Odin

Odin was the chief god of the Norse and wider Germanic world — Woden to the English, Wotan to the continental Germans — and a strange one to sit at the top of a pantheon. He ruled war and kingship, but also poetry, magic, prophecy and the dead, and his myths show him hungry for a knowledge he is always paying for: an eye surrendered at Mímir’s well, nine nights hanging wounded on the world-tree to seize the runes. For the Viking Age he was the god of kings and skalds from Iceland to the rivers of Rus, receiving sacrifices — animal and human — in sacred groves, most famously at the great temple at Uppsala.

His worship did not fade so much as it was converted. As Christian kingship spread through the North between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the old religion was outlawed from the top down: Iceland adopted Christianity by a single vote of its assembly in the year 1000, Norway was hammered Christian by its kings, and around 1080–1100 the temple at Uppsala — the last great open centre of the cult — was pulled down. Odin did not vanish cleanly; he sank into folklore, into the Wild Hunt and the wandering one-eyed stranger, and into the language itself, where he survives best of all. Most people who say “Wednesday” have no idea they are still naming his day — a god reduced to a word, worshipped by no one and spoken by everyone.