacy, however, was in the later period of heathenism seriously threatened by the growing cult of Odin, which was at first foreign to the Scandinavian peoples, and was received by them from the South Germanics races. This would easily account for the seemingly greater popularity of Odin among the Danes and Swedes than among the Norwegians and Icelanders, to whom the new cult would be later in spreading. In this connection it may be noted that some of the poetic names for Odin, such as ‘ the friend of the Gauts’. ‘Tyr of the Gauts’ (as well as the simple Gauti and Gautr ), appear to indicate that his worship was associated with the people of that name in southern Sweden. It was in Gautland that the poet Hallfred was nearly sacrificed to Odin in 997, and her also in 1018 the poet Sigvat was refused admission to a farm wherew a sacrifice was taking place, become they ‘ were afraid of Odin’s anger’. It may even be significant that Earl Hakon’s sacrifice already mentioned was performed on the coast of Gautland.
The ninth and tenth centuries were a period of new development and great changes within the Scandinavian countries. The Viking expeditions brought a large part of the population into direct contact with war and battle, while the former petty kings disappeared, or lost most of their importance, before strong rulers like Gorm in Denmark or Harald in Norway. In the courts of these new sovereigns there was a life and splendor previously unknown in the north, and under the royal favour the art of poetry flourished to a remarkable extent. It appears fairly certain that in these surroundings the cult of Odin found most favour, and that the conceptions of the god which meet us in the mythology were developed among men who found a pleasure both in fighting and in poetry, and who modeled their ideas of the warlike deity on the monarch to whose court they attached themselves. Odin was thus the god of the warrior, the poet, and the friend of kings, while Thor retained his former place in the hearts of those who still followed the old way of life in the secluded valleys of Norway or Iceland. Something of this distinctly appears in the figures of the two gods as they are presented in the old poems and legends. Odin bears all the stamp of the new life and culture about him ; Thor is rather a sturdy yeoman of the old unpolished type. Odin is a ruler in whom knowledge and power are equally combined; Thor has little more to rely upon than his bodily strength. Even in small matters the contrast is marked : Odin lives by wine alone, while Thor eats the flesh of his goats and drinks the homely ale. Odin’s weapon is the spear; Thor’s is the more primitive hammer. It is to Odin that all the warriors go after death; Thor gets only the thralls. In some of the poems there is an obvious tendency to assign to Thor an undignified and even ludicrous part, which is strongly at variance with the veneration in which he was actually held, as we have seen above. It would, perhaps, be unsafe to attach very much importance to this, as it is quite uncertain how far these poems can be accepted as evidence for religious beliefs. It is perhaps more significant that while writers like Snorri tell how Odin and various other gods ( such as Njörd and Frey) came from the south-east into Denmark and Sweden there is no similar account as regards Thor. In the historical period, too, there were distinguished families in Sweden and Norway whose genealogy was traced back to Odin and Frey, While on one claimed descent from Thor. Both of these facts may reasonably be regarded as supporting the view that Odin belong to a later period in the history of Scandinavia than Thor, and some such explanation appears to be requisite to account for the striking differences in the traditional statements regarding the two chief gods of the old religion.