Woden

Also Known As: Old English Wōden; continental Germanic Wodan, Wotan; cognate with Old Norse Óðinn; from Proto-Germanic *Wōdanaz, built on a root meaning fury or inspired frenzy
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Anglo-Saxon Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: In the only Old English passage that shows him doing anything, he takes up nine glory-twigs and strikes a serpent into nine pieces.
Role in Mythos: He is the figure the English royal houses put at the head of their pedigrees, the ancestor from whom Kent, Mercia, Wessex, Deira, Bernicia and East Anglia all claimed the right to rule.
Relation to Humans: The English named a weekday and a good deal of their landscape after him, then spent the centuries after their conversion insisting he had only ever been a man. No Old English text prays to him, and the one charm that names him puts his single act firmly in the past.

Someone is grinding herbs into powder. Mugwort, plantain, lamb’s cress, betony, chamomile, nettle, crab-apple, chervil, fennel, worked down with old soap and the juice of a sour apple until the whole mess smells green and sharp enough to sting the back of the throat. The charm has to be sung three times over each plant before it goes in, then sung again into the sick man’s mouth and into both his ears and into the wound itself, and partway through the singing the god arrives. A worm came creeping and tore a man apart. Then Woden took nine glory-twigs and struck the adder so that it flew into nine pieces.

That is very nearly the whole of him. The Nine Herbs Charm sits in a tenth-century leechbook, the compilation known as the Lacnunga, and it is one of two places in the surviving Old English record where the god is named at all. Everything else people confidently say about Woden belongs to Óðinn, and Óðinn is a Norse god preserved in Icelandic books written centuries later and an ocean away. The one eye, the hanged self-sacrifice, the ravens, the mead of poetry, the wolf at the end of the world: none of that is English. Strip the imported material away and what is left is four lines of a healing charm, one disapproving line of wisdom poetry, a weekday, a handful of place-names and a great many royal pedigrees.

The second mention is colder. In Maxims I, copied into the Exeter Book, a Christian poet runs through the proper order of things and arrives at the housel for holy men and sin for the heathen. Then: Woden worhte weos, wuldor alwalda rume roderas. Woden made idols, the glorious ruler of all made the roomy heavens. The word weos is read as idols or as heathen shrines, and either way the contrast is doing the work. One of them gets carved wood. The other gets the sky. It is a small, almost bored piece of demolition, and it tells us more about the English attitude to their old god than any hymn would have.

Nobody wrote down what he looked like. There is no English description of his height, his beard, his cloak or his weapons, which leaves the most famous god of the Anglo-Saxons as a pair of hands in a charm and a name in a list. The nine twigs are the only object he is recorded as holding, and even they are a puzzle, since wuldortanas might mean rods cut for casting lots, or splinters from a tree, or the nine plants themselves under a poetic name. What the charm does give is motion. Something came creeping along the ground, something got hit hard enough to come apart, and the pieces went nine ways.

His real English career was as somebody’s grandfather. Writing around 731, Bede recorded that the first leaders of the invading Angles were the brothers Hengist and Horsa, sons of Victgils, whose father was Witta, whose father was Wecta, whose father was Woden, and from whose stock the royal families of many provinces traced their descent. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle repeated it and extended it, and by the ninth century the West Saxon line ran back through Woden to a figure called Geat, then to Sceaf, whom the Chronicle makes a son of Noah born aboard the ark, and from there to Adam. A god had been folded into the book of Genesis and given a berth on a boat.

The demotion was deliberate, and it was not resented. The tenth-century chronicler Æthelweard, himself of royal blood, complained that the heathen Danes had foolishly made a god of Woden when any educated man could see he had been a king of the barbarians and nothing more. Craig R. Davis, writing in Anglo-Saxon England in 1992, argued that this euhemerised ancestor is a late development rather than an inherited memory, a move made after the conversion precisely because a divine grandfather was too useful a thing to throw away. The English did not forget their god. They filed him under history.

He stayed there for a very long time. Twelfth-century manuscripts drawn up well after the Norman Conquest still show him crowned and enthroned with the royal lines of Kent, Mercia, Deira, Bernicia and Wessex radiating out around him, and Henry of Huntingdon runs one of those lines all the way down to Henry II. Ernulf, bishop of Rochester, gave the East Anglian kings the same descent.

The ground remembers him better than the books do. Wednesbury and Wednesfield in Staffordshire, Woodnesborough in Kent, and the long chalk earthwork across Wiltshire that early charters call Wodnesdic and modern maps call the Wansdyke, all carry his name in their first syllable. So does Wednesday. Wōdnesdæg is a calque of the Latin dies Mercurii, made when the Germanic-speaking peoples matched their own gods to the Roman week, and the match is old: Tacitus wrote in the Germania that the Germans worship Mercury above all the gods, and hold it lawful to placate him on certain days with human victims. He never writes the name Woden. The identification is an inference drawn backwards from the day-names, and it is worth saying so, because a great deal has been built on it.

Not everyone claimed him. The kings of Essex traced their line instead to Seaxnēat, whose name appears to mean sword-companion and which is simply the Saxons’ own knife made into a person. A later chronicler tidied the anomaly away by demoting Seaxnēat to a son of Woden.

What can he actually do, on the evidence? He can break a poison. The charm sets him against the creeping thing that travels through the land, and his nine-fold blow answers nine poisons, nine contagions, nine blistering sicknesses listed off by colour: red, dark, white, pale blue, yellow, green, dusky, brown, purple. He works by cutting one whole thing into many, which is the logic of a healer as much as a warrior. And he can father a dynasty, which in practice meant he could make a claim to a throne look older than it was.

His limits are the limits of what survives. He has no death, no wife, no enemy and no story in English beyond a single stroke at a snake. He cannot be summoned out of a corpus that never addresses him in the present tense. In the charm he is already historical, something that happened once; in Maxims I he is an error being corrected; in the genealogies he is a dead king several dozen generations back. The most striking thing about Woden is how thoroughly his own people managed to make him ordinary, and how completely they failed to get rid of him, since the English still say his name once a week without noticing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Woden?

Woden is the chief god of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, known from Old English sources and from the royal genealogies of early England. He appears by name in only two surviving Old English poems, and after the conversion to Christianity the English recast him as a human ancestor-king rather than a god. He is the same divine figure as the Norse Óðinn, but almost nothing of the Norse myth cycle is attested in England.

What does Woden do in the Nine Herbs Charm?

In the Nine Herbs Charm, preserved in the tenth-century Old English medical collection called the Lacnunga, a serpent comes creeping and tears a man apart, and Woden takes nine glory-twigs and strikes the adder so that it flies into nine pieces. It is the only surviving Old English passage in which Woden performs an action. The charm was sung three times over each of nine herbs while a healing salve was prepared.

Is Woden the same as Odin?

Woden and Óðinn are the same god under English and Norse forms of one inherited name, both from Proto-Germanic *Wōdanaz. The surviving material is completely different, though. The Norse sources give a full mythology of the one-eyed wanderer, while the English record gives only a healing charm, a dismissive line of wisdom poetry, a weekday name, place-names and royal pedigrees.

Why did Anglo-Saxon kings claim descent from Woden?

Descent from Woden gave an early English dynasty a pedigree that reached beyond living memory and legitimised its right to rule. Bede recorded in 731 that Hengist and Horsa were his great-grandsons and that many provinces traced their royal families back to him. Christian writers were comfortable with this because they treated him as a human king rather than a god, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle eventually extended the West Saxon line past Woden to Noah and Adam.

Why is Wednesday named after Woden?

Wednesday comes from Old English Wōdnesdæg, Woden’s day, a translation of the Latin dies Mercurii or Mercury’s day. Germanic-speaking peoples matched their own gods to the Roman days of the week, and Woden was paired with Mercury. Tacitus reports that the Germans worshipped Mercury above all other gods, though he never gives the god’s Germanic name.