The Battle God of the Vikings..

[Lyfing]

The Battle God of the Vikings, by Hilda Ellis Davidson..

The cunning god of death and battle who urged men to strife, gave luck to his chosen warriors, and conducted them to his own abode after death, honouring courage and an heroic end, has long been remembered because Odin was also the god of poetry and eloquence. The exploits of the heroic dead were remembered at funeral ceremonies and celebrated in poetry, and the evidence of the literature and of the Gotland memorial stones implies that it was obligatory among his followers to rehearse and commemorate the exploits of past heroes; thus it is due to the power that he once possessed over the minds of men that we have been left with such abundance of heroic tradition from Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia, even if this only forms a very small part of what flourished in pre-Christian times.

We may give him thanks for this, for the heroic world of the North is worthy of remembrance, and without some understanding of the cult of the god of battle we shall comprehend little of the art and literature of the Viking Age.

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Tyr and Gungnir..??

Later,
-Lyfing