The God Thor 97 



those parts iu wliicli the Danes and Norsemen were 

 settled ; we may assume, therefore, that they were 

 brought in by the Vikings, and were not Anglo-Saxon. 

 Whereas the place-names compounded of the name of 

 the greatest Saxon divinity, Woden, such as Wednes- 

 field, Wednesbury, though these are far less numerous, 

 occur in localities outside the sphere of Scandinavian 

 influence. 



In Scandinavia itself the proper names of persons or 

 of places which contain the name of Odin (Odhinn, the 

 northern equivalent of our Woden) are much less 

 numerous than those which contain the name of Thor. 

 Odensju (Odin's lake), Odinshog (Odin's mound), are 

 places that occur in the map of Sweden and Norway: the 

 first two in Sweden. Odin itself occurs as a man's name, 

 as does Thor. The local name Odnajs, and the proper 

 names Odd, Oddrun, Oddny — these last two are women's 

 names — are connected with a root odd,- which means a 

 ' point ' of land or a ' head ' of a family or of a troop. 

 On the whole, the traces of the worship of Odin are 

 much less conspicuous in Scandinavia than the traces 

 of the worship of Thor — certainly among the Norsemen 

 and Icelanders. Indeed, we may say that among the 

 Norsemen and the Danes (we judge very much from 

 the traces which these have left behind them in our 

 country), Thor, though he was not originally the chief 

 crod of the Scandinavians — for that was Odin — was the 

 most thought of and most often in men's mouths. 



In the best description that has come down to us of 

 a temple of the later days of heathendom, the descrip- 

 tion, namely, of a temple which stood at Upsala, and 

 probably gave its name (Upp-salr, High Hall) to that 



G 



