Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/511

Rh as ruling over different social spheres, for Thor numbers earls and others of high degree among his worshippers, but persons of royal blood and their followers seem to devote themselves to the worship of Odin — the cult of a royal ancestor. Nomenclature affords interesting testimony to some such social division. We have seen what a large proportion of Norwegian proper names contained "Thor" as a component part, but we do not find any of these borne by a single Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English king. Not even among the petty kings of the period preceding the unification of Norway under King Harold Fairhair do such names occur. Now we are told that it was just these petty, often landless, kings who with their followings practised war as a profession, and it was certainly in Norwegian court circles that skaldic poetry — an art attributed to Odin — took its origin. If the position of Odin was at all similar on the Continent, it would be easy to explain the prominence of this god in all Continental accounts from Tacitus onwards, for it seems probable that there also each king or prince was surrounded by a body of warriors devoted to his service, and that these took the principal part in wars.

In Iceland there is no mention of Odin-worship, though there is one instance of the "old custom" of throwing a spear over a hostile force, a rite which originally devoted the enemy to Odin. The existence of the cult in Norway is vouched for by the custom of drinking a toast consecrated to him at sacrificial feasts, but we must note that a toast to Odin is only mentioned at courts. In Sweden, however, Odin is more prominent. There is a statue of him "like Mars" by the side of Thor in the great Upsala temple, and the people are said to sacrifice to him in time of war. A legendary king sacrifices his nine sons to him for long life for himself — a gift which another story shews it to be within Odin's power to bestow, if he receives other lives in exchange. It is generally agreed that he was originally a god of the dead, before he became a god of war, and it is in the guise of a soul-stealing daemon that he seems to appear in folk-lore. For Denmark the tales of heroes under Odin's protection, and the importance of the god in Saxo's stories (where he sometimes appears himself to demand his victim), form a considerable body of evidence. Of the Frisians we are told by Alcuin that the island Walcheren was sacred to a god whom later accounts identify with Mercury. Mercury is the name under which Odin appears in Tacitus and all Continental writers, and shews that the god must there have borne much the same character as is ascribed to him in Scandinavian sources, where he is described as shifty and full of guile, skilled in magic and runes, and the inventor of poetry. To judge from the evidence of place-names, his cult extended as far south as Salzburg. It is also noteworthy that the Scandinavian account of his equipment, armed only with a javelin, corresponds to that of the Germans in the time of Tacitus.

An ancient form of sacrifice to Odin in Scandinavia is the gruesome