“Aslaug, dottur Sigurdur Fafnisbana,” is recorded in the Landnama-bok in sober earnest as having married Ragnar Lodbrog.
Divine legacy, or relic, appears in Asleif, the English Oslaf. The northern Aasny, with Ashildur, has always been a favourite. Osthryth, divine threatener, came out of the house of Bernicia into Mercia, where she was murdered by the Danes, and revered as St. Osyth with a priory in her honour.
Thoroughly English are likewise Osmod, divine mood or wrath; Osfrith, divine peace; Osred, divine council; Osgifu, divine gift; Oswine, divine friend, the third of the admirable but short-lived kings of Bernicia; Oswiu, who overthrew him, was probably named from a word meaning sacred, of which more in its place. Osbeorht we share with Germany, which calls it Osbert, and has the feminine Osberta. In fact, most of these names were in use there, beginning with os or ans, according to the dialect in which they were used. Ansgisel was one of the Frankish forms, that section of the race always making much use of gisel, a pledge.[[107]]
[107]. Grimm; Turner; Munch; Lappenberg; Mallet; Landnama-bok; Domesday; Michaelis; Hermann Luning, Edda; Hist. of Scandinavia; Marryat, Jutland.
Section III.—Odin, or Grîmr.
The head of the Aasir was Odin, as we have learned to call him from the North, which worshipped him long after we had forgotten our Wuotan, except in the title of his day of the week. There are various opinions as to the meaning of his name, some making it come from the word for rage in the North, odhr; in A. S., wod; and still wuth in German; and the adjective wud in Scottish. It thus may allude to Odin being the god of storm and tempest. Others take the name from O. G., watan, N., vatha, to pervade, the title of the Divinity, as being through all things. This is, in fact, the same as God.
However this may be, Odin, in the higher myths, is the All-father, standing at the head of Asgard, as Zeus does of Olympus. He governs all things, and knows all things. He obtained this mighty influence, says the Edda, by hanging for nine nights on the world-tree, Yggdrasil, without food or drink, transfixed with a spear, as a self-sacrifice. Then he looked down into the depth, and sank from the tree into it; but in the abyss beneath he drank the costly poet-mead, and learnt powerful songs, obtaining the Runes, the beginning of wisdom, by which he could compel to his will all nature: wind, sea, and fire, hate and love!
Coupled with this entirely divine Odin, there was the abiding notion of ancestry beginning with a god; and no one, of any nobility, was content without having Odin for his forefather. Even when Christianity dethroned Odin from his place in Heaven, he was still retained as a heroic ancestor; and somewhat grotesquely, the old chroniclers, after carrying up their kings to him, brought him down from Noah, and he became reduced to be the leader of the great migration from Asia, while the gods were made his human sons.
We do not find Odin itself forming part of any personal name; it seems to have been avoided as Zeus was in Greece, and, to a greater degree, Jupiter in Rome. But he had no less than forty-nine epithets, all of which are rehearsed in the prose Edda, and his votaries were called by one or other of these.