Odin Trivia
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49 free Odin trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Odin is the one-eyed All-father of Norse mythology, god of war, death, poetry and frenzy, who rules from Asgard, sends his ravens across the world each dawn and is fated to be swallowed by a wolf. This quiz starts with the things most people know (the eye, the ravens, the eight-legged horse, the hall of the slain) and asks exactly what the sources say about them: which well took his eye, what the ravens' names mean, who the horse's mother was, and what Odin himself lives on. It then follows him through the Eddas and sagas and out into history: the murder of Kvasir and the theft of the mead of poetry, the pickled head of Mímir, the wall-builder's stallion, the spear Gungnir and the ring Draupnir, the wife his brothers shared, the Roman who called him Mercury, the bracteate that first names him, the kings who claimed him as ancestor, and the weekday, opera, comic book and video game villain that carry his name. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Odin and the figures and objects around him, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Norse mythology, Thor and Zeus quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Odin is usually described as having only one eye; what did he give the other one up for?
Wisdom
Wisdom. Odin wanted a single drink from Mímir's well, where wisdom and understanding are stored, and its keeper refused until he left an eye in the water as his pledge.
Q 02What are the names of the two ravens that bring Odin news of the world?
Huginn and Muninn
Huginn and Muninn. Odin taught the pair human speech, and they perch on his shoulders to murmur into his ear everything they have seen and heard on their flights.
Q 03Roughly what do the names of Odin's two ravens mean?
Thought and memory
Thought and memory. In the poem Grímnismál a disguised Odin frets each day that Thought may not fly home, yet says he worries more for Memory.
Q 04What is the name of Odin's eight-legged horse?
Sleipnir
Sleipnir. Odin lent him to Hermóðr for the ride to Hel to beg for the dead Baldr's release, and the horse cleared Hel's gate in a single leap.
Q 05Which god gave birth to Odin's eight-legged horse, having taken the form of a mare?
Loki
Loki. He became a mare to lure away the stallion Svaðilfari, so the giant building Asgard's wall would miss his deadline and lose his fee: Freyja, the sun and the moon.
Q 06Odin's wife is which goddess?
Frigg
Frigg. She is said to know every fate yet never to prophesy, and when her son Baldr dreamed of his death she made fire, water, iron, stones and beasts swear not to harm him.
Q 07Odin and his brothers created the world by slaying which primordial being?
Ymir
Ymir. From the frost giant's body they built the world: his blood became the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the crags and his skull the sky.
Q 08In which hall does Odin receive the warriors slain in battle?
Valhöll
Valhöll means hall of the slain, yet Odin gets only half of them: Freyja claims the other half of each day's battle-dead for her own field, Fólkvangr.
Q 09Chosen by the valkyries, the slain warriors who feast in Odin's hall are known as what?
Einherjar
Einherjar. Every morning they arm themselves, go out to the courtyard and cut one another down for sport, then ride back to the hall together and sit down to drink.
Q 10Odin's hall of the slain is described as having a roof thatched with what?
Shields
Shields. In the Prose Edda, King Gylfi finds the roof shingled with golden shields and, in the doorway, a man juggling seven short swords at once.
Q 11Odin's warriors feast every day on the flesh of Sæhrímnir, a beast that is said to be what?
Whole again each night
Whole again each night. The Prose Edda makes Sæhrímnir a boar that the cook Andhrímnir boils every day, and says its meat will never run short however many warriors arrive.
Q 12The slain warriors in Odin's hall drink mead; which drink is said to be the only thing Odin himself consumes?
Wine
Wine. It is both food and drink to him, so he hands everything on his own table to his two wolves, Geri and Freki; the warriors' mead flows from the udders of the goat Heiðrún.
Q 13At the end of the world, which monstrous wolf swallows Odin?
Fenrir
Q 21In Lombard legend, what did Odin call the Winnili after seeing their women with hair tied around their faces?
Long-beards
Long-beards. His wife told the women to wear their hair like beards where he would look out at sunrise; when he asked who the 'long-beards' were, she said he now owed the people he had named a victory.
Q 22Adam of Bremen described a great temple with statues of Thor, Odin and Fricco at which Swedish site?
Uppsala
Uppsala. Adam wrote that Thor sat in the middle as the mightiest of the three, and that people sacrificed to him against plague and famine, to Odin before war and to Fricco for weddings.
Q 23In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Odin's English form Woden has an ancestor, Sceaf, said to have been born aboard what?
Noah's Ark
Fenrir. The gods had tricked the wolf into a fetter as soft as a silk ribbon, and he bit off the god Týr's hand as the price; at the world's end he finally breaks free.
Q 14In the Prose Edda, Víðarr avenges his father Odin by stepping into the wolf's jaws, protected by what?
A thick shoe
A thick shoe. It is said to be pieced together from every scrap of leather people have trimmed off their own shoes, so anyone who wants to help the gods should throw those trimmings away.
Q 15Odin's name derives from a Proto-Germanic word often translated as 'lord of' what?
Frenzy
Frenzy. The root covers rage, madness and inspiration alike, fitting a god of both warriors and magicians; the chronicler Adam of Bremen glossed the name bluntly as 'Wodan, id est furor'.
Q 16Which day of the week is named after Odin in English?
Wednesday
Wednesday began as Old English Wōdnesdæg, 'Woden's day', Woden being the Anglo-Saxon form of Odin; German has no such name, calling the day Mittwoch, simply 'mid-week'.
Q 17Roman writers passed over Jupiter and equated the wandering, cunning Odin with which of their own gods?
Mercury
Mercury. Why is still debated, since both were said to guide the souls of the dead and both were gods of eloquence; the match is why Romans wrote that the Germans worshipped 'Mercury' above all.
Q 18Which Tolkien character did the author describe as an 'Odinic wanderer', echoing Odin's guise as a cloaked traveller?
Gandalf
Gandalf. Tolkien used the phrase in a 1946 letter complaining that an illustrator had made the wizard a figure of fun, and he took the name itself from the list of dwarfs in the Norse poem Völuspá.
Q 19In Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner calls Odin by what name?
Wotan
Wotan. In the cycle's first opera he wins the ring by tricking the dwarf Alberich into turning himself into a toad, then seizing him and taking his gold as ransom.
Q 20The oldest known inscription naming Odin is on a gold disc found in Denmark in 2020 by whom?
A new detectorist
A new detectorist. Ole Ginnerup Schytz was trying out a newly bought detector on an old classmate's field; the inscription, 'He is Odin's man', pushes the god's written record back at least 150 years.
Noah's Ark. Christian scribes kept the pagan god in their kings' family trees by giving him a pedigree that led back to the Bible, so King Æthelwulf's line runs through Woden to Noah and on to Adam.
Q 24The Merseburg Charms, in which Wodan chants a cure over a foal's sprained foot, survive in which language?
Old High German
Old High German. A cleric wrote the two spells down more than 1,000 years ago, and they lay unnoticed in Merseburg's cathedral library until 1841; Wodan's cure runs 'bone to bone, blood to blood'.
Q 25In Hávamál, Odin hangs himself on a windswept tree for nine nights to win knowledge of what?
The runes
The runes. Given no bread or drink, he calls himself 'offered to Odin, myself to myself', then seizes the runes with a scream and falls back to the ground.
Q 26In Hávamál, the sayings attributed to Odin, cattle die and kinsmen die, but what is said never to die?
A good reputation
A good reputation. Elsewhere the poem is drily practical: it tells guests not to outstay their welcome and warns that the more a man drinks, the less he is master of his own mind.
Q 27On which tree is Odin generally thought to hang himself for nine nights in the poem Hávamál?
Yggdrasil
Yggdrasil. The poem only says a windswept tree, but the name is usually read as 'Ygg's horse', Ygg being Odin and the horse a gallows, which the hanged were said to ride.
Q 28In the Prose Edda, Odin and his brothers shape the first humans, Ask and Embla, from what?
Two trees on the seashore
Two trees on the seashore. The brothers gave them breath, wits, speech and sight, then clothes and names; the older poem Völuspá credits Odin, Hœnir and Lóðurr instead.
Q 29In Völuspá, Odin opens the first war in the world, between the Æsir and the Vanir, by doing what?
Flinging his spear into the enemy
Flinging his spear into the enemy host began a war neither side could win; it ended with an exchange of hostages, which is how Njörðr and his children Freyr and Freyja came to live among Odin's people.
Q 30After the Vanir beheaded the hostage Mímir, what did Odin do with the head?
Embalmed it for its counsel
Embalmed it for its counsel. He smeared the head with herbs so it would not rot and sang spells over it until it could speak, then carried it with him to learn hidden things.