THE WODENSMAN BLOG
History beyond the familiar.
Ancient worlds, unexpected comparisons and the sources that let us investigate them.
Widukind: Child of the Woods—or Child of Woden?
An investigation into the name of the Saxon warrior who defied Charlemagne, and an unexpected linguistic connection to the god Odin.
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Before the Longships: Why Sarmatian Raiding Sounds So Viking
Booty, mobility and a reputation won through warfare: a comparison between the Roman frontier and the later Viking world.
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5 Common Mistakes People Make When Researching Norse Mythology History (And How to Fix Them)
Research into Norse mythology history often begins with a familiar question: Were Odin and Woden purely mythological figures, or might the tradition preserve memories of real people and migrations?
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Deifying the Crown
How Kings Became Gods in Norse Mythology. A dead king, a public cult and the political power of ancestry.
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Norse Religion, Reframed: Reading Odin’s World as Memory, Migration, and Power
Norse religion often gets boxed into a simple “pagan myth” category, but that label hides more than it reveals. What if those old stories carry traces of real migration, memory, and power…
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4 Breakthroughs That Put Woden Back Into History
Snorri Sturluson wrote centuries after the Migration Period. Anglo-Saxon kings claimed descent from gods. Stories of eastern homelands were classified as medieval prestige fiction. And without…
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Odin in Norse Mythology
Odin’s presence in Norse mythology feels unavoidable—he turns up in every saga, poem, and rune. But what if that ubiquity isn’t just storytelling flair? What hidden historical memories lie beneath…
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How the Alans Became Norse Gods
Could the Norse gods have preserved the memory of real people who migrated into northern Europe from the Eurasian steppe?
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As, Alans, and Æsir
I know how this sounds before anyone says it. The Norse gods and the Alans. Odin and some Iranian speaking horse people from the steppe. The Æsir maybe being connected to the As or Alans. It…
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The Real Warrior King Behind Odin
What if Odin was not simply invented as a god, but became the mythologised memory of a real eastern ruler, warrior elite, or founding migration?
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More Than Trinkets: Decoding the Artifacts of Odin’s Realm
At first glance, those Viking religious relics might seem nothing more than ancient knick-knacks. But wait a moment—what if I told you that each Thor’s hammer pendant, runic-inscribed spearhead,…
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Ancient DNA Has Not Found Odin. It May Be Looking at the Wrong People.
There is no skeleton with his name carved into it. No genome has connected a man buried in Sweden directly to Azagarium, and no genetic study has completed a trail from the Dnieper to Lake Mälaren.
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Odin Was Not a Trojan War Refugee
While modern retellings often claim that Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda identifies Odin as an escaped refugee from the Trojan War, a careful reading of the sources reveals that the text actually…
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Which Troy Did Odin Mean?
The Trojan War is typically dated to the closing period of the Bronze Age (unless you ask Caleb Howells, which you most certainly should!). It would be impossible for a king who fled the fall of…
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