"Odin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... countries, but is particularly abundant in England. The lead-mines in Derbyshire are many, as the Odin, Speedwell, Tideswell Moor, Dirtlow, &c.; and the ore is not only found in various soils, but mingled with a variety of substances. The Odin mine, at the foot of Mam Tor, and near it to the south, is the most celebrated and ancient of any in the county, being worked by the Saxons, from whom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... eighty acres situated in Marlon County, Illinois, two and a half miles from Tonti Station, and six miles from Odin, on branch of Illinois Central R. R., and O. & M. Road—300 acres under plow, 180 acres timber. The latter has never been culled and is very valuable. Farm is well fenced into seven fields. Has an orchard on it which has yielded ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... spear, The sound of smitten shields I hear, Keeping a harsh and fitting time To Saga's chant, and Runic rhyme; Such lays as Zetland's Scald has sung, His gray and naked isles among; Or muttered low at midnight hour Round Odin's mossy stone of power. The wolf beneath the Arctic moon Has answered to that startling rune; The Gael has heard its stormy swell, The light Frank knows its summons well; Iona's sable-stoled Culdee Has heard it sounding o'er the sea, And swept, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... listened all, in grim delight, While scalds yelled out the joys of fight. Then forth, in frenzy, would they hie, While wildly-loose their red locks fly, And dancing round the blazing pile, They make such barbarous mirth the while, As best might to the mind recall The boist'rous joys of Odin's hall. And well our Christian sires of old Loved, when the year its course had rolled, And brought blithe Christmas back again, With all his hospitable train. Domestic and religious rite Gave honour to the holy night; ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... be the difficulties, however, we are already able to come to certain definite conclusions. We cannot connect the megalithic monuments with any one of the ancient religions known. They were certainly not set up in honor of Odin or of Osiris, of Astarte or of Athene, the Phoenician or the Egyptian, the Greek or the Roman gods; their erection seems to have had but one end in view, to do honor to the dead. Beneath none of them do we find the remains either of the cave-bear or of the reindeer, still less of the mammoth ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... summer insects, or dance in magic circles on the greensward. And it did his heart good to feel he was not alone, but that these merry little companions were with him, lightening his way and guiding his course all the night through. And he thought too of luckless dwarfs whom Odin had condemned to dig and delve all day deep in the ground, and throw fuel on the great central fire of the earth, but who at night, like the fairies, might come above and revisit then old haunts. And even these mischievous little companions helped to ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... and isolated as Finland, fantastic mythology took firm root, and we certainly find the most romantic and weird verses in connection with the chief heroes of the Kalevala, namely, Winminen and Ilmarinen, who broadly resemble the Norse demigods Odin and Thor. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... my thumb," quoth Tostig. "By Odin, the women of the North Danes are a scurvy breed. They birth dwarfs, not men. Of what use is this thing? He will never make a man. Listen you, Lingaard, grow him to be a drink-boy at Brunanbuhr. And ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of the red cliffs of Heligoland appeared, the German cruiser Seeadler came from the island to meet the squadron and reported that the coast ironclads Aegir and Odin, the cruisers Hansa, Vineta, Freya, and Hertha, together with the torpedo-boats, had set out from Wilhelmshaven during the night and had seen nothing of the enemy. The sea appeared free. All the available English ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... the flames had also a superstitious meaning, and the simple people thought that in this way they could ward off evil spirits and prevent sickness. The Roman shepherds used to leap through the Midsummer blaze in honour of Pales. The Scandinavians lit their bonfires in honour of their gods Odin and Thor, and the leaping through the flames reminds us of the worshippers of Baal and Moloch, who, as we read in the Bible, used to "pass their children through the fire" in awe of their cruel god. St. John's Day, or Midsummer Day (June 24th), was ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a Runic manuscript, the language of the original population of Iceland, invented by Odin himself," cried my uncle, angry at ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded as a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being and into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office for young Taurus any spring. She licks him out of the fogs and bewilderments and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first landing upon these shores, and up on to his feet in ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Sulgrave, as identified by the garter king-at-arms. Still more recently the mythical spirit has taken violent possession of the Washington ancestry, and an ingenious gentleman has traced the pedigree of our first president back to Thorfinn and thence to Odin, which is sufficiently remote, dignified, and lofty to satisfy the most exacting Welshman that ever lived. Still the breach made by Colonel Chester was not repaired, although many writers, including some who ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sagas, as they were called, did he miss. When he by daytime watched the sheep he thought of them, and told them over to himself. Thus he learned of other lands. He learned of Thor, and Odin, and the other gods which the Jarl worshipped with all his men, since they had never heard of the one true God, our Father of all. And he knew the Jarl believed that if a man was brave, and honest, ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... in the highest esteem and veneration by the people among whom they lived; they were received and welcomed wherever they went, and even kings delighted to honor them. In short, their art was supposed, by the Anglo-Saxons, to be of divine origin, having been invented by Odin, the great All-Father, and perfected by Bragi, the musician of the gods. As, however, civilization advanced and Christianity became established, this admiration for the minstrel and his art became modified in a degree. He was no longer ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... crossed himself and said— 'I know that Odin the Great is dead; Sure is the triumph of our Faith, This one-eyed stranger was his wraith.' Dead ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... unharness'd in freedom can play, And safely o'er Odin's steep precipice stray, Whilst the wolf to the forest recesses may fly, And howl to the moon as she ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... inhabitants of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, were of the same origin as the tribes that peopled Germany, and that came from the East, probably from the borders of the Black Sea. They were fire-worshippers, and their chief god was Odin. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the Hall of Mists, Freya (or Frigga), wife of Odin the All Father, sat with her golden distaff spinning the clouds. Orion's Belt was known as "Frigga's spindle" by the Norsemen, and the men on the earth, as they watched the great cumulous masses of snowy-white, golden or silver edged, the fleecy cloudlets of ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... miscellaneous collection, in which there is whatever might have been looked for, with perhaps the single exception of original verse. One of the books opens with: "Vegtam's Kvitha, or The Descent of Odin, with the Latin of Thomas Bartholine, and the English poetical version of Mr. Gray; with some account of the death of Balder, both as narrated in the Edda, and as handed down to us by the Northern ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... apart from the Church. They have somewhat indulgently regarded it as one more historic institution for preserving myth and legend. To them the Christ-life has meant little more than the Beowa-myth, the Arthur-saga, the Nibelungen cycle, the Homeric stories, the Thor-and-Odin tales! Druids, fire-worshippers, moon-dancers, and Christian communicants have been comparatively studied, with a view to understanding the race-progress in ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human victims. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... chronicles point out Odin as the most persuasive of men. They tell us that nothing could resist the force of his words; that he sometimes enlivened his harangues with verses, which he composed extempore; and that he was not only ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Palaeolithic Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 329. As to stone implements used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac, as above, 6 and 7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead Sea; also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97; also Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... fear the human deer, And rested,—when he had leisure! Come,—shout and sing Of the great Sea-King, And ride in the track he rode in! He sits at the head Of the mighty dead, On the red right hand of Odin! ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... not yet Spirit or mind, Blood, or beauty, Or lovely hue. Odin gave spirit, Heinir gave mind, Lothur gave ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... patient and compelled him to surrender at discretion to his nurses and medical advisers, but before the Valkyrie of Delirium are scouring the fields of his understanding, to pounce on the corpses of ideas their Odin had slain. That time was not due for many hours yet, when Gwen got speech of her cousin. She immediately appreciated that the patient was anxious to impress bystanders that this illness was all in the way of business. Also, that she was watching the development of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... called Odense," replied the Pastor, "the other towns were envious of its better appearance and condition, and particularly the town now called Kjerteminde, and complaint was made to Odin, who was angry, and replied, 'Vaer du mindre' (literally, 'be you less'); this was that they should continue to be smaller towns than Odense. In time the name from Vaer du mindre became altered to its present name of Kjerteminde. There is also the variation ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... almost suppose it an earl's home; and such it was, or rather upon its site stood an earl's home, in days of old, for there some old Kemp, some Sigurd, or Thorkild, roaming in quest of a hearthstead, settled down in the gray old time, when Thor and Freya were yet gods, and Odin was a portentous name. Yon old hall is still called the Earl's Home, though the hearth of Sigurd is now no more, and the bones of the old Kemp, and of Sigrith his dame, have been mouldering for a thousand years ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... heard that it was a custom to hang out a helmet[799].' JOHNSON. 'Hang him up, hang him up.' BOSWELL. (humouring the joke) 'Hang out his skull instead of a helmet, and you may drink ale out of it in your hall of Odin, as he is your enemy; that will be truly ancient. There will be Northern Antiquities[800].' JOHNSON. 'He's a Whig, Sir; a sad dog. (smiling at his own violent expressions, merely for political difference of opinion.) But he's the best traveller ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the sword, but I now Am undone by Sword-Odin. 'Gainst shields beyond the sea-flood The ruin of shields was wielded. Methinks the blood-fowl blood-stained In blood der men's heads stood there, The wound-erne yet ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... he said, when he returned. "Zarathustra pool-ball fruit. Potato-flour hotcakes, with Baldur honey and Odin flameberry jam. And two big cups of coffee apiece. It's a miracle they aren't dead now. If they're alive for lunch, we won't need to worry about feeding them anything we eat, but I'm glad somebody else has the ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... After her marriage, Bertha herself for some years held Christian services here alone in little St. Martin's Church, but Ethelbert still loved his idols; indeed, for many years, he continued to worship Odin and Thor. St. Patrick had been in Ireland a full ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... of the Hebrews: Homer, one of the earliest poets of the Greeks: Ossian, an ancient poet of the Scots: Taliesen, an ancient poet of the Welsh: and Odin, an early poet of ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... the country over which he reigned, and which will be noticed in connection with Denmark; these two countries forming a greater part of the ancient Scandinavia, from which our Teutonic ancestors migrated, the land of Odin, and Frea, and Thor, those half-fabulous deities, concerning whom there are still divided opinions; some supposing that they were heroes, and others, impersonations of virtues, or elements and wonders of nature. The ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... their doings in the "old days." One of his victims tells him to "let bygones be bygones." The gods are the subject of many stories that are here raked up against them, stories of another order of belief and of civilisation than those in which Odin appears as the wise and sleepless counsellor. This poem implies a great amount of independence in the author of it. It is not a satire on the gods; it is pure comedy; that is, it belongs to a type of literature which has risen above prejudices and which has an air of levity because it is ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... am at last! Theodore hadn't been up for a week, so I came down, to find Mr. Gunther thundering like Odin because I had promised to help him arrange sittings with you, and had forgotten it. I had to bring him at once. He says his group is all done but the two heads, and he must have yours and the baby's. But he'll tell you all about it. Where is he? Elliston, I ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... pillars in Orkney. When he says it continued till a late period, I suppose he must allude to the standing stone at Stenness, perforated by a hole, with the sanctity attached to promises confirmed by the junction of hands through the hole, called the promise of Odin. Dr. Daniel Wilson enters into this fully in Praehistoric Annals of Scotland, pp. 99, 100, 101. It has been told myself that if a lad and lass promised marriage with joined hands through the hole, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... in peace, but a lion in war, The pride of her kindred, the heroine grew: Her grandsire, old Odin, triumphantly swore,— "Whoe'er shall provoke thee, th' encounter shall rue!" With tillage or pasture at times she would sport, To feed her fair flocks by her green rustling corn; But chiefly the woods were her fav'rite ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... not enough, we want revenge. Odin and Thor will not know their children; our spears ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the torch straightway, In honour of Odin and Thor,— And the blazing night is as bright as the day As a gift to the gods of war; For down to the melting sand And over each flaring mast Those fifty and five they have burnt as they stand To the tune of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Stenness," with the famous Stone of Odin about 150 yards to the north, are second only to Stonehenge, one measuring 18 feet in length, 5 feet 4 inches in breadth, and 18 inches in thickness. The Stone of Odin had a hole in it to which it was supposed that sacrificial victims were fastened in ancient times, but in later times ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... north a different story was told, but the meaning was the same. Sometimes men told how Odin (the All-Father) had become angry with Brunhild (the maid of spring), and had wounded her with the thorn of sleep, and how all the castle in which she slept was wrapped in deathlike slumber until Sigurd or Siegfried (the sunbeam) rode through flaming fire, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... made her too proud and serious. A more proper part for her was that of a heroine, a queenly heroine,—that of Theresa of Hungary, for example; or, better still, that of Brynhilda the Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd, the serpent-killer, who incurred the curse of Odin, because, in the tumult of spears, she sided with the young king, and doomed the old warrior to die, to whom ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... be blotted out in the darkness to-night; but the great shadow of the tree which hides you from the light of heaven shall be swept away. For this is the birth-night of the white Christ, son of the All-Father, and Saviour of mankind. Fairer is He than Baldur the Beautiful, greater than Odin the Wise, kinder than Freya the Good. Since He has come to earth the bloody sacrifices must cease. The dark Thor, on whom you vainly call, is dead. Deep in the shades of Niffelheim he is lost forever. His power in the world is broken. Will you ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... May we not suspect that superstition was the parent of despotism? The descendants of Odin, (whose race was not extinct till the year 1060) are said to have reigned in Sweden above a thousand years. The temple of Upsal was the ancient seat of religion and empire. In the year 1153 I find a singular law, prohibiting the use and profession of arms to any except the king's guards. Is it not ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... rock, the mountain, the river, the forest, the sun, the stars, the storms, the rude Teutonic mind saw a protecting or avenging deity. They easily transferred to the Christian clergy the reverence they had bestowed on the old priests of Odin, of Freya, and of Thor. Reverence was one of the great sentiments of our German ancestors. It was only among such a people that an overpowering spiritual despotism could be maintained. The Pope became to them the vicegerent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... price paid by the suitor to the father for his good will; while portion, on the other hand, was the sum paid by the father to persuade a suitor to take a daughter off his hands. Let us remember, therefore, that in those times, as Odin was supreme in Asgard as the Great Father of Gods and men, so in his own house every father of the race that revered Odin was also ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... are considering here second causes only, without raising profane eyes to the Providence which directs them. The Christian religion, born in Syria, having received its principal development in Alexandria, inhabits to-day the lands where Teutate, Irminsul, Frida, Odin ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... time for talking now, son of Hakon!" he shouted. "What think you we should do?—run into the islands, or go to Odin where we are? These men, methinks, ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... any reasons. What's the use of being an Amal, and a son of Odin, if one has always to be giving reasons like a rascally Roman lawyer? I say the governor looked like a liar; and I say this monk looks like an honest fellow; and I choose to believe him, and there is an ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Tacitus, they lived bout the period of the birth of Christ, and were a poor but brave people. Their original name was Vinuler, or Viniler. "When these Viniler," say the traditions, or rather fables of Scandinavia, "were at war with the Vandals, and the latter went to Odin to beseech him to grant them the victory, and received for answer that Odin would award the victory to those whom he beheld first at sunrise, the warlike female, Gambaruk, or Gunborg, who was mother to the leaders of the Viniler—Ebbe and Aage—applied to Frigga, Odin's wife, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... maintained itself in more Northern latitudes. It was brought to Britain by the German invaders, continued there till the seventh century, and was brought in again in a more Northern form by the Norsemen, who in their turn "gradually deserted Thor and Odin for the white Christ."[3] Bede tells hardly anything of the paganism which had been the religion of England a century before he wrote; in this he is like other Christian teachers who might have told but did not. But though it ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... beams; upon the walls are shown The painted histories of the olden might, The King of the Wends Thassilo's stern fight On land with Nimrod, and on ocean wide With Neptune. Rivers too personified Appear—the Rhine as by the Meuse betrayed, And fading groups of Odin in the shade, And the wolf Fenrir and the Asgard snake. One might the place for dragons' stable take. The only lights that in the shed appear Spring from the table's giant chandelier With seven iron branches—brought from hell By Attila Archangel, people tell, When he had conquered ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of ancient Europe, the Scandinavians were perhaps most imbued with a persuasion of the efficacy of magic; a fact which their home and their habits sufficiently explain. In the Eddas, Odin, the leader of the immigration in the first century, and the great national lawgiver, is represented as well versed in the knowledge of that preternatural art; and the heroes of the Scandinavian legends of the tenth ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... them to the college and the cloister, we must consider them as founders at home, and as missionaries abroad; otherwise how could we estimate all that is at stake for Erin and for Christendom, in the approaching combat with the devotees of Odin,—the deadly enemies ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... presently to shed its soft light in the sky; and they tended the torches and lights around the trees devoutly, not guessing that their fathers had done the same long ago, in bleak Denmark and snowy Norway, in worship of Odin and in honour of Yggdrasil, the tree ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... the fervent wish of depositing them at Cologne. There these skeletons were taken into the most especial consideration, crowned with jewels and filigreed with gold. Never were skulls more elegantly mounted; and I doubt whether Odin's buffet could exhibit so fine an assortment. The chapel containing these beatified bones is placed in a dark extremity of the cathedral. Several golden lamps gleam along the polished marbles with which it is adorned, and afford just ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... he had none. He told me his history. Thrown upon the world a foundling, his paternal origin was as much a mystery to him as the genealogy of Odin; and, scorned by everybody, he fled the parish workhouse when a boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for several years, a dog before the mast, and now he had thrown it up ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... god of poetry and eloquence, son of Odin and Frigga; represented as an old man with a long flowing beard and unwrinkled brow, with a mild expression of face; received in Valhalla the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that understanding alone that I shall give some little worship to Thor the next winter when I get back to Iceland." Then the king said and smiled, "It may be seen from the mien of Kjartan that he puts more trust in his own weapons and strength than in Thor and Odin." Then the meeting was broken up. After a while many men egged the king on to force Kjartan and his followers to receive the faith, and thought it unwise to have so many heathen men near about him. The king answered wrathfully, and said ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... word boh! used to frighten children, was the name of Boh, a great general, the son of Odin, whose very appellation struck ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... within the meadow-mist Their halos, wavering thistledowns of light; The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst, Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright, Like Odin's hounds, ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... quick as her tongue; chattering all the time, she yet missed nothing of interest. The poppy-strewn plain, the green levels of the mesa delighted her; so did the wide stretches of blue distance, and she screamed with joy at the orange and red pinnacles in Odin's Garden. ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... Odin, who "howled his war-song to the gale", no Lapland savage who cowered in his hut, ever panted for the respite of the spring-time more than these two lovers in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... effect of the Greek genius at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter of Cnidos and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods, when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices, soma drinking, magical ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Christian woman. A few priests came with her to England, and the king gave them a ruined Christian edifice, the Church of St. Martin, outside the walls of Canterbury, for their worship. But it was overshadowed by a pagan temple, and the worship of Odin and Thor still dominated ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... rests on a mental want; we hope, we fear, because we wish."[53-1] And long before this conclusion was reached by philosophers, it had been expressed in unconscious religious thought in myths, in the Valkyria, the Wish-maidens, for instance, who carried the decrees of Odin to earth. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... lips in music rolled The Havamal of Odin old, With sounds mysterious as the roar Of billows on a distant shore. Dead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Rhenish, a German hero. The whole scene of the tragic events is laid in the Rhinelands, where the killing of the Worm also takes place. On a hill in Frank-land Sigurd frees Brynhild from the magic slumber into which Odin had thrown her on a rock of punishment, because she, as a Valkyr, or shield-maiden of his, had brought about the death of a Gothic king to whom the god of battle had promised victory. In the south, on the Rhine, Sigurd is murdered. In the Rhine, Hoegni (Hagen) hides ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd. The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... backs, driving the great world-plough which wins the world's bread up and up over the shoulder of the world—a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the Aesir visited. These people also go north year by year, and drag audacious railways with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat or timber land, sometimes into mines of treasure, and all the North is foil of voices—as South Africa was once—telling discoveries ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... know more of the Scandinavian religion through the Eddas, the Iliad of the Northmen, than of the religion of the Germans; but the two religions were closely allied. Among the chief gods worshiped by the Germans were Woden, called "Odin" in the North, the highest divinity, the god of the air and of the sky, the giver of fruits and delighting in battle; Donar (Thor), the god of thunder and of the weather, armed with a hammer or ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on "The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his annotations on "The Lay ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... her when they were wild, but which had grown tame and lovable under her gentle care. Then the old woman related in turn many a legend and fable, tales of the saintly King Olaf, or the doings of Odin and Thor. ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the gold ring. He said, "Each night this ring will throw off a ring just like it. He gave the ring to Odin." ...
— A Primary Reader - Old-time Stories, Fairy Tales and Myths Retold by Children • E. Louise Smythe
... very epoch when the nations of the East invaded Europe, the Scandinavians began to land on the coast of England. Their operations are little better known than those of the barbarians: they are hidden in the mysteries of Odin. ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Moslems in secret to this day in Andalusia, and if there were worshippers of Odin and Thor till lately on the shores of the Baltic, may not some secret votaries of Jupiter and Mars have lingered among the recesses of the Balkan, for centuries after Christianity had shed ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... to take you for a good long drive to-morrow, and show you something; but the trouble is, the doctor and I are at variance as to what the something shall be. I want you to see Odin's Garden; and the doctor insists that you ought to go to the Cheyenne canyons first, because those are his favorites. Now, which shall it be? We ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... counsellor. Odin and Thor send that we may meet again;" and Edwy with only a dozen followers rode ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... whence proceed pure and limpid all the streams that are contaminated by baser contact in their later course, is a question which might mightily task the most powerful minds. The gods of Greece and Rome are reproduced in Odin and Thor, Freia, and Gerda and Tduna. Aphrodite at Athens, Venus on the Seven Hills, Freia in the North, differ but in name. Dark hair and coal-black eyes, and a warm, sunny beauty may please the ardent inhabitants of Greece and Rome; the Swedes and Germans may bow before golden ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... errors the Greeks imputed to him. His great learning caused the Orientals to compare him with the Mercury or Hermes of the Egyptians and Greeks; just as the northern peoples compared their Wodan or Odin to this same Mercury. That is why Mercredi (Wednesday), or the day of Mercury, was called Wodansdag by the northern peoples, but day of Zerdust by the Asiatics, since it is named Zarschamba or Dsearschambe by the Turks ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... trinkets of the negroes of Soudan. There too, in still other halls, was the history of our own race; the maces the Teutons and Norsemen fought with, the torcs of twisted gold they wore about their necks, the sacrificial knives that slew the victims on the altars of Odin; so, too, what our fathers have carved and spun, moulded, cast, and portrayed, until we took up the task of life. In another place you found the great collection made in Egypt by Lepsius. The visitor stood within the facsimile of a temple on the banks of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose. His companions take up the parable in turn, "and the echoes, huddling in affright, like Odin's hounds," go baying down the valleys and clamouring amongst the pines, like a legion of invisible fiends after a strange cat. Then again all is hush, and tramp, and sanctity, and flop, and holy meditation! And so the pilgrimage is accomplished. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... diameter. It was more than a battle-craft; it also had political functions. The grand salon, on the outer zone where the curvature of the floors was less disconcerting, was as magnificent as any but a few of the rooms of the Imperial Palace at Asgard on Odin, the floor richly carpeted and the walls alternating mirrors and paintings. The movable furniture varied according to occasion; at present, it consisted of the bare desk at which they sat, the three chairs they occupied, and the three secretary-robots, their rectangular black casts ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... were heathen still and their religion was the old religion of force. They loved battle even more than they loved plunder. They held that the warrior who was slain in fight was received by the god Odin in Valhalla, where immortal heroes spent their days in cutting one another to pieces, and were healed of their wounds in the evening that they might join in the nightly feast, and be able to fight again on the morrow. He that died in bed was condemned ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... belief held by the Pampas;[14] and even of the late Brahmanic custom of sacrificing the widow (suttee), in the practice of the Natchez Indians, and in Guatemala, of burning the widow on the pyre of the dead husband.[15] The storm wind (Odin) as highest god is found among the Choctaws; while 'Master of Breath' is the Creeks' name for this divinity. Huraka (hurricane, ouragon, ourage) is the chief god in Hayti.[16] An exact parallel to the vague idea of hell at the close of the Vedic period, with ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the gods. Now, De Gubernatis regards this fable as 'making the boar emblem of the hidden moon'; and Mr. Conway thinks there is no doubt that the boar at an early period became emblematic of the wild forces of Nature. 'From being hunted by King Odin on earth, it passed to be his favourite food in Valhalla, and a prominent figure in his spectral hunt.' But it is with the moon, not with Odin, that we are at present concerned, and so note two curious items mentioned by Conway. In Sicilian legend, he ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... tras el fuego, "sayings of old wives by their firesides," before the existence of any writings in their language, from the circumstance that these are in the old romance or rudest vulgar idiom. The most ancient poem in the Edda, "the sublime speech of Odin," abounds with ancient proverbs, strikingly descriptive of the ancient Scandinavians. Undoubtedly proverbs in the earliest ages long served as the unwritten language of morality, and even of the useful arts; like the oral traditions of the Jews, they floated ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... religion; and I can only resume, in a few words, their real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome. Our fancy may create, or adopt, a pleasing romance, that the Goths and Vandals sallied from Scandinavia, ardent to avenge the flight of Odin; [20] to break the chains, and to chastise the oppressors, of mankind; that they wished to burn the records of classic literature, and to found their national architecture on the broken members of the Tuscan and Corinthian orders. But in simple truth, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pine wood he built an altar unto thee and Odin, There thou mayst see the roof of his still dwelling. There lives the earthly Freia—cruel maiden— There slumbers she, perhaps—the proud one rests in Joy's downy arms, undreaming aught of Balder! As if I did not ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... menstruated regularly to the age of thirty-eight. The penis was imperforate but hypospadic, from whence came the urinary and spermatic discharges, and Hohmann could in turn copulate as either male or female. Odin is also quoted in relation to the case seen at the Hotel-Dieu-de-Lyon, during the service of M. Bondet. The subject was aged sixty-three, and named Mathieu Perret. The case greatly resembled that of Hohmann, at the autopsy being ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... civilization? Has Israel no contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel—half misunderstanding, like most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was other than One. Jesus but applied to himself ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... Karen and Lovisa came up with the smaller children the place had already an inhabited, homelike look. There was even a wise old raven, almost as large as a gander, whom Nils had christened Munin, after Odin's bird. The little ones had all the new milk they could drink from their wooden bowls, and were put to bed in the movable wooden bed-places, on beds of hay covered with sheepskins and blankets. All were asleep before dark, for at that season the night lasted only two or three ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... indiscriminate, is furthermore supported by the Hindoo myth, according to which Brahma married his own daughter Saravasti. The same myth turns up again among the Egyptians and the northern Edda. The Egyptian god Ammon was the spouse of his own mother, and boasted of it. Odin, according to the Edda, was the mate of his own daughter Frigga.[2] Morgan proceeds from the principle that, from the state of promiscuity, soon a higher form of sexual intercourse took shape. He designates ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... times, before Christianity had found its way so far north, the bird which influenced the people most was the raven. He was credited with much knowledge, as well as with the power to bring good or bad luck. One of the titles of Odin was "Raven-god," and he had as messengers two faithful ravens, "who could speak all manner of tongues, and flew on his behests to the uttermost parts of the earth." In those days the figure of a raven was usually emblazoned on shield and standard, and it was thought that as the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... bowers, far outshining The six heavens of Mohammed, Or the sunbright spheres of Vishnu, Or the Gardens of Adonis, Or the viewless bowers of Irim, Or the fine Mosaic mythus, Or the fair Elysian flower-land, Or the clashing halls of Odin, Or the cyclop-orbs of Brahma, Or the marble realms of Siva, Or the ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... being the half-way point between the N. and S.E., became the meeting-place of the two great ravaging swarms which have desolated Europe: here the stalwart children of frozen Norway, the worshippers of Odin, clashed against the Saracens from torrid Arabia, the followers of Mahomet. Nor can a greater proof be adduced of the power and relative superiority of the Cordovese Moors over the other nations of Europe, than this, their successful ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... days, and the dread choice had to be made—the crisis in the life of Alfgar, a crisis which has its parallel in the lives of many around us—approached, and he had to choose between Christ and Odin, between the death of ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... soldiers, who were absent, must come home as suddenly and unexpectedly as the little child had done. She and her whole household therefore busied themselves in preparing everything for the reception of her lord. The long, colored tapestry, on which she and her maidens had worked pictures of their idols, Odin, Thor, and Friga, was hung up. The slaves polished the old shields that served as ornaments; cushions were placed on the seats, and dry wood laid on the fireplaces in the centre of the hall, so that the flames might be fanned up at a moment's notice. The Viking's wife herself ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... were at least a nominally Christian people, and the seventh century certainly witnessed the destruction of many of the idols and their shrines that had hitherto formed the centre for the religious rites of the Anglo-Saxons. Woden or Odin, Thor and the other deities did not lose their adherents in a day, and Bede records the relapses into idolatry of Northumbria as well as the other parts of England. There can be no doubt that fairies and elves entered largely into the mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, and ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... settling down in Europe; on their wanderings these races lost the original religion of their homes, and with it the right view of life: so, under a new sky, they formed religions for themselves, which were rather crude; the worship of Odin, for instance, the Druidic or the Greek religion, the metaphysical content of which was little and shallow. In the meantime the Greeks developed a special, one might almost say, an instinctive sense of beauty, belonging ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... nearer the shore they saw it was laden with quantities of gold and weapons, but not a soul was to be seen on board. When the Danes boarded the ship, they found a little boy lying asleep on the deck, and above his head floated a golden banner. Thinking that their god Odin had sent the boy, they brought him ashore and proclaimed him King. They named him Skjold, and he became a great and good King. His fame was such that the Danish Kings to this day are called "Skjoldunger." ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... high explosives. There still survives among us the superstition that races professing Christianity are divinely destined to rob or exterminate races holding other beliefs. Some men occasionally express their conviction that we still worship Thor and Odin,—the only difference being that Odin has become a mathematician, and that the Hammer Mjolnir is now worked by steam. But such persons are declared by the missionaries to be atheists ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... a comparative study of the accounts of the creation held by people of different races and faiths. Our Norse ancestors, whose myths were of a very exalted nature, recorded in their Bible, the Edda, that one day the sons of Bor (a frost giant), Odin, Hoener, and Loder, found two trees on the sea beach, and from them created the first human pair, man and woman. Odin gave them life and spirit, Hoener endowed them with reason and motion, and Loder gave them the senses and physical characteristics. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the clock were pointing upward. And I was half-asleep, and half-dreaming. Remembering all the friends I had—most of them scattered to the four winds by now. And that best friend of all, Doctor Jack Odin! I wondered where he was and how he had fared since he disappeared into that dark ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... as jolly were they as were Odin and the Iotun—dead drunk in Valhalla over their mead and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... second day the whole head, and on the third the entire form endowed with beauty, agility, and power. This new being was a god, from whom and his wife, a daughter of the giant race, sprang the three brothers Odin, Vili, and Ve. They slew the giant Ymir, and out of his body formed the earth, of his blood the seas, of his bones the mountains, of his hair the trees, of his skull the heavens, and of his brain clouds, charged with hail and snow. Of Ymir's eyebrows the gods formed Midgard (mid earth), ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Odin in Valhall I dare not beseech; For him I forsook in days of childhood. But the great new God in Gimle?— All that ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... than half humorous tolerance—Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus, Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher the foam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our literature, beside whom the gods of northern Europe—Odin, Thor, Freya—are strangers, unhomely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliar furniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though great numbers of us are from the loins of Northmen, it is in these gracious deities of the South that we find the familiar ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... south in Iceland Gunnar guarded well himself, Boldly battle's thunder wielding, Fiercest foeman on the wave; Hero of the golden collar, Sixteen with the sword he wounded; In the shock that Odin loveth, Two ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... own notion on this point. Its mythology was not without its own dark powers; but though they, too, were ejected and dispossessed, they, according to that mythology, had rights of their own. To them belonged all the universe that had not been seized and reclaimed by the younger race of Odin and AEsir; and though this upstart dynasty, as the Frost-Giants in AEschylean phrase would have called it, well knew that Hel, one of this giant progeny, was fated to do them all mischief, and to outlive them, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... she answered, dropping it again, and sitting down on it. "Heregar the king's thane—the standard bearer—shall bend to no humbler burden than the Dragon of Wessex. Go; and Thor and Odin ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... least tangible, it is believed, is that which has been suggested with the Scandinavian mythology. That mythology is of so marked and peculiar a character, that it has not been distinctly traced out of the great circle of tribes of the Indo-Germanic family. Odin, and his terrific pantheon of war-gods and social deities, could only exist in the dreary latitudes of storms and fire, which produce a Hecla and a Maelstrom. These latitudes have invariably produced nations, whose influence has been felt in an elevating ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... attempts to substitute the Scandinavian social system for that of the Irish septs and clans were forever frustrated. City life and maritime enterprises, together with commerce and trade, were as scornfully rejected as the worship of Thor and Odin. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is flown; And, like the eagle free, That soars into the cloud and dies, I leave my life on sea. To man I yield not spear nor sword Ne'er harmed me in their ire, Vain on me Europe shower'd her shafts, And Asia pour'd her fire. Nor wound nor scar my body bears, My lip made never moan, And Odin bold, who gave me life, Now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... them all a good omen, and as they rowed towards Bathstead they saw a flock of ravens, which encouraged them yet more, since the raven was the bird of Odin, the haunter of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... the leaf, it appeared that Miss Blanche, on retiring, had been pursued by a hideous winged bug which defied the efforts of herself and maid to dislodge. Odin, the Spitz dog, had insisted upon scratching at the door. And it made her eyes red to sleep in the morning. And she had an early call to make. And ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of their kings the Lacedemonians met in large numbers and tore the flesh from their foreheads with pins and needles. It is said that when Odin was near his death he ordered himself to be marked with a spear; and Niort, one of his successors, followed the example of his predecessor. Shakespeare speaks of "such as boast and show their scars." In the olden times it was not uncommon for a noble soldier to make public exhibition of his scars ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... lifted upward, and assumed strange and threatening shape. The cloud forms might be the giants rising up out of Jotunheim, and advancing to attack Odin and the Aesir—the evil wolf Fenrir in the van—his bristles silvered by ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... downstairs backwards. The Doctor was not less well mounted; in fact, the Icelandic pony is quite a peculiar race, much stronger, faster, and better bred than the Highland shelty, and descended probably from pure-blooded sires that scoured the steppes of Asia, long before Odin and his paladins had peopled the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... you kill a skald? This boy has hearkened Odin sing Unto the clang and winnowing Of raven's wings. His heart is thralled To music, as to ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... stealing he loved and lying device; him the heathens they made their majestical god, and at the cross roads they offered him gifts, and to the high hills brought him victims to slay. This god was main worthy all heathens among, and his name when translated in Danish is Odin. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... consolidate their own position. After that it would take more than just one patrol cruiser to clear Warlock; it will require a fleet. So the Throgs will have another world to play with, and an important one. This lies on a direct line between the Odin and Kulkulkan systems. A Throg base on such a trade route could eventually cut us right out of ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... thoughts; perhaps he will have some day. At least he is a man, and a brave one; and as the greater contains the less, surely before a man can be a good man, he must be a brave one first, much more a man at all. Cowards, old Odin held, inevitably went to the very bottom of Hela-pool, and by no possibility, unless of course they became brave at last, could rise out of that everlasting bog, but sank whining lower and lower, like mired cattle, to all eternity ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the great flag, The Raven of Odin, torn; And the eyes of Guthrum altered, For the ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... conscience high-enthroned, The day when East is West and West is East To strike for human Love and Freedom's word Against foul wrong that cannot be atoned; To-day is hope of brotherhood's bond increased, And Christ, not Odin, is acclaimed the Lord. ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... admiration, "you ask just the question which it is most difficult to answer. An ingenious speculator on races contends that the Danes, whose descendants make the chief part of our northern population, (and indeed if his hypothesis could be correct, we must suppose all the ancient worshipers of Odin,) are of the same origin as the Etrurians. And why, Kitty, I just ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveller, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous confusion of names and characters than that which has hitherto disguised the genuine personality of the ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... any kind, that is the hallmark of his heroism, and before such an one humanity should bow down. Of real history, therefore, you will learn nothing from Heroes; neither will you get any trustworthy information concerning Odin, Mahomet and the rest of Carlyle's oddly consorted characters. One does not read the book for facts but for a new view of old matters. With hero-worshipers especially it ranks very high among the thought-provoking books of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... another direction lay the valley of Hopedale, with its two villages, Hope and Castleton, its ancient castle of the Peverils seated on a rock over the entrance of the Peak Cavern, and its lead mines worked ever since the time of the Saxons, the Odin mines as they are called, the white cinders of which lay in heaps at their entrance. We left the driver to take our baggage to its destination, and pursued our way across the fields. Descending a little distance from the summit, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... that all that part of the world had suffered a great and general revolution by a migration from Asiatic Tartary of a people whom they call Asers. These everywhere expelled or subdued the ancient inhabitants of the Celtic and Cimbric original. The leader of this Asiatic army was called Odin or Wodin: first their general, afterwards their tutelar deity. The time of this great change is lost in the imperfection of traditionary history, and the attempts to supply it by fable. It is, however, certain, that the Saxon nation believed themselves ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... deities, and were celebrated under the general name of the Druidical rites. But no matter where or how instituted, whether ostensibly in honor of the effeminate Adonis, the favorite of Venus, or of the implacable Odin, the Scandinavian god of war and carnage; whether dedicated to Demeter, the type of the earth, or to Mithras, the symbol of all that fructifies that earth,—the great object and design of the secret instruction ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... had slain his father. The sons of Hunding gathered themselves—Alf and Eywolf, Hiorward and Haward—and the hosts met in the plain under Lowfell. There was war in heaven while those armies made it on earth. Out of the lightning flare came the Valkyrs, daughters of Odin, choosers of the slain. They rode grey horses; they wore helms and coats of mail; their spear-heads gleamed like fire. Helgi sat by the Eagle Rock and cried out to them to stay. And one—it was Hogni's daughter, Sigrun—turned him her fire-hued face and answered: "Other business have ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... a sword and launch his ship. And sometimes in his excitement he would slip outside into the darkness, and hear far up in the frosty sky the whistle of the swans as they flew southward, and fancy them the shield-maids of Odin on their way ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... am, I seek the fight, and offer as the prize The untasted bait that bribed my soul, nor thou the boon despise; Else, like some worn-out beast of prey, Starkather soon must lie, Nor gain the bliss that Odin gives to men ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... this story is that about Wednesday which follows. Wednesday, the day consecrated to Odin, the eve of the day sacred to the Thundergod,[254] may also have been held holy by the heathen Slavonians, but to some commentators it appears more likely that the traditions now attached to it in Russia became transferred to it from Friday ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... ancestors had a similar one, the setting of which was certainly not inferior to the grotesque battle of Merodach with Tiamat. The prose Edda tells us that the first man, Bur, was the father of Boer, who was in turn the father of Odin and his two brothers Vili and Ve. These sons of Boer slew Ymir, the old ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... wandering gaze focussed itself; a silly laugh welled up in his throat. "It would be no strange wonder if I did not," he chuckled. "Odin has changed you greatly; your face was never so beautiful. But this once you cannot trick me, ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... the task now imposed on our heroism, to elevate and purify and refine the race, to introduce the ideal of quality in place of the ideal of quantity which has run riot so long, with the results we see. "As the Northern Saga tells that Odin must sacrifice his eye to attain the higher wisdom," concludes Fahlbeck, "so Man also, in order to win the treasures of culture and refinement, must give not only his eye but his life, if not his own life that of his posterity."[16] The vulgar aim of reckless racial fertility ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before: that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its asphyxia, and the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner at his best. Schiller's "Three Words of Faith," in which liberty, virtue, and God are declared to be the only essentials of religion, finds a parallel (which even retains the metre) in Tegner's "The Eternal," in which ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and faith in their own and their fellow-countrymen's purity of descent from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced their lineage direct to Odin, AEneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues, English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... Norse mythology, the grandfather of Odin. In the creation of the world he was born from the rocks, licked by the cow Andhumla (darkness). He was the father of Bor, and the latter, wedded to Bestla, the daughter of the giant Bolthorn (evil), became the father of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... in its outlines. Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of human hands can rival. "The grandest objects," says Major Dutton, "are merged in a congregation of others equally grand." With the wealth of form goes a wealth of color. Never, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... this, and similar tales, we may recognize something of real history. That the Fins, or ancient natives of Scandinavia, were driven into the mountains, by the invasion of Odin and his Asiatics, is sufficiently probable; and there is reason to believe, that the aboriginal inhabitants understood, better than the intruders, how to manufacture the produce of their own mines. It is therefore possible, that, in process of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... her own free will, as soon have put her hand into a red-hot fire as have asked Uncle Brues to receive Fred Garson in a hospitable manner; but she was made of fine metal, and would carry out Yaspard's wishes, although all the thunders of Thor and Odin were ready to burst on her ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... the one evening of performance during my visit a festival was to be celebrated in the hall of antiquities. The esteemed artist Vogelberg, a native of Sweden, had beautifully sculptured the three heathen gods, Thor, Balder, and Odin, in colossal size, and brought them over from Rome. The statues had only been lately placed, and a large company had been invited to meet in the illuminated saloon, and do honour to the artist. Solemn hymns were to be sung at the uncovering of the statues, beside ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... bullocks of the Druid, garlanded with flowers, heading the procession that entered the dark groves in search of the sacred mistletoe-bearing oak; the processions of Pan and Odin, and Siva and Vishnu and Baal, and Venus and Bacchus. Nymphs and fauns and dryads and hamadryads called from the depths of the forest, and youths and maidens and shepherds with vine-wreathed brows danced ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... well for the Latins had his age been less. He died in the year 1237, and young Baldwin, who was married to his daughter Martha, became sole emperor. John de Brienne made so great a name that he was compared with Ajax, Odin the Dane, Hector, Roland, and Judas Maccabaeus. Baldwin, who came after him, might have been compared with any of those kinglings who succeeded Charlemagne, and sat in their palaces while the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... him of the cow Audhumla, alone in the vast plain at the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted over with hoar frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from them a warrior named Bur, the father of Boer, the father of Odin, who is the father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his three evil children—here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not, always feel his mother hold him ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Northmen who had ravaged England came eager for blood and plunder, and hating the sight of a Christian church as an insult to their gods, Thor and Odin; but the lapse of a hundred years had in some degree changed the temper of the North; and though almost every young man thought it due to his fame to have sailed forth as a sea rover, yet the attacks of these marauders might be ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in all the faith of the Teutonic race. The chief virtue of man was courage, his unpardonable sin was cowardice. "To fight a good fight," this was the way to Valhalla. Odin sent his Choosers to every battlefield to select the brave dead to become his companions in the joys ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and find this wild north land. It is called Scandinavia, and comprises Norway and Sweden. The home of these Northern gods was a city called Asgard, built above the clouds, in the midst of which stood Valhalla, the hall of the chief god, Odin. Such a marvellous place as this was! It had a golden roof that reflected light over all the earth, just like the sun, and its ceiling was supported by spears, while millions of shields formed its walls, over which were draped coats of mail. A huge wolf ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Jocunda's practical jests and overpowering gaiety. When she addressed herself to me, my answers were as constrained and as concise as possible; and, as I was afterwards told, I seemed, at the close of my reply to each interrogative of her ladyship's, to answer with Odin's prophetess, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... by the Muslim chroniclers to have been to Solomon what Odin's ravens were to the Norse god. It is said to have known all the secrets of the earth and to have revealed them to him; hence the magical virtues attributed by the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... following year, printed for private circulation his 'OEdipus Judaicus', a bold attempt to explain many parts of the Old Testament as astronomical allegories. In 1817 appeared the first part of his 'Odin', a poem in blank verse; in 1824-29 his 'Origines, or Remarks on the Origin of several Empires, States, and Cities', was published. Sir William, who died at Rome in 1828, lived much ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... I may first remark, for the information of the general reader, that by Gimle is meant the abode of the righteous after the day of judgment; by Naastrand, the place of punishment after the same dread sentence; by Ragnarok, the last day; Valhal, the temporary place of happiness to which the god Odin invites those who have been slain in battle; and Hel, the goddess of death, whose abode is termed Helheim. With these explanations the reader will be able to understand the subjoined passage, which expresses the Norse idea of the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty dish and bed of care at once. Lacking the battle death, I could at least mimic it, as they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... as Miss Austen's books, especially as Pride and Prejudice, which I think exquisite; but it is worth reading. The hour and the Man is eloquent, but an absurd exaggeration.—I hold out so valorously against this Scandinavian weather, that I deserve to be ranked with Odin and Thor; and fancy I may go to live at Clifton or Drontheim. Have you had the same icy desolation as ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of Odin, and hammer of Thor, And by all the gods of the Viking's war, I swear we have quitted our homes in vain: We have nothing to look to, glory nor gain. Will our galley return to Norway's shore With heavier gold, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... harvest and the vine Spring from their gods and claim a birth divine; While heroes, kings and sages of their times, Those gods on earth, are gods in happier climes; Minos in judgment sits, and Jove in power, And Odin's friends ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to the orphan of the Garde Doloureuse, the daughter of a line of heroes, whose stem was to be found in the race of Thor, Balder, Odin, and other deified warriors of the North, whose beauty was the theme of a hundred minstrels, and her eyes the leading star of half the chivalry of the warlike marches of Wales, to mourn her sire with the ineffectual tears of a village maiden. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... have contributed most largely (1 Kings, iv. 32). In the same way the Greeks attributed most of their sayings to Pythagoras; the Arabs to Lokman, Abu Obeid, Al Mofaddel, Meidani, and Samakhshari; the Persians to Ferid Attar; and the northern people to Odin. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... that Odin had a poll-tax which was called in Sweden a nose-tax; it was a penny per ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett |
