How ‘Ignorant’ Pagans Deified A Real-Life Wodan Into Their Ancestral Anglo-Saxon Warrior God ‘Odin’

Many people still to this day worship Odin as the traditional god of the Anglo-Saxon race — and these same people also believe that Christianity — supposedly an alien, Middle Eastern religion that worships a Semitic desert god — was forcibly imposed upon their pagan ancestors in Europe, subplanting their “real” noble warrior god — named Woden or Odin — and thereafter cut off the Saxon race from their true and “natural” spiritual leader.

There is only one small problem with this fanciful narrative — Woden was a real man — a historically-documented ancestral chieftain — that pagans long ago turned into a god — and began to worship as a god out of sheer ignorance, according to Medieval historian Richard Fahey:

No detailed account of Woden and his mythic adventures survives from early medieval England; nevertheless, this ancestral figure remains present in the cultural imagination of the English people even centuries later.  The famous ecclesiastical historian Bede is the first known Anglo-Saxon author to describe this mythic genealogy in Book I, Capitula 15 of his Historia claiming: ‘Duces fuisse perhibentur eorum primi duo fratres Hengist et Horsa….Erant autem filii Uictgilsi, cuius pater Uitta, cuius pater Uecta, cuius pater Uoden, de cuius stirpe multarum prouinciarum regium genus originem duxit,’ [or translated into English]:

“From the first their leaders (the Anglo-Saxons) were held to be two brothers, Hengest and Horsa….They were sons of Wictgils, whose father was Witta, whose father was Wecta, whose father was Woden.”

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, surviving in nine extant manuscripts and probably completed under King Ælfred the Great in the 9th century, reiterates Bede’s Wodinic genealogy.  Almost a century later, in a Latin adaptation known as Chronicon Æthelweardi, the 10th century historian Æthelweard (descended from the 9th-century King Æthelred I, the elder brother of the King Ælfred the Great) laments Woden’s divine status within the Norse Pantheon.  In his chronicle, Æthelweard complains that ignorant Scandinavian pagans have mistakenly deified Woden, whom Æthelweard identifies as king of the barbarians.  He bemoans how these pagans honor Woden as a god rather than the ancestral chieftain that Æthelweard, like so many Anglo-Saxon authors, understood him to be.

Well after the Norman Conquest of 1066, Woden was still making his way into English manuscripts, especially in depictions of Anglo-Saxon royal lineages.  At roughly the same time as Snorri was composing his Edda, and Geoffrey of Monmouth his Historia, Wodinic genealogy remains present in the English written record, remembering the Anglo-Saxon kings of old who trace their ancestry back to this deified chieftain.

The Libellus de primo Saxonum uel Normannorum adventu—located in a 12th-century manuscript (London, British Library Cotton Caligula A. viii) and often attributed to Symeon of Durham—contains an illustration of Woden, crowned as ancestral king of the Anglo-Saxons.  The text surrounding the illustration describes the royal lineages of the kingdoms of Kent, Mercia, Deira, Bernicia and Wessex respectively, each claiming descent and the right to rule from this legendary figure.

A strikingly similar image of Woden as a crowned English ancestral figure surrounded by his royal descendants accompanies the 12th-century Historia Anglorum by Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon (located in Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 66).  This text connects Woden with Henry II, the contemporary king of England.

Likewise, Ernulf, Bishop of Rochester describes the kings of East Anglia as descendants of the legendary Woden in his 12th century Textus de Ecclesia Roffensi (found in Rochester Cathedral Library, MS A.3.5).

In medieval English historiography, Woden appears to have been used to establish dynastic legitimacy for kings in early medieval England.  Long after Woden may have been worshiped as a god, well past the Anglo-Saxon conversion and even through the Norman Conquest, the importance of this legendary figure continues to loom large in the cultural imagination of those living and ruling in medieval England.  Although today nowhere near as popular or well known as Arthur, the so-called king of the Britons, the earliest kings ruling in England turned to Woden, not Arthur, in order to affirm and legitimize their royal lineages.

European paganism is very popular among many White Nationalists who believe in this false notion that Christianity is an “alien” religion — but this view requires willful ignorance of a significant part of early European history.

Europeans did not grow like mushrooms up out of the native European soil — nor did they descend from Cro Magnons or Neanderthals.

White Europeans migrated up into Europe from the Near East — no one disputes that the Roman Empire included the Near East and Levant, the seat of Christianity.

At the time of Christ, the Near East — including Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Judea — were inhabited largely by White people — extending across most of the northern coast of Africa.

They traveled by ship across the Mediterranean along the southern and western coasts of Europe — and they migrated up through the Caucasus Mountains — through the “Pass of Israel” — which is why Europeans are called Caucasians.

Thus, Christianity has been a “European” religion from its foundations — the apostle Paul sent his epistles to White European peoples — mainly to people in what is now modern Greece, Rome, and the seat of what became the Christian  Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire.

We know from history that most of this area was eventually overrun by Arabs — who now occupy — and live on top of — much of this former White homeland — the literal cradle of our civilization.

The ancestors of the Saxons were the Goths and related peoples — and the ancestors of the Goths were the Scythians — and the homeland of the Scythians is the general area of the ancient Parthian Empire — the rival of Rome in the Near East.

And if you look at a map of ancient Parthia, you will see that it largely coincides with the ancient Assyrian Empire.

So these Scythians comprised a portion of the “lost” northern ten tribes of the House of Israel from the Assyrian captivity — the so-called “gentiles” of the Bible.

Christ is the God of the House of Israel — hardly the “alien” God of an “alien” race.

Woden/Odin was a Saxon, a Goth, a Scythian, an Israelite — but he wasn’t God.

Woden’s God was Christ — he just may not have known it yet.

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