Wild Chicken
I’ve been seeing a lot of incredibly fat skrator lately (what they call magpies here in Sweden), so I decided to honor them with a cartoon. You have to respect these hardy, hardworking birds who stuff themselves to the feathers with seeds and worms in preparation for winter. But you also have to wonder… do they ever go overboard?
I’m not good in Norse mythology (always no time to read more), so I’m not sure, what’s the relationship vetween Odie and Heimdall? Son? (With those Aesir and Vanir gods it makes the thing ever more complicated..)
Yikes, that’s a tough one… I had to do some research. Instead of
pretending I know more than I do about this than I do, I’ll relate what I found:
Only three gods, Thor, Baldur, and Váli/Bous, are explicitly identified
as sons of Odin in the Eddic poems, in the skaldic poems, in Saxo
Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, and in the Gylfaginning section of Snorri
Sturluson’s Prose Edda. But silence on the matter does not indicate that
other gods whose parentage is not mentioned in these works might not
also be sons of Odin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Odin
In various kennings Snorri also describes Heimdall, Bragi, Tyr and Höd
as sons of Odin, information that appears nowhere else in the Edda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Odin
There are a bewildering number of theories about another of the leading gods,
Heimdall, but he, too, was probably originally one of the Vanir. He was
associated with the sea and was the son of nine maidens (perhaps nine waves).
Crossley-Holland, the Norse Myths
Assuming the Aesir and Vanir gods once belonged to different tribes of people,
and assuming that Heimdall was once a Vanir god, he probably became a “son of Odin” after the tribes became intermingled and the two pantheons combined. At least this would be my armchair historical theory on the matter. But what’s more intriguing to me than the identity of of Heimdall’s father is the logistics behind having nine mothers. As it relates to Odin and Friends, at least one of those mothers may have been a nuclear submarine — or a toaster oven.