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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 482857" data-attributes="member: 2205">Actually, the treatment of Norse mythology you give below is also violence done to the pantheon by analytic logic.  You assume that version we know of the mythos is somehow "canonical" and that the corpus of Norse mythology can therefore be analyzed accordingly.That's hogwash.  Norse mythology was an oral tradition.  It was also (as were most pagan European mythologies) subject to strong localization.  Where you see inconsistencies, I see a much more likely scenario in which two seperate local traditions crept into the Edda.A good example of what I'm talking about is the cult of Odin/Wotan.  You see, originally Thor was the king of the gods -- and why not, he's essentially the same god as the Slavic Perun, Greek Zeus, Indic Indra, etc. carried down from the common Indo-European tradition of all those cultures.  But worship of Odin as a god of magic and war spread, starting in central Europe and taking over most of pagan Europe that still worshiped a Germanic mythos before Christianity wiped it out.  As the cult of Odin grew in importance, the "doctrine" that Odin (as a more important god in terms of worship) must have been the king of the gods spread with it.  Interestingly enough, in Iceland and Greenland (which brought us the Eddas) this cult hadn't been thoroughly disseminated, so in those areas Thor was still the king of the gods.  So is Norse mythology inconsistent because both Thor and Odin are the kings of the gods?  No, because at any individual location and time, they weren't both the kings at the same time.To me, the fact that mythology is an oral tradition thousands of years long and what we see today is a strange amalgamation of that hodge-podged together after the fact makes a lot more sense than the strange belief that dark ages Europeans didn't mind having obvious and glaring inconsistencies in their mythology.</blockquote>

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