Current Events > Did Norse and Greek gods really clash in any mythology?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Other than video games and comic books?

No the MCU hadn't been invented yet

Nope

The concept from God of War was pretty sweet and now its bleeding into the MCU. Pretty wild.

Nah, but there's some of that in the old testament where Yahweh slowly devours lesser pagan gods to become the one Supreme being.

No. The Norse and Greeks didn't really have contact with each other until the middle ages, and by that point the Greeks had Christianized and the Norse were in the slow process of doing so.

The actual gods fighting? No
Their worshipers fighting? I doubt it, Greek mythology was replaced by christianity before the Norse religion really came to be.

That's not really how polytheists, or, at least the Greeks and Romans understood foreign Gods. They mostly interpreted foreign Gods as essentially being the same Gods or as being aspects of a given God.
It would be fascinating to learn how the pre-Christian Norse and Greeks would map their pantheons out on the other. Some of them me are obvious (Zeus and Odin would almost necessarily be analogues, as rulers of the Gods) but sometimes you would get seemingly weird ones, like the Greeks associating Osiris with Dionysus.

I know that the Romans conflated Odin with Mercury. At that time, the Germanic people didn't place Odin at the head of the Norse pantheon. That position belonged to Tyr (Tiwaz), the god of war. Odin was more of an old wise man and sometime benevolent trickster, which is what Mercury was to the Romans.

Should be noted that Tolkien based Gandalf the Grey off this older version of Odin in both appearance and personality.

Greeks and norther Germanic clans probably did have contact with one another. People got around

lilORANG posted...

Nah, but there's some of that in the old testament where Yahweh slowly devours lesser pagan gods to become the one Supreme being.

Reminds me when Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes ordered the Jews to worship Zeus. The Israelite High Priest at the time was a Hellenized Jew with a Greek name who tried to smooth the command over with the populace. He placed a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies and insisted that Zeus was in reality Yahweh, so it shouldn't be a problem to worship Yahweh under that name.

We know how that went.

To a Roman the Norse gods didn't exist.

Hmm your "Odin" sounds a lot like the god Jupiter. They must be the same god!

synchronization was good for religious tolerence, but for the conquered it was also a form of denying their gods and replacing them with the conquers.