Óðinn as a son of god

In terms of belief itself, the border between science and magic can be nearly impossible to define: the contextual accrual of knowledge is radically subjective, so that empirical bases for evaluating a belief are very difficult to certify or extrapolate. The greatest advance in the scientific method lay in developing procedures for disproving theories rather than for validating them as a cornerstone of the methodology. While Christian cultures of the Middle Ages were geared primarily towards the promulgation of faith, their criteria for disbelief were largely couched in terms of orthodoxy (i.e. observing the expressions of authorities) rather than in controlled observation. Since orthodoxy involves a conformity which is more socially than logically disciplined, the more sparse and peripheral the social network, the more the constraints of orthodoxy are relaxed. Viking-Age Scandinavia did not have the infrastructure to preserve orthodoxy, which only came as a result of (yet perhaps also a contributing condition for) a subsequent drive towards political centralization. Landnámabók is one of the most complex compositions in Old Icelandic, insofar as its redaction 1) required a diverse range of informants dispersed throughout the island and 2) adopted a format which was not amiable to neat syntheses. Among its compilation of micro-sagas (the formal expression of some being no longer than someone's nick-name), there are mentioned certain ancestors who 'believed only in their own strength". The theoretical primacy of theism to Christian thought renders atheistic ideologies (such as Buddhism or the Hedonist philosophy of antiquity, but equally today's mainstream Western science) very difficult to comprehend from within such a framework. A religion of Óðinn may have generated much less anxiety for Christian Icelanders when imagining their ancestors' culture, than a belief system without recourse to supernatural beings as an explanatory strategem for human behaviour. The purpose of this analysis is to consider Norse paganism as an outgrowth of Scandinavian Christianity, whose construction became possible only as the social network of religious orthodoxy began to tighten around the peoples of Northern Europe. Any worship of Óðinn may have thus proved a collateral effect of Christian theism's penetrating ever farther into the North, after a fashion which is strangely echoed in the prologues to Heimskringla and Snorra Edda.