Almost a century later, in a Latin adaptation known as Chronicon Æthelweardi, the 10 th century historian Æthelweard (descended from the 9th-century King Æthelred I, the elder brother of the King Ælfred the Great) laments Woden’s divine status within the Norse Pantheon. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, surviving in nine extant manuscripts and probably completed under King Ælfred the Great in the 9th century, reiterates Bede’s Wodinic genealogy. The famous 8th-century ecclesiastical historian Bede is the first known Anglo-Saxon author to describe this mythic genealogy in Book I, Capitula 15 of his Historia claiming: Duces fuisse perhibentur eorum primi duo fratres Hengist et Horsa….Erant autem filii Uictgilsi, cuius pater Uitta, cuius pater Uecta, cuius pater Uoden, de cuius stirpe multarum prouinciarum regium genus originem duxit, “From the first their leaders (the Anglo-Saxons) were held to be two brothers, Hengest and Horsa….They were sons of Wictgils, whose father was Witta, whose father was Wecta, whose father was Woden.” Image from the Peterborough Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. No detailed account of Woden and his mythic adventures survives from early medieval England nevertheless, this ancestral figure remains present in the cultural imagination of the English people even centuries later. But not everyone agreed that Woden was divine. ![]() ![]() Last week we learned about the deified Woden, often identified with the Old Norse god Oðinn.
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