Odin, by Arthur Rackham
Once, whilst trying to explain the nature of the Norse Gods to a lady whilst strolling in the woods, I said 'sometimes The Gods laugh with us, sometimes they laugh at us'.
Christians struggle with 'The Problem of Evil': they cannot logically justify the existence of evil and suffering in a world which God made and where God has total power, This is not a problem with the Norse faith. It is possible to believe that Odin and his brothers made the world from the corpse of the giant they slew; if one considers the beauty and cruelty of the word, the way justice and abomination and war and chaos and love and lust and rage all dance hand in hand, and if one considers that the world was made 'in the image' of a God who is both noble and roguish, who kills with his own hand whose who are in his way and organises slaughter on a grand scale, who is a loving husband to Frigg and a lover to untold multitudes, and who knows that one day he too shall die.
The Gods do not love all of us. Sometimes they are busy. Much of the time they are drunk.
Does that not explain so much?
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