Monday, November 05, 2007

Odin's Wain

I found these sites while looking up info about Odin's Wain after reading "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman:

Wodensdaeg
Pagan Astronomy - The Big Dipper
Viking Cosmology and Myth - This site claims that it is Thor's Wain (scroll down to the section on Thor)
Cultural Astronomy - This site says that has been attributed to either Odin, Thor or Irmin.

Now, I'm not sure what this has to do with Odin's Wain (it came up in the search) but I'm including it because apparently someone thought that Odin had enough of a sense of style that they needed to name a clothing store after him.

2 comments:

Rursus said...

The idea of Odin's Wain as the Big Dipper asterism seems to originate from the somewhat confused article [[Big Dipper]] on Wikipedia. This site claims (in Norwegian Bokmål language) that “Rognis reid”, which seems to me to be an original designation of the Big Dipper, is Odin's Wain. But “Rognis”/“Røgnis” just seems to mean “Ruler”, so I'm very unsure about what to do with this “Odin's Wain” too.

magnusalpha said...

Odin's Wain is actually Ursa Major, which contains the Big Dipper. That's probably where the mix-up comes from.