The Norse Gods: Aesir and Vanir of Norse Mythology

The Norse gods form one of the most complex and vividly imagined pantheons in world mythology. Unlike the bounded hierarchies of Olympian Greece or the courtly single-god traditions of the ancient Near East, the Norse divine world is a warlike aristocracy of clashing personalities, a fractured family whose members quarrel, betray, and prophesy one another’s ends across a timeline that ends in fire. Two great divine clans dominate this world: the Aesir, associated with war, kingship, sky, and cosmic order; and the Vanir, associated with fertility, peace, the sea, and the prosperity of the earth. Together they constitute the gods whose stories fill the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, the Heimskringla, and the rich body of skaldic verse composed between the ninth and thirteenth centuries.

This guide is a comprehensive introduction to that pantheon. It explains the origins of the gods, the war that brought Aesir and Vanir together, the principal members of each clan, the lesser-known deities who surround them, and the literary sources through which their myths survived. Each major god is treated in depth on a dedicated page elsewhere on this site; the cluster pages on Odin the Allfather, Thor God of Thunder, Loki the Trickster, Freya Goddess of Love and War, Tyr God of War and Justice, Heimdall Guardian of the Bifrost, Baldr the Beautiful God, and Njord Lord of the Seas are linked throughout.

Origins: From Ginnungagap to the First Gods

The Norse cosmos begins not with gods but with emptiness. In the Völuspá, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda, a völva (seeress) describes Ginnungagap, the yawning void that existed before the world. To the north lay Niflheim, a realm of ice and cold; to the south, Múspell, a realm of fire and heat. Where the rime from Niflheim met the sparks from Múspell, the first being was formed: Ymir, the primordial giant. From Ymir’s armpits and legs sprang the first of the Jötnar, the giants who would become the gods’ eternal adversaries. The cosmic cow Auðumbla licked the salty ice-stones and shaped the first of the gods, Búri, whose son Borr mated with the giantess Bestla and produced the first of the Aesir: Odin, Vili, and Vé.

This creation account, recorded by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda (c. 1220), embeds the gods in a genealogy that ties them to the giants they would later oppose. Odin and his brothers slew Ymir, and from his body they fashioned the world: his flesh became the soil, his blood the seas, his bones the mountains, his skull the dome of the sky held up by four dwarves. The world tree Yggdrasil was raised to support the nine worlds, and the gods took their seats in Asgard, the highest of those worlds.

This origin story frames the Norse gods as cosmic improvers, not uncreated absolutes. They are the descendants of giants, the slayers of giants, and the destined victims of giants. The shadow of that first violence runs through every later myth.

The Two Divine Clans: Aesir and Vanir

Norse mythology is unique among the Germanic pantheons in preserving a clear memory of a divine dichotomy. Most scholars interpret the Aesir–Vanir split as a reflex of an older Indo-European social division, perhaps between a warrior aristocracy and a priestly or agricultural class, projected backward into prehistory. Whatever its origin, the distinction is firmly embedded in the medieval sources: the Prose Edda devotes an entire chapter, the Gylfaginning, to describing the differing realms, customs, and characters of the two tribes.

The Aesir

The Aesir (Old Norse Æsir, singular Áss) are the sky gods of war, kingship, law, and cosmic order. Their stronghold is Asgard, and their leader is Odin, the Allfather. To the Aesir belong the principal members of the Norse pantheon as it is remembered today: Thor, defender of the world with his hammer Mjölnir; Tyr, the one-handed god of war and lawful oaths; Heimdall, the watchman of the gods; Baldr, the beautiful and doomed god of light; and the trickster Loki, whose parentage is among the giants yet who dwelled among the Aesir by oath-brotherhood with Odin.

The Aesir are characterized by the qualities of the aristocratic warrior: they settle disputes by combat and by oath, value honour and reputation, and are bound by the laws of hospitality and gift-giving. Their halls include Valhalla, Odin’s hall for the slain warriors known as the Einherjar, and Hliðskjálf, the high seat from which Odin (and on one famous occasion Loki) surveys all the worlds.

The Vanir

The Vanir (Old Norse Vanir) are a separate and older clan of gods associated with fertility, prosperity, the sea, the wind, and the bounty of the earth. They are described as wiser than the Aesir in certain magical arts, particularly seiðr, a form of shamanic sorcery associated with prophecy, fate-working, and the manipulation of destiny. Snorri writes in the Ynglinga saga (the opening of the Heimskringla) that the Vanir were the first gods worshipped by the Norse peoples, and that the Aesir were a later dynasty of warrior gods who overthrew them.

The principal Vanir known to the medieval sources are Njord, lord of the sea, the wind, and seafaring; his children, the twins Freyr and Freya, who between them govern fertility, love, war, gold, and the prosperity of the harvest. To the Vanir also belong the obscure deities Kvasir, born of the saliva of the two clans after the war, and Gullveig, whose burning and rebirth triggers the Aesir–Vanir War in the Völuspá.

The Vanir are characterized less by warlike prowess than by gifts: the gift of fertility, the gift of peace, the gift of abundance, and the gift of foreknowledge. In the Vafþrúðnismál, the wise giant Vafþrúðnir lists the Vanir among the gods who will survive Ragnarok, the prophesied end of the world.

The Aesir–Vanir War

The first great narrative of the Norse pantheon is the war between the two divine clans. It is preserved in fragmentary form in the Völuspá and in longer prose form in the Prose Edda and the Ynglinga saga. The cause, in the Völuspá, is the Aesir’s attempt to destroy the Vanir seeress Gullveig (or Heiðr) by burning her: she is pierced with spears, burned three times, and reborn three times, hinting at an eternal cycle of death and regeneration. The Vanir, angered by this assault on one of their own, demand satisfaction. The Aesir refuse. War breaks out.

Snorri Sturluson describes the war as a long and indecisive conflict during which each side repeatedly invades the other’s stronghold. The Aesir, being primarily warriors, have the advantage in pitched battle; the Vanir, masters of seiðr and shape-shifting, wage a war of attrition. Eventually both sides grow weary. They meet, exchange hostages, and seal their truce by spitting into a great jar. From this spittle they fashion a being of surpassing wisdom, Kvasir, who will later be slain by the dwarves and from whose blood the poets’ mead is brewed. The war ends not in victory for either side but in a binding peace, the establishment of hostages on each side, and a partial exchange of divine knowledge.

The Hostages

The terms of the truce are described in Skáldskaparmál and the Ynglinga saga. The Vanir send to Asgard their most prized members: Njord and his children Freyr and Freya. The Aesir, conversely, send to Vanaheim a figure whose identity is debated but who is sometimes named as Hœnir (a passive, indecisive god who relies on the Vanir for counsel) and the craftsman Mímir, whose head the Aesir later keep at the well of memory. The exchange marks the formal union of the two pantheons into the single divine society that the medieval sources describe.

The war and its aftermath explain a number of persistent features of Norse mythology: why the Vanir are associated with magic rather than war, why certain gods (notably Freya) are masters of seiðr, why the Aesir are slightly embarrassed by the practice, and why the Vanir gods in Asgard retain a slightly foreign and elevated dignity.

Odin: The Allfather

The chief of the Aesir, Odin — also called Allfather, Yggr, Grímnir, Hárr, and by more than 150 other names catalogued by Snorri — is the god of wisdom, war, death, poetry, magic, and sovereignty. He is the patron of kings, of poets, of those who hang on windswept trees, and of those who seek knowledge at the cost of pain. He sacrificed one of his eyes at Mímir’s well for a draught of cosmic wisdom; he hanged himself for nine nights on the world tree Yggdrasil to win the runes; he rules Valhalla from his high seat, surrounded by his wolves Geri and Freki, his ravens Huginn and Muninn, and his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. He is the author of human fate, working through his Valkyries to select the slain, and he is prophesied to fall at Ragnarok swallowing the world-serpent Jörmungandr.

Odin is the most complex of the Norse gods, and his many roles pull in different directions. He is a war god who counsels peace, a death god who gives life, a wisdom god who commits terrible follies. He is identified outside the Norse world with the Roman Mercury (the Roman author Tacitus, writing in the first century CE, identifies the Germanic Woden with Mercury) and with the Old English Wōden and Old High German Wotan. In English, his name survives in the weekday Wednesday.

Thor: Defender of Asgard

Thor is the best-attested of the Norse gods in the archaeological record, with thousands of hammer pendants, runestones dedicated to him, and place-names bearing his name across Scandinavia. He is the god of thunder, storms, oak trees, strength, and the protection of humanity. He wields the hammer Mjölnir, forged by the dwarves Sindri and Brokkr, which returns to his hand when thrown and which he uses to consecrate marriages, births, and funerals. He drives a chariot drawn by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, whose hooves and bellowing produce thunder.

Thor is depicted in the Prose Edda as a large, red-bearded man of immense strength, the son of Odin and the earth-goddess Jörð (Earth). He is the perpetual enemy of the Jötnar, whom he fights in repeated journeys to Útgarða-Loki’s hall and elsewhere. His great fishing expedition, in which he hooks the world-serpent Jörmungandr only to have his line severed by the giant Hymir, is one of the most frequently illustrated scenes in Norse myth. He is prophesied to slay Jörmungandr at Ragnarok and to walk nine paces before falling dead from the serpent’s venom.

Loki: The Trickster

Loki is the most controversial of the Norse gods, in part because his status as a god at all is debated. Snorri calls him the son of the giant Fárbauti and the giantess Laufey, and the oath-brother of Odin, which makes him a blood-brother of the chief of the Aesir and therefore a member of the divine community. Yet his parentage is among the giants, his crimes against the gods are unbounded, and his prophesied role at Ragnarok is to lead the forces of chaos against Asgard on the ship Naglfar.

Loki is a shapeshifter, a master of wordplay, and a prolific father of strange children. With the giantess Angrboða he fathered Fenrir the wolf, Jörmungandr the world-serpent, and Hel, the half-blue, half-flesh ruler of Helheim. With Odin’s wife Freya (in a strange episode in the Lokasenna) he allegedly fathered Narfi and Váli, although the relationship is contested. With the mare Svaðilfari he fathered Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed.

Loki is the agent of much of the divine mischief: he tricks the dwarves into forging Mjölnir, he cuts off Freya’s hair, he procures Idunn’s apples and Sif’s golden tresses. He is also, in the Lokasenna, the most aggressive and insulting of the gods’ interlocutors, accusing each of the assembled Aesir of sexual impropriety, cowardice, or unbecoming conduct. His final binding by the gods, after he engineers Baldr’s death, sets the divine timeline in motion toward its prophesied end.

Freya: Goddess of Love and War

Freya (Old Norse Freyrja, “Lady”) is the most prominent of the Vanir gods resident in Asgard. She is the goddess of love, fertility, beauty, gold, war, and death. She travels in a chariot drawn by cats, owns the precious necklace Brísingamen, and receives in her hall Fólkvangr half of those slain in battle — the other half going to Odin in Valhalla.

Freya is also the most accomplished practitioner of seiðr among the gods, having brought the art from Vanaheim to Asgard. She taught it to Odin, which the Ynglinga saga treats as a source of social opprobrium (for a male god to practice seiðr was considered ergi, a form of unmanliness). Her husband, Óðr, is described in the Prose Edda as one who wanders far and is often absent; their daughters are Hnoss and Gersemi, names that mean “treasure” and speak to the goddess’s association with precious things.

Freya’s name survives in the Scandinavian word for Friday (Fredag in Danish and Norwegian, Freitag in German), and her cult is well-attested in place-names (Frövi, Fröjel, Freysnes) and runic inscriptions across Sweden and Norway.

Tyr: God of War and Justice

Tyr is the most ancient of the Norse war gods, predating Odin in the continental Germanic record. The Germania of Tacitus identifies Tiw (Tyr) as a sky-god worshipped by the Germanic tribes alongside Woden; the Old English runic poem calls him “the inspirer of courage” and a “famous lord.” His Old English name, Tīw, gives its name to Tuesday.

Tyr’s defining myth, preserved in the Prose Edda, is the binding of Fenrir. When the gods resolved to bind the growing wolf with the silken cord Gleipnir, Fenrir would consent only if a god placed a hand in his mouth as pledge of good faith. Tyr alone volunteered, and when the cord proved unbreakable Fenrir bit off the hand at the wrist. From that day Tyr is one-handed, and his name is invoked in oaths and pledges of justice.

Tyr is also a god of lawful order and assembly, in keeping with the ancient Germanic Thing (assembly) at which judicial oaths were sworn in his name. At Ragnarok he is prophesied to fight the dog Garmr at the gates of Hel, and they will slay each other.

Heimdall: Guardian of the Bifrost

Heimdall is the watchman of the gods, stationed at the bridge Bifröst (the rainbow) that connects Asgard to Midgard. He is described in the Prose Edda as needing less sleep than a bird, seeing a hundred leagues by night or by day, and hearing the grass growing on the earth and the wool on the backs of the sheep. He is the son of Odin and nine mothers (the daughters of the sea-giant Ægir, or alternatively the waves of the sea themselves), and he is said to be the progenitor of the three social classes of humanity: thrall, freeman, and noble.

Heimdall’s defining role is his vigil: he sits at the gates of Asgard with the horn Gjallarhorn, ready to sound the warning that will summon the gods to their final battle. The Völuspá describes him raising the horn and blowing it loudly when Ragnarok begins, and Odin hears him and counsels the Aesir. At the climax of the battle Heimdall and Loki are prophesied to meet and slay each other, fulfilling the prophecy of mutual destruction that runs through the closing poems of the Poetic Edda.

Baldr: The Beautiful God

Baldr is the second son of Odin and the goddess Frigg (in both the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda; the long-running scholarly debate over the Frigg/Freya conflation is a separate question and is not a textual variation between the two sources), and he is described as the most beautiful, the most eloquent, and the most merciful of the gods. His hall is Breiðablik, “wide-blink,” where nothing impure may enter. His wife is Nanna, daughter of a minor god, and their son is Forseti, god of reconciliation and justice.

Baldr’s defining myth is his death, which is preserved in the Baldrs draumar and the Gylfaginning. He is troubled by dreams of his own death, and his mother extracts oaths from every thing in the world — fire and water, iron and all metals, stones, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds, poison, and serpents — that they will not harm him. The gods amuse themselves by hurling weapons at him and watching them turn aside. Only the mistletoe is overlooked, and Loki, ever the contriver, fashions a dart of it and places it in the hand of the blind god Höðr, Baldr’s brother, who throws it and kills him.

The death of Baldr is the central tragedy of Norse mythology, the first stroke of the chain of events leading to Ragnarok. His wife Nanna dies of grief; his brother Váli is born specifically to avenge him; Hermóðr the Bold rides to Hel to beg for his return but is told that Baldr will not return until the world is renewed. He will return, according to the Völuspá, after the burning of the world, to dwell in the new Asgard with Höðr.

Njord: Lord of the Seas

Njord is the principal of the Vanir gods resident in Asgard, father of Freyr and Freya, and a god of the sea, the wind, seafaring, fishing, and the prosperity that comes from the bounty of the waters. He is described in the Prose Edda as ruling over the winds and calming storms and fires for those who invoke him. He dwells in Nóatún (“Ship-yard”), a hall by the shore.

Njord is married in the Prose Edda to the giantess Skaði, daughter of the giant Þjazi. The marriage is unhappy: Skaði cannot bear the cry of the seabirds at Nóatún, and Njord cannot bear the howling of the wolves in Skaði’s mountain hall in Þrymheim. They agree to spend nine nights in each place, but the experiment fails, and they part. The myth is read as an allegory of the difficult marriage of sea and mountain.

Njord’s cult was particularly strong in Norway, where seafaring and fishing were central to the economy, and many place-names (Njarðvík, Njardarlog) preserve his memory. In the Ynglinga saga he is named as a member of the divine dynasty from which the Norwegian Yngling kings traced their descent.

The Lesser-Known Aesir and Vanir

Beyond the eight principal gods treated on the dedicated pages, the Norse pantheon includes a constellation of lesser-known deities whose roles are nevertheless important. They appear in the kennings of skaldic verse, in the lists of gods in the Prose Edda, and in the place-names of Scandinavia.

Vili and Vé are Odin’s brothers, his co-creators of the world. They are sometimes identified with will and holiness (vé is related to weih in Old High German, meaning “sacred”), and in one passage of the Prose Edda they share rule with Odin during his long absences.

Frigg is Odin’s wife and the mother of Baldr. She is the patroness of marriage, motherhood, and the household, and she is identified by Snorri with the Roman Juno. She sits beside Odin on Hliðskjálf and shares his foreknowledge, though she is silent about what she knows.

Höðr is Baldr’s blind brother, the unwitting instrument of his death. He is described in the Prose Edda as “the bold and warlike” but doomed to kill and be killed by his brother.

Váli is the son of Odin and the giantess Rindr, born for the specific purpose of avenging Baldr’s death. He is said to have grown to full manhood in a single day, and he slays Höðr without ever combing his hair or washing himself until Baldr is avenged.

Víðarr is Odin’s son by the giantess Gríðr. He is the silent god, who wears a thick shoe and sits apart from the others. At Ragnarok he avenges his father by kicking Fenrir in the mouth and tearing the wolf apart.

Bragi is the god of poetry, sometimes said to be the first skald. He is married to Iðunn, the goddess who keeps the apples of youth in her casket. The “bragarfull,” the cup of Bragi, is a term in Old Norse for a ceremonial toast.

Forseti is Baldr’s son by Nanna, the god of reconciliation and the just settlement of disputes. His hall is Glitnir, and there he settles every quarrel that is brought to him.

Ullr is a god of skiing, archery, and the hunt. He is named in the Grímnismál as one of the gods who will survive Ragnarok, and in Old Norwegian place-names he is a frequent presence.

Týr (Tyr) is discussed above; the Hymniskviða mentions his son Hérmóðr, the bold messenger who rides to Hel to negotiate Baldr’s release.

Ægir is a sea-giant, sometimes counted among the gods, who hosts the gods at his hall under the sea and brews ale for them. His wife Rán catches drowned sailors in her net, and their daughters are the nine waves.

Skaði is the giantess-wife of Njord described above, associated with winter, skiing, and the mountains.

Sól and Máni are the sun and moon, children of the giant Mundilfari, pursued across the sky by the wolves Sköll and Hati.

Dagr is Day, son of Nótt (Night), and Nótt rides across the sky in a chariot drawn by a horse named Hríðfaxi.

Nerthus, described by Tacitus in the Germania, is a continental Germanic earth-goddess whose cult involved a procession in a sacred cart. Many scholars identify her with Freya or with an older goddess absorbed into the Vanir.

Hœnir is the silent, indecisive god sent to the Vanir as hostage. He relies on Mímir for counsel, and when Mímir is taken from him he becomes useless.

Mímir is the wise being, sometimes god, sometimes giant, whose head Odin keeps at the well of memory beneath one of the roots of Yggdrasil.

Kvasir is the god of inspiration, born of the spittle of the two clans after the war. He is later slain by the dwarves Fjalar and Galar, who brew his blood into the mead of poetry.

The Vanir in Detail

The Vanir occupy a peculiar place in the Norse pantheon. They are older than the Aesir, wiser in certain matters, and yet they are politically subordinate: their principal members (Njord, Freyr, Freya) are hostages in Asgard rather than rulers of their own realm. Snorri’s identification of their homeland as Vanaheim is paired with almost no mythic narrative; the gods who come from there are characterized more by their attributes than by their deeds.

The principal Vanir in the medieval sources are Njord, Freyr, and Freya. Freyr is the male fertility god, lord of sunshine and rain, of the harvest, of prosperity, and of peace. He owns the ship Skíðblaðnir (which can fold up and fit in a pouch) and the boar Gullinbursti (“Golden-bristle”), and he gives peace and good seasons to those who call on him. He is said to have loved the giantess Gerðr, whom he won by giving away his sword, a renunciation that will cost him at Ragnarok when he fights the fire-giant Surtr without a weapon.

The Vanir are also associated with a hidden class of beings — the álfar (elves) and possibly the landvættir (land-spirits) — whose worship overlaps with theirs. The exact relationship between Vanir and elves is debated, but the medieval sources frequently couple the two, particularly in the Gylfaginning.

The Aesir–Vanir Division in Practice

The division between the two divine clans is not absolute, and certain members of the Norse pantheon are difficult to classify. Freya is a Vanir hostage in Asgard and yet she leads the Valkyries, a function that the medieval sources typically assign to the Aesir. Loki is by birth a giant, by oath an Aesir, and by allegiance a traitor. Njord is a Vanir but sits among the Aesir at council.

In practice, the two clans are distinguished more by origin and by the kinds of arts they practise than by exclusive membership. The Aesir are the gods of war and rule; the Vanir are the gods of fertility and the prosperity of the world. The two are joined by marriage, by oath, and by shared residence in Asgard, but they retain distinct theological identities.

The Valkyries and the Slain

The Norse gods are unusual in extending their divine household to a corps of semi-divine warrior-women, the Valkyries (“choosers of the slain”). These are the handmaidens of Odin, sent into the world of mortals to select those who will die in battle and to bring them to Valhalla. In the Grímnismál Odin names them: Skuld (who shares her name with one of the three Norns), Skögul, Hildr, Þrúðr, Hlökk, Herfjötur, Göndul, Geirahöð, Ráðgríðr, and Reginleif. In the Völuspá the völva identifies them as a host of armed women riding the air. In the heroic legends, individual Valkyries — Brynhildr of the Völsunga saga, Sigrún of the Helreið Brynhildar, Sváva of the Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar — fall in love with mortal champions and bring doom to them.

The Valkyries are bound to Odin and to Freya, who according to the Grímnismál also receives the slain in her hall Fólkvangr. They serve mead in Valhalla, choose the warriors, and ride to battle with helmet and spear. Their origin is uncertain: they are sometimes called Óðr’s daughters, but in the heroic poems they are mortal women who have been elevated to semi-divine status.

The High Seat Hliðskjálf and the Sight of the Gods

One of the most distinctive objects in the Norse divine world is Hliðskjálf, the high seat of Odin from which he can see over all the nine worlds. In the Gylfaginning, Odin and Freya (or Frigg) are the only gods who sit there, and the privilege is associated with the right of prophecy. In the Þrymskviða, Loki borrows the seat and sees Freyja’s lost necklace. The seat is identified by scholars with the hliðsjóð tradition of kings sitting on a high seat to survey their lands, but in the mythic context it is a divine attribute reserved for the chief god and his wife.

Seiðr and the Magic of the Gods

A central but contested category in Norse religion is seiðr, the shamanic practice associated with the Vanir and with Freya in particular. The Prose Edda and the Ynglinga saga describe seiðr as involving prophecy, fate-weaving, the sending of the spirit out of the body, the raising of the dead, and the manipulation of weather and luck. It was considered shameful for a man to practise (a seiðr-maðr was accused of ergi, unmanliness), though both Odin and the Vanir gods used it. Freya brought seiðr to Asgard from Vanaheim; she taught it to Odin.

The related art of galdr (incantation) and the use of runes for magic are attested throughout the saga literature. The Egils saga, the Völsunga saga, and the Hrólf saga kraka all describe heroes cutting runes, raising the dead, or affecting the weather by magical means.

Worship, Sacrifice, and Ritual Practice

The Norse gods were worshipped through sacrifice (blót), through feasting, and through the drinking of sacred ale. The Icelandic Kjalnesinga saga describes a typical blót as the gathering of a community at a holy place, the consecration of a boar or other animal, the sprinkling of the altar with its blood (the hlaut), and the shared feasting that follows. The Heimskringla records the great blóts of the Norwegian kings at midwinter and at the beginning of summer, with sacrifices for peace, victory, and good harvest.

The major sites of Norse cult included Uppsala in Sweden, where the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum of Adam of Bremen describes a great temple with idols of Thor, Odin, and Freyr, where a sacrifice of nine males of every species was held every nine years; the Lofotr and other centers in Norway; and a constellation of local hofs (temples) and hörgr (outdoor altars) across the Norse world. Place-names, runestones, and stray finds of votive objects attest to the worship of Thor, Freya, Freyr, and Njord across Scandinavia, with Thor by far the most common in the surviving evidence.

The blót was integrated into the political life of the Norse communities. The king or chieftain who hosted the feast presided over it as the earthly analogue of the Allfather; the chieftain who failed to host a successful blót lost prestige and, sometimes, his chieftaincy. Christian writers condemned the practice as idolatry, and the Icelandic Kristni saga and Heimskringla record the conflicts that arose when Christian kings tried to suppress it.

The Family of the Gods

A brief genealogy of the principal Norse gods, drawn from the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, and the Heimskringla, helps make the relationships clear.

Odin is the son of Borr and Bestla, brother of Vili and Vé, and the father of Thor (by Jörð), Baldr and Höðr (by Frigg), Víðarr (by Gríðr), Váli (by Rindr), and (in some sources) of Hermóðr the Bold. With Freya (in a single passage of the Lokasenna) he is said to have fathered Narfi and Váli, but the passage is contested.
Thor is married to Sif, the golden-haired goddess; his son Móði (“Courage”) and daughter Þrúðr (“Strength”) are mentioned briefly in the Prose Edda. His stepson Ullr is sometimes called the son of Sif by a previous marriage.
Baldr is married to Nanna, daughter of a minor god, and their son is Forseti, the god of justice.
Freya is married to Óðr (sometimes identified as Odin in disguise), and their daughters are Hnoss and Gersemi. By her brother Freyr she has no children in the standard sources, though later folklore sometimes supplies them.
Njord is the father of Freyr and Freya; in the standard Gylfaginning genealogy the only other child mentioned is Freya’s own daughter Hnoss (by Óðr), not a further child of Njord.
Loki is married to Sigyn, who stays by him in his binding; their son Narfi (also called Váli in some sources) is killed by the gods to make the chains that bind Loki. With the giantess Angrboða he fathers Fenrir, Jörmungandr, and Hel. With Svaðilfari the mare he fathers Sleipnir.

The Sources

The Norse gods are known from a remarkable convergence of medieval textual, archaeological, and place-name evidence. The principal sources are:

The Poetic Edda — a collection of some twenty-five poems, preserved in the Codex Regius (Iceland, c. 1270), composed orally in Norway, Iceland, and the British Isles between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The Völuspá describes the creation of the world and the events leading to Ragnarok; the Hávamál presents the wisdom of Odin; the Þrymskviða describes Thor’s recovery of his hammer; the Lokasenna is a flyting between Loki and the other gods.

The Prose Edda — composed by Snorri Sturluson in Iceland c. 1220, partly to preserve the pagan traditions and partly to give Icelandic poets a handbook of mythology and kennings. The Gylfaginning (“Tricking of Gylfi”) is a structured account of the creation, the gods, and the events of Ragnarok; the Skáldskaparmál explains the kennings of skaldic verse; the Háttatal is a metrical treatise with example verses.

The Heimskringla — a history of the Norwegian kings by Snorri Sturluson, drawing on earlier skaldic verse and oral tradition. The opening Ynglinga saga describes the divine dynasty of the Swedes and Norwegians, treating the gods as historical kings; the Hákonar saga góða and Óláfs saga helga describe the conversion of Norway and the conflict between pagan and Christian practices.

The Íslendingasögur (Sagas of the Icelanders) — a corpus of family sagas composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, set in the Viking Age and the early Icelandic commonwealth. They preserve a vast number of references to the gods in the speech and ritual practice of ordinary Icelanders.

The Eddic and Skaldic verse — preserved in the Prose Edda, the Heimskringla, the sagas, and the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. Skaldic verse in particular preserves older traditions in compressed and sometimes obscure form.

Place-name evidence — the names of farms, parishes, and natural features across Scandinavia encode the cults of Thor, Freya, Freyr, Njord, and many other gods and goddesses. Place-names in southern Sweden, in particular, preserve the cult of Freya and her kin.

Archaeology — the great temple at Uppsala, the Golden Horns of Gallehus, the runestones with invocations to Thor, the hundreds of Mjölnir pendants, the wooden idols from the Oseberg ship burial, and the surviving fragments of stave churches in Norway all attest to the material culture of Norse religion.

The Norse Gods in Comparative Context

The Norse pantheon is part of a wider Germanic and ultimately Indo-European pattern. The war-god Tyr corresponds to the Celtic Lugus and the Indo-European Dyeus, the sky father. Odin is in many ways a more developed form of the *Wōðanaz* attested across the Germanic world. Thor is the hammer-wielding thunderer familiar from the continental Germanic record. Freya and Freyr are recognized in the Old Saxon and Continental sources.

Tacitus, in the Germania (c. 98 CE), describes a Germanic pantheon headed by Woden (identified with Mercury), Tiw (identified with Mars), and Þunar (identified with Hercules, i.e. Thor). This early testimony is the closest the surviving sources come to a contemporary account of the pre-Viking Age religion, and it confirms the antiquity of the principal figures.

The Norse gods are also remarkably adaptive: as the medieval sources record the conversion of Iceland (c. 1000) and Norway (c. 1015–1030), they describe the resistance of pagan communities to Christianization, the persistence of blóts into the twelfth century, and the survival of pagan belief in folklore. The great family sagas, set in the generation before conversion, are full of pagan references — the Eyrbyggja saga describes a temple at Helgafell in which the dead Christian missionary Þorvaldr is moved at the chieftain’s request to make room for a Christian chieftain who has died abroad.

The Survival of the Gods in Folklore and Legend

Even after the formal conversion of Scandinavia, the Norse gods survived in folklore, in place-names, in the calendar (the days of the week are still named for them in the Germanic languages), and in the tales collected by folklore scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The wild hunt of Odin, with his hounds and his company of the dead, became a widespread European legend. The Christmas celebrations of Yule retained pagan elements long after Christianization. Local tales preserved the memory of Freya as a benevolent goddess of fertility, of Njord as the lord of the winds, of Thor as the protector of the home.

The survival of the gods in the medieval and post-medieval imagination is the precondition for the explosion of Norse mythology in modern culture: the Norse gods are the gods of the Eddas, of Wagner’s Ring, of Tolkien’s legendarium, of the Marvel cinematic universe, of God of War, and of the global neopagan movement of Ásatrú. Each of these is treated on a dedicated page elsewhere on this site.

Royal Genealogies and the Divine Origin of Kings

One of the most distinctive features of the Norse world is the close connection between the gods and the royal dynasties of Scandinavia. The Ynglinga saga opens the Heimskringla with a genealogy in which the Swedish Yngling kings are descended from the god Freyr, and the Norwegian Ynglings trace their descent from Njord and the Vanir gods. The Danish Skjöldung dynasty, described in the Skjöldunga saga (now mostly lost but known through Saxo Grammaticus and the Beowulf manuscript), traces its descent from the god Skiöld, son of Odin.

The English royal genealogies, preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, trace the descent of the English kings from Woden (Odin). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lists the kings of Wessex as descendants of Woden, and the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1136) makes similar claims for the British kings. The pattern is the same across the Germanic world: the royal dynasties are descendants of the gods, and the genealogy of the king is a genealogy of divine descent.

The cult of the royal ancestor was reinforced by the cult of the king in life. The Norse king was the human analogue of Odin, the protector of the people, the patron of the warriors, the one who presided over the sacrifices. The king’s hús (house) was a kind of divine hall, and the king’s hirð (retinue) was a kind of human Einherjar. The king’s authority was divine in origin, and the cult of the king was a part of the cult of the gods.

The Conversion of Scandinavia

The conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity was a long and uneven process, beginning in Denmark in the ninth century and ending in Sweden in the late twelfth. The process was not a single event but a series of political, military, and missionary events, and the resistance to Christianity was strong in many parts of the Norse world.

The Icelandic Kristni saga describes the conversion of Iceland in the year 1000, when the Icelandic commonwealth resolved to accept Christianity by the decision of the Lögrétta, the legislative assembly. The resolution was a compromise: the Icelanders agreed to accept baptism, but they also agreed to maintain the public sacrifice of the pagan gods (a concession that was later retracted). The Heimskringla describes the conversion of Norway under Olaf Tryggvason (c. 995–1000) and Saint Olaf (1015–1030), and the bloody suppression of pagan resistance in the eastern and central parts of the country. The Swedish conversion is described in the Vita Ansgarii and the Gesta Hammaburgensis of Adam of Bremen, and the process was long and contested, with the cult of Uppsala persisting well into the twelfth century.

The conversion of Scandinavia did not result in the immediate disappearance of the pagan gods. The Íslendingasögur describe the persistence of pagan practice well after the formal conversion, and the place-names, runic inscriptions, and folk-traditions of Scandinavia preserve the memory of the gods long after the conversion. The cult of Thor is particularly persistent: the Mjölnir pendants are found in 10th- and 11th-century contexts, and the worship of the god continued in isolated communities into the twelfth century.

The Gods in the Skaldic Verse

The Norse gods are also preserved in the skaldic verse of the Viking Age, a corpus of formal poetry composed by the court poets of the Scandinavian and Icelandic kings between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. The skaldic verse is one of the most difficult bodies of literature in the medieval North, and the gods are central to it.

The skaldic verse is full of kennings for the gods, and the catalogue of kennings in the Skáldskaparmál is a treasure-house of the Norse mythology. The kennings for Odin include Yggs*, Hroptr, Gautr, Böðvarr, Fjölnir, Grímnir, Hárr, Þriði, Sannr, Svipall, Viðfríðr. The kennings for Thor include Áss, Einnríki, Hlorriði, Vingthor, Öku-Thor. The kennings for Freya include Gefn, Hörn, Mardöll, Sýr, Vanadís. The kennings for Njord include Hrogr and Vágr. The use of the kennings in the skaldic verse is a kind of theological game, in which the poet demonstrates his learning and his knowledge of the myths.

The skaldic verse also preserves many mythological stories not found in the Eddas. The Þórsdrápa of Eilífr Goðrúnarson (c. 1000) describes the fishing trip of Thor with the giant Hymir, and the Húsdrápa of Úlfr Uggason (c. 1000) describes the theft of Freya’s necklace. The Ravens’ song of Þorbjörn Brúnason (the so-called Brúnsonarvísur) describes the sacrifice of the king Dómaldi by his people, a myth not preserved in the Eddas but well known to the skaldic tradition.

The Days of the Week

The names of the weekdays in the Germanic languages are derived from the names of the gods, and the Latin syncretism with the Roman planetary week. The Latin dies Solis (day of the Sun) becomes the English Sunday and the German Sonntag. The Latin dies Lunae (day of the Moon) becomes the English Monday and the German Montag. The Latin dies Martis (day of Mars, identified with the Germanic Tiw/Týr) becomes the English Tuesday and the German Dienstag. The Latin dies Mercurii (day of Mercury, identified with the Germanic Wōden/Odin) becomes the English Wednesday and the German Mittwoch (“mid-week,” a Christianization of the pagan name) or the Scandinavian Onsdag. The Latin dies Iovis (day of Jove, identified with the Germanic Donar/Thor) becomes the English Thursday and the German Donnerstag (or in Scandinavia, Torsdag). The Latin dies Veneris (day of Venus, identified with the Germanic Frigg or Freya) becomes the English Friday and the German Freitag (in Scandinavia, Fredag). The Latin dies Saturni (day of Saturn) becomes the English Saturday and the German Samstag.

The English and Scandinavian weekdays preserve the Norse gods in the modern calendar. The English Wednesday preserves the name of Odin directly, and the English Thursday and the Scandinavian Torsdag preserve the name of Thor directly. The English Tuesday and the Scandinavian Tisdag preserve the name of Tyr directly. The English Friday and the Scandinavian Fredag preserve the name of Freya directly. The preservation of these names is a vivid testimony to the persistence of the Norse gods in the modern imagination.

The Cosmology of the Gods

The Norse gods inhabit a structured cosmos, the nine worlds connected by the world-tree Yggdrasil. The gods of the Aesir dwell in Asgard, the highest of the worlds, and they are connected to the other worlds by the bridge Bifröst, the rainbow. The Vanir gods dwell primarily in Vanaheim, although the principal Vanir have been sent to Asgard as hostages. The giants dwell in Jötunheim, the realm of chaos at the edge of the world. The dwarves dwell in Svartálfheim, beneath the earth. The dead who die of sickness or old age dwell in Helheim, the realm of Hel.

The gods are bound to this cosmos by the laws of fate, the Norns of the well of Urd. The three Norns — Urd (What Has Been), Verdandi (What Is Becoming), and Skuld (What Shall Be) — draw water from the well of Urd and pour it over the roots of Yggdrasil, and they shape the fate of gods and men. The Norns are older than the gods, and even Odin is subject to their will. The Norse gods are not omnipotent, and their fate is set from the beginning: they will die at Ragnarok, and a new world will be born from the ashes.

The cosmography of the gods is treated more fully on the dedicated pages for Yggdrasil and the nine worlds.

The Aesir and Vanir in Comparative Mythology

The Norse pantheon is part of a wider Indo-European pattern. The division between the Aesir and the Vanir is paralleled in the Vedic pantheon of the Rigveda, in which the Devas (gods of war, kingship, the sky) are opposed to the Asuras (gods of fertility, prosperity, the waters). The Vedic war between the Devas and the Asuras is similar in structure to the Norse Aesir–Vanir war, and the parallel has been noted by many scholars.

The Roman pantheon has a similar structure, with the Di Indigetes (the older gods of the land) opposed to the Di Novensiles (the new gods introduced from elsewhere). The pattern of the older gods being supplanted by the newer gods is consistent across many Indo-European pantheons, and it suggests an older social structure in which a warrior aristocracy and a priestly class coexisted.

The Vanir are associated with seiðr, the shamanic practice that is also associated with the Finnic noaidi and the Siberian shaman. The parallel suggests a deeper connection between the Vanir cult and the shamanic traditions of the Finnic and Siberian peoples, and it has been a major theme in the comparative study of Norse religion.

Conclusion

The Norse gods of Asgard are the descendants of giants, the rulers of nine worlds, and the doomed victims of a fate they themselves helped to set in motion. The split between the Aesir and the Vanir gives them a depth and complexity unmatched by the more hierarchical pantheons of the ancient Mediterranean, and the literary sources that preserve them are some of the most extraordinary products of medieval European literature. To read the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda is to enter a world of war and wisdom, of trickery and tragic foreknowledge, of love and doomed courage — a world whose gods are recognisably human in their passions and recognisably divine in their power.

The dedicated pages on the major gods — Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya, Tyr, Heimdall, Baldr, and Njord — each take up the myths and attributes of a single deity in greater depth.