All-Father

Norse tradition worshipped Odin as a figure of fury and knowledge rather than weather, and Adam of Bremen, describing the temple at Uppsala around 1075, renders the name for his Latin readers as Wodan, id est furor — Wodan, that is, the Furious. The word behind it, óðr, covers rage and poetic inspiration together, which is most of the character in one syllable. The sources put him among kings, poets, outlaws and the war-dead, and tie him to wisdom, war and the business of dying across the whole corpus. He is worth being careful around, and the myths never pretend otherwise.