As promised in the Zeus VS Odin blog, here’s the follow up post. I’ll be covering a few more niche things that I cut out of the main post for length, as well as a couple others.
Can Odin “make everything go in accordance with his will?”
No, but, I can understand why people may get confused about it.
Alright, so, unlike what I covered in the main post, these next two claims aren’t actually things I’ve seen people trying to argue. I’m expecting that whenever Death Battle chooses to do this episode, and when G1 gears up to make the prediction blog to match, people will probably take another look at these mythological sources and read through them to identify potential new arguments. During my own research, I noticed a few things that I’m expecting people to get confused by. To future-proof my Zeus VS Odin blog, I’m going to “pre-bunk” them, Minority Report style.
These lines come from the Prose Edda, the same source as the other not-quite-right “omnipotent Odin” claim which I addressed in the main post. They’re from a different scene, however. Here’s the part I think people will fixate on:
“King Gylfi was clever and skilled in magic. He was quite amazed that the Æsir-people had the ability to make everything go in accordance with their will.”
Again, I get why some people might get tripped up by this. I know it seems super duper explicit. But there’s a lot of holes if you A. know the context and B. actually think about it for a while.
The quote is from the very beginning of Gylfaginning, the first main part of the Prose Edda. In context, it’s talking about King Gylfi, a legendary Swedish king, explaining why he’s going to investigate the Aesir and Asgard. It’s part of the frame story that Snorri uses to deliver the reader all the different old Norse myths that Gylfaginning portrays.
The second sentence, which is the one people would use to argue Odin’s omnipotent, is only Gylfi’s impression of the Aesir, not a direct 100% confirmed statement about their abilities. He clearly doesn’t know much about them for sure; again, the scene is explaining why he’s going out and investigating them in the first place. The very next sentence after it is this: “He [Gylfi] wondered whether this could be as a result of their own nature, or whether the divine powers they worshipped could be responsible.” Gylfi is explicitly lacking information here and trying to seek it out. That’s the point of the scene.
And I mean, “divine powers they worshipped?” Since when do the Aesir worship any divine powers? They are the divine powers. With odd details like this, we shouldn’t take Gylfi’s personal interpretation as gospel.
With this in mind, the line could easily be referring to any number of things that aren’t omnipotence. Such as their ability of prophecy, which is referenced in the same paragraph as something Gylfi lacks and doesn’t have any knowledge of. If you had the ability to foresee future events and plan around them in advance, it’d certainly seem to uninformed clueless outsiders that you have the power to “make everything go in accordance with your will.” That also kinda seems like something the author could realistically be going for here. Or, maybe it could be referring to Odin’s ability to pick who wins and loses in battle, as I mentioned in the main blog. The line is not really as rock solid as it looks.
As mentioned before, the sentence that comes after the quote confuses things further. The mention of “divine powers they worshipped” seems out of place when talking about gods. This could be a result of its placement in the Prose Edda. I’ve already explained what euhemerism is before, and the Prose Edda, while considered one of the most useful sources we have on viking mythology, does in fact have some euhemerization in it. The prologue to Gylfaginning, which comes directly before this scene with Gylfi that we’re talking about, firmly establishes that the Norse “gods” are just humans, and that the only real god is the capital-G Christian one. Odin? He’s just a Turkish royal with the gift of prophecy.
Okay, so, you’re probably wondering now how the Prose Edda is such a valuable source for genuine Norse myth if it has stuff like this in it. Well, as I mentioned briefly in the main post, most of the Norse myths in the Prose Edda are delivered through a frame story. The Prose Edda is not written like a normal book; the stories in it are not written like normal stories. They’re written as conversations between characters who are sharing the old non-euhemerized tales.
Where I’m going with this is, this line comes from the frame story, not one of the old stories shared in the context of that frame story. It comes from a scene that’s just there as a way to deliver us the old stories. Is there some bit of genuine viking lore in the frame story? Yes, there is, as conversations between gods and other beings where stories are swapped are a recurring theme in other sources – including the Poetic Edda, in the poem Vafthrudnismal, as one example. The three names Odin uses to fool Gylfi are also referenced in other pieces of poetry. So, it’s not like Snorri completely made things up himself with the frame story (at least I don’t think so). But still, we should be a bit more thoughtful when using things from it. When thought of in this context, the confusing line could be a result of the euhemerization present earlier on in the Prose Edda, like the other quote I talked about. This would explain why so-called “gods” are worshipping higher powers; because in this scene, they’re still being “humanized” to some degree as they were in the prologue.
To sum it all up, the line isn’t as solid as it appears for numerous reasons. The character whose thoughts it represents is explicitly uninformed, there are some perfectly valid alternate interpretations of the line, and odd details both in and about the overall segment it’s from cast doubt on how reliable it is as a genuine facet of Norse myth.
Did Odin and his brothers create time?
Short answer, no. Long answer, keep reading.
This is a big one I’m expecting people to get caught up on – when Odin and his brothers created the world, there’s a few odd lines that people might misconstrue as them “creating time.” Specifically, when they made the Sun and Moon and gave them their courses. However, what’s happening here is that they created a way to measure time, giving humanity days and months by creating the celestial bodies that they can track them by.
Remember, before we had fancy newfangled things like “atomic clocks” and “Coordinated Universal Time,” people would measure days and months by just, y’know… counting based on sunset and sunrise, and charting the movements of stars at night. This is what those scenes are referring to, not Odin and his brothers literally creating the flow of time. Inventing the meterstick or legally defining the length of a meter is not the same thing as “creating length” or “manipulating a spatial dimension.”
This is backed up by how, in the Poetic Edda poem Voluspa (one of the most essential sources for the Norse creation myth, the same thing I’m quoting above) the birth of Ymir is described as happening “early in time.” I’ve read through over 10 different translations of Voluspa, plus translations of an alternate version from a different manuscript, and in none of them does the birth of Ymir occur before time was created – if the translation is attempting to be literal at all, there is almost always some reference to him being born during some early era in time.
This event happened long before Odin and his brothers were ever even born, and yet, time clearly exists. Like Ginnungagap, Muspelheim, and Niflheim, time was just one of those things that was around before they were.
Did Odin and his brothers completely fill in Ginnungagap?
When I was trying to piece together potential arguments Death Battle could try and use to make Odin infinitely strong, I settled on the idea of him and his brothers completely filling in Ginnungagap for a bit before dismissing it for several reasons. I imagine people might try out that argument for themselves, so I figured I’d just quickly lay out the reasons why the logic behind it is incredibly flawed.
There is a single sentence in the Prose Edda that possibly backs up the idea that, after Odin and his brothers slew Ymir and created the world from his corpse, Ginnungagap was completely filled up and no longer in existence. It’s in a longer section where Gylfi and Odin’s three manifestations are discussing Yggdrasil. Here’s the important part, with the single notable sentence highlighted.
“The ash is of all trees the biggest and best. Its branches spread out over all the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Aesir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root.”
So yeah, there’s this line that explicitly refers to Ginnungagap in the past tense. Meaning it’s totally filled up, right? Totally gone? Well, if you think about it for more than a second, the line is like… really confusing and contradictory. So wait, Jötunheim apparently took up Ginnungagap in its entirety? When we know that Odin and his brothers made Midgard, Jötunheim, and the ocean that surrounds those lands all inside of Ginnungagap? It’s kind of weird for the book to just randomly say that Jötunheim is where Ginnungagap once was when, y’know, there was a bunch of other stuff explicitly made inside it.
What I think is going on here is that the sentence isn’t referring to Ginnungagap in its entirety, but just a portion of it. There’s another sentence earlier on that seems to explicitly use the term Ginnungagap to refer to a single portion of the void: “Ginnungagap, the part that faces in a northerly direction, was filled with the weight and heaviness of ice and rime and there was vapour and a blowing inwards from it.” Here, a particular section of Ginnungagap is just called… Ginnungagap. While this may just be a quirk of translation, there’s still more evidence. Later on in the Prose Edda, we’re told that “Ginnungagap” is also a synonym for the sky in Norse poetry. The sky is also just a finite portion of what was previously Ginnungagap. (And obviously, it hasn’t been filled up, that’s another knock against the “completely filled Ginnungagap” argument.) So the term can and was used to refer to specific areas of empty space, as well as the entire primeval void in and of itself.
With this interpretation, the sentence isn’t saying that Jötunheim took up all of Ginnungagap, but just that it took up a part of it and that the root reaches to where that part once was. Replace the word “Ginnungagap” with “empty space” or “part of Ginnungagap” and it not only still holds up, but patches the logical gap in Jötunheim apparently taking up all of Ginnungagap. Which again, the concept of Jötunheim completely taking Ginnungagap makes absolutely zero sense. The line directly contradicts the main creation story of the mythology. I think you should take a critically important and consistently referenced pillar of the mythos over one weird inconsistent detail.
How big is Ginnungagap anyways?
All weirdness aside, there’s actually no indication in any historical source that Ginnungagap was endless or bottomless or in any way infinite to begin with. Even if the line was saying that they totally filled up Ginnungagap, it wouldn’t make the brothers infinite, since there’s no evidence the space they filled up was infinite.
Of course, you could argue this lack of a clear size is due to how these historical sources tend to only cover Norse cosmology in the most vague and self-contradictory of terms. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely just… feels right that it’d be infinite in size. It’s like, the ultra-ancient empty gap where the gods created the Earth. If it had some kind of edge, that’d just feel really odd. But we’re talking about a mythology where the world was created from the body of a giant whose legs had sex with each other and who drank entire rivers of milk from a mysterious cosmic cow who licked humanity out of a random salty block of ice that was just there for no reason. “Odd” is kind of to be expected.
The etymology behind the term Ginnungagap is debated, since the word isn’t really used all that much in Old Norse texts. But none of the proposed etymologies imply an infinite size. It’s usually thought to mean “yawning void” or “yawning gap,” which… I mean, just because it’s called a void doesn’t mean it’s infinite. It just means it’s… nothing. There’s also a second proposed etymology that claims it means something like “magic-filled space” or “magically-charged space.” Which yeah, doesn’t really confirm it’s infinite either. The meaning of the “ginnunga-” part is what’s debated, but in any version you look at, the “-gap” part just translates to… y’know, “gap”, empty space.
I’m sure some people will try and use how Ginnungagap is sometimes translated as “yawning abyss” and then use the definition of “abyss” as “a bottomless or boundless or endless area” to argue that it’s infinite, but that’s basically just forcing a modern day concept onto an Old Norse term. Again, the “-gap” part is what people are translating as “abyss”, and they’re just using the word for aesthetic reasons when they translate it that way. The “-gap” part literally just means gap or empty space, it doesn’t translate to any particular English word like void or abyss, and it wouldn’t hold any particular meaning that we now ascribe to those words. I’m not sure if that’s obvious or not, but sometimes I can’t really tell how informed people are on like, how languages get translated to other languages.
There’s not just a lack of evidence to say it’s infinite, but possibly even evidence to the contrary. Now, I’m just a simple country battleboarder, I’m not like you fancy city folks who’ve being using VSBW for ages. I’m not sure if this point will sound stupid at all, or even make any sense, I’m not really used to arguing over things like this. But Ginnungagap is repeatedly described as having both a “northern” and a “southern” region, as well as a “middle.” And these sections aren’t just using the landmarks inside Ginnungagap as measuring points. I thought that might be the case at first, y’know, like they’re really just saying that Niflheim is north of Muspelheim, but after looking into it more that isn’t right. Niflheim is specifically said to be located in “the part [of Ginnungagap] that faces in a northerly direction,” and Muspelheim in “the southern region [of Ginnungagap]” or “the southerly part of Ginnungagap.”
Forgive me here, as I’m not really an expert in determining whether a fictional void is infinite or not, but could an infinite space really have a north, a south, or a middle? Wouldn’t directions just not apply or be meaningless? Wouldn’t it be all middle, making the implication of a particular identifiable middle kind of weird? “North” and “south” implies there’s some kind of center or edge or at least some fixed reference point like an equator to judge that from, and “middle” implies there’s an area that isn’t middle. A center or middle implies some kind of observable symmetry or decreasing distance to set boundaries, the very concept of a “middle” relies on a space having defined endpoints or outer limits, which wouldn’t be the case in an infinite void.
All this to say, Odin and his brothers likely didn’t completely fill Ginnungagap. That line that implies Jötunheim somehow filled all of Ginnungagap on its own makes little sense, is inconsistent with other, more important mythological details, and is likely just saying that Jötunheim only took up a specific section of Ginnungagap in the first place. (I mean, “realms” or “worlds” are consistently shown to have edges, including Jötunheim as established in the main blog, so it contradicts that as well. If Jötunheim did really encompass all of Ginnungagap, well Jötunheim has an edge, so shouldn’t Ginnungagap as well?) Additionally, while Ginnungagap’s size is impossible to determine, there’s not really much of any evidence to suggest it’s infinite in size, and in fact, you could put forward an argument against that interpretation rather easily.
Did Odin revive after his death in Heimskringla?
As I mentioned in the opening of the blog, Heimskringla is an odd source to pull from. It’s euhemerized (meaning Odin is depicted as a mortal and not a god) and yet it also kinda isn’t. Translations of other pieces of Norse literature will bring it up in footnotes to fill in gaps in knowledge, so scholars do see it as a viable source, but a lot of things in it are definitely questionable.
I’ve seen some people confused over one of those questionable elements of Heimskringla, one that I mentioned both in the Zeus VS Odin blog and my earlier Odin Respect Thread over on Reddit. Odin is explicitly a mortal and not a god, he even dies of illness at one point, but then he also just shows up in his regular role as a god at some points after his own death. So uh, what gives? Did Odin resurrect himself? Is that something he can do? Well, no, not really.
This is probably going to be a little confusing, but basically, Heimskringla was based on earlier, presumably non-euhemerized source material. It compiles those earlier tales into one big interconnected compendium of sagas. The euhemerization was introduced during the writing process of the collection, but not everything was changed from that original source material. The stories in Heimskringla set after Odin’s death where he takes on a more godly role weren’t originally part of a collection where Odin died earlier; in the original forms of those stories, Odin never died to begin with. He didn’t come back to life, he just wasn’t ever actually dead.
Let me try and use a comparison here. Basically, imagine I took a trade paperback of Batman comics from the library, and I created my own page where Batman gets shot to death. I staple this page in at the end of the first comic included in the collection and put it back in the library. Someone just picking up and reading that book would think that Batman died and came back to life between the first comic and the next, but in reality, he had never died in the first place – that detail was just added in later and wasn’t ever part of those later issues, or the first one for that matter. Does that any make sense?
Why didn’t you do calcs for speed?
Alright, we’re out of the Minority Report zone and into the “addressing complaints” zone. This is the only major criticism I got so I’m just going to really hone in on it in particular. I’ll admit that I kind of glossed over speed. But that’s mostly because I think Death Battle will probably wind up doing the same, for multiple reasons.
Both characters are pretty nebulous in terms of speed. All of their actual like, “moving around” speed feats are not very impressive. I mean, zipping between Heaven and Earth as fast as thought or quickly travelling from one realm to another are very good feats, but when compared to both gods’ strength, they’re just not up to scale. You’d expect someone who’s infinitely strong or who helped create the world to have speed to match. So, you wind up having to rely on really weird feats to get the kinds of FTL numbers that activate DB fans’ neurons. Stuff like Heracles shooting the sun with an arrow, or Odin and Thor throwing stuff into the sky to make them stars.
Heracles shooting the sun being used as a speed feat to me is odd. Like… okay, I’m no… archery scientist? But I’m pretty sure that when someone fires an arrow from a bow, their hand is not moving as fast as the arrow. I’m sure enough that I’m not even going to bother typing that into Google. Checking the Heracles VS Sun Wukong script, they technically never compare Heracles’ speed to the arrows, they just say that they wouldn’t be able to hit Wukong. Though, there is that concurrent pop-up which says “Heracles has also battled Apollo, who is frequently depicted as an entity of light, giving further evidence of Heracles’ speed,” which I guess you could say is making an indirect comparison between the arrow and Heracles?
I’m guessing they were just strapped for feats here or something. Which, yeah, I get it. There’s just like, no good individual feat to bust out and calc for the Greek side of things. They’re all either super lame or just very, very strange.
For Odin’s side, throwing things into the sky to turn them into stars is definitely more applicable for speed than shooting an arrow from a bow. However, when you take cosmology into account, I think the feats basically just become unusable for speed. We have no idea how far away from Earth the Norse thought stars were. To them, stars were not giant superhot balls of gases located lightyears away from our planet. In their stories at least, stars were fiery sparks from the burning realm of Muspelheim set within the inside of a giant’s skull by the god Odin and his brothers so that humans could track the passage of time by their movements. We have no idea of their size, their position relative to the Earth, or really much of anything about their exact nature.
I am firmly against just using real world numbers here. If you’re going to use what the Greeks and the Norse thought about the scope of the universe when nailing down each character’s level of strength, you should remain consistent and carry that into calculating their speed as well. Doing otherwise is just total BS, I don’t know what else to say. Even within the context of the stories themselves it doesn’t make much sense to use real world numbers. In neither mythology was the universe created by the Big Bang. Both of them have their own origins for how stars and the Sun came to be, and they have different properties from real life stars. The universes presented to us are not remotely in line with our own in terms of creation or arrangement or how things work. It just checks out that the real world measurements wouldn’t be accurate within the worlds presented by the myths.
Now, the minds behind Death Battle possibly disagree with me on this… but I think they had their reasons, and that they’ll eventually come around. I briefly went over this in the blog, but I was kind of being dismissive, I really didn’t want to get too much into it as I thought it’d distract from the main points I wanted to get across. In Heracles VS Sun Wukong, they used the real world measurement for the distance between the Earth and the Sun while calculating the speed of Heracles’ arrow, and the real world size of the observable universe when calculating how fast Sun Wukong moved when he flipped across the Buddha’s hand.
When writing the blog, I figured that there had to be a reason behind this. I don’t know how to phrase this without sounding rude, I’m really not trying to insult anybody here, but I didn’t think someone could somehow not notice the incredibly blatant self-contradiction in jumping from “Wukong has infinite strength because ancient Buddhists thought the universe was infinitely big” to “here’s our calc for Wukong’s speed which uses the size of the observable universe as determined in the modern day, which is a finite number.” So yeah, I thought, “no one could make a mistake like that, there must’ve been some kind of conscious choice going on.”
In the case of Heracles and the arrow, I figured they were using the real world measurement because of Eratosthenes, the 3rd century BC Greek mathematician who possibly managed to land pretty close to the actual distance between the Earth and the Sun. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia to explain:
“Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparatio Evangelica includes a brief chapter of three sentences on celestial distances (Book XV, Chapter 53). He states simply that Eratosthenes found the distance to the Sun to be “σταδίων μυριάδας τετρακοσίας καὶ ὀκτωκισμυρίας” (literally “of stadia myriads 400 and 80,000”) and the distance to the Moon to be 780,000 stadia. The expression for the distance to the Sun has been translated either as 4,080,000 stadia (1903 translation by E. H. Gifford), or as 804,000,000 stadia (edition of Edouard des Places, dated 1974–1991). The meaning depends on whether Eusebius meant 400 myriad plus 80,000 or “400 and 80,000” myriad. With a stade of 185 m (607 ft), 804,000,000 stadia is 149,000,000 km (93,000,000 mi), approximately the distance from the Earth to the Sun.”
Yes, I did check the original source and the different translations myself to ensure that the quote isn’t being made up. I’m just borrowing their wording here cause they phrased it better than I ever could. So yeah, even though this probably wasn’t something widely known to or agreed upon by the ancient Greeks, I figured this was why they were okay with using the real life distance.
For Wukong’s feat, I figured using the real world size of the universe was some kind of lowball to make things look more fair, as I mentioned briefly in the original blog. I know that probably sounds silly since Wukong was still pegged at like a kajillion times faster than Heracles, but the other option was giving Wukong infinite speed. So, technically, dialing things back and using a finite measurement was infinitely more fair.
Either that, or there was something about the model of the Buddhist cosmology they were using that I was missing. Maybe the “infinite celestial sky” is somehow separate from the universe? Somehow? They described the feat as Wukong somersaulting “to the very edge of Heaven.” So, maybe they thought “Heaven” was a finite universe-sized location and the “infinite celestial sky” was something else that’s totally unconnected? I don’t know. Listen, I’m one of those people who finds cosmology-focused debates incredibly boring, but if you’re going to bank on it in the episode maybe toss it more than a few sentences.
Anyways, next I’ll address the other notable speed feat for Odin, he and his brothers placing all the stars in the sky. The big issue I have with it is that, again, we have absolutely no clue how big the sky was believed to be, or how far away from Earth the stars were believed to be, or how long they took to put all the stars in the sky. We also don’t know how exactly Odin and his brothers put the stars in the sky – like, did they just fly around placing each one individually, or did they do something else? They’re described as “throwing” Ymir’s brains into the sky to make clouds in the same source, and in both the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda there’s references to Odin and Thor creating stars by throwing severed body parts into the sky. So it’s totally possible they just grabbed handfuls of sparks from Muspelheim and tossed them up there, and thus this feat is not really much different from those other ones.
So again, if you’re going to be consistent and use the cosmology while trying to nail down a number for speed… I really don’t think you can calc this feat at all. Again, the stars are not star stars, they’re “stars.” They don’t seem to work like regular stars at all, many of them are just molten sparks statically set into the skull of a giant that’s held up over the Earth by dwarves. That’s about as far away from real stars as you can get. And on that topic of “far away,” I just really want to make this clear: we don’t know how far from Earth they were perceived to be or how Odin and his brothers even put them there in the first place. You just cannot math up a number for this crap.
And yes, I think the same thing about a lot of the Greek feats too. When I was drawing comparisons between the two and saying that things would “turn out similar enough,” I was talking about the similarly vague Greek star-related feats you can try and use for Zeus’s speed. Zeus taking people and setting them into the sky as stars or constellations, other gods doing the same kind of thing, Hera’s breast milk creating the Milky Way, those I also think you can’t really calculate.
I could get into all the different interpretations the Greeks had had in regards to stars, but I’d be here for days. There were tons of models where the stars and other celestial bodies were believed to be embedded into domes, rings, or spheres that surrounded the Earth, similar to the Norse story of the stars being set in Ymir’s skull. Various thinkers tried to calculate the distance between the stars and Earth, with Archimedes being one example. In his essay The Sand Reckoner, he calculated the celestial sphere of stars that surrounded the Earth (AKA the “fixed stars” that can be seen in the night sky) to be no more than 2 lightyears in diameter. Of course, you need to remember that there is practically zero consistency for any of this, there is no one “correct” answer as to the size of the Greek cosmology and where the stars were positioned in relation to Earth within it.
And yet, this is all still better than the Norse, for whom we have nothing to go off of as to how far they thought stars were from Earth. Literally all we can do for those guys is guess. I emphasized in the original blog how vague and contradictory the Norse cosmology is, but the Greek one isn’t really much better. We just already have a clue as to how DB will treat it.
When I said that other arguments “favored Zeus,” I was talking about the various higher arguments you could bring in if you really wanted. Things like potential omnipresence, scaling him to Gaia birthing the heavens, using some kind of argument related to shaking the entire universe, the argument about him defeating Cronos and thus being above time, him absorbing the infinite universe into himself in Orphism including the embodiment of time, whatever. DJTiki said in his Heracles profile that he doesn’t really think that outliers can exist in mythology, so even if stuff like omnipresence isn’t consistent, I still think it’s possible it could be brought up. Do I personally buy all of these? No, but I think there’s a chance Death Battle will buy at least one.
I’ve been rambling a bit, and I’m sorry for how unstructured all of this has been. Essentially, what I’m trying to get across is that I expect DB to realize that it’s not possible to assign an exact speed value to either of these characters while remaining internally consistent with how they treat cosmology. I think that the errors they made regarding that in the HvSW episode were probably conscious concessions that they made. So, when it comes time to put together the Zeus VS Odin episode, I figure they’ll probably just handle the whole speed debate very vaguely. Either they’ll just not comment on it all that much, or they’ll drop some simple line like “both gods are capable of travelling between earth and heaven super-fast, and both can place stars in the sky,” and then not elaborate past that.
So, why didn’t I do calcs for speed? Well, cause I can’t. Not because I’m bad at math – I mean, I am bad at math, that’s just unrelated here – but because nobody can. To do so would require either information that we don’t have or to make arbitrary choices that could unfairly kneecap either opponent. Yeah, again, I hope some people can understand why I don’t think you can actually use either of these characters for Internet versus debating.
So what if Death Battle sticks with using real world measurements? Does the verdict change at all?
Let’s say DB sticks to their guns. When they episode rolls around, they decide to keep on awkwardly flip-flopping between these mythical cosmologies as perceived by the followers of their respective belief systems and the real world measurements as we know them today. I mean, it’s possible that happens. So, what changes from the conclusion in the original blog?
Well, if they use any of the higher Zeus speed arguments, nothing really. Zeus just kinda crushes with those, I’m pretty sure. If they use other speed feats for Zeus like the star-related ones, then they’re about even. As explained in the main blog, that pretty much locks down a win for him as well. He’d have better strength, better durability, far superior immortality, equivalent magic BS and equivalent speed, too. Yeah, that’s a Zeus sweep right there.
I’ll admit there’s some vagueness around Zeus’s star creating feats that may give some people pause when equating them with their Norse counterparts. I kinda brushed over this in the main blog by shoving most of the star-related things into a text album, so let me elaborate here a little.
The act of turning someone or something into a constellation is often described as “setting” or “placing” them among the stars, which is similarly vague wording to Odin and his brothers’ feat. We don’t exactly know for sure how it worked. It could be that Zeus physically takes them, flies them up, and literally puts them among the stars, transforming them in the process. He could also just send their body flying up there like magic before turning them into stars. It could also be that he just transforms them into stars in the sky, no upwards movement required on anyone’s end. It could even be that the constellations the gods create are just representations of the someone or something that they honor, rather than literally their transfigured bodies. In that case, Zeus is probably just, again, magically creating stars in the sky, no movement required.
It could also be all of the above – some are physically placed, some are magically created from the being or item they represent, and others are representations that were also magically created. As with pretty much every facet of mythology, it’s up for debate, and there is evidence to support the “physically moving them to the stars” interpretation being true in some cases.
In Pseudo-Erastosthenes’ Catasterismi, a summary (or “epitome”) from the 1st or 2nd century AD of the earlier lost work of the same name, Pegasus is described as physically flying up to the stars when he became a constellation. In Pseudo-Hyginus’ Astronomica, a manual on Greek constellations from around the same period, Athena is described as creating the constellation Draco by physically throwing a dragon to the stars.
Both of these are mentioned among a number of alternate stories about their respective constellations, but that’s completely normal. Every single constellation described in each source has a number of origins listed, as there were many different beliefs about them, with none of them truly being the definitive version. Again, that’s just kinda how mythology is.
Now, while these two works are somewhat later ones, both of them frequently cite much earlier sources such as Hesiod, Homer, Pherecydes, Panyassis, Herodotus, Aeschylus, and more. This includes lost works that we don’t have today, so these two sources are our only way of accessing bits of those stories. So, kinda like how Snorri Sturluson was working off earlier Norse poems while writing the Prose Edda, the guys behind these works had earlier resources available to them which they based their writings off of. Most of the Greek materials written about the constellations and the stories behind them are no longer extant, and these two works are some of the only ones we have left that cover the topic in great detail. They’re some of the most valuable resources we have, despite their later origins and unclear authorship.
If they’re really strict, then maybe Odin has a shot. They’d have to dismiss the above justification for Zeus’s star-creating speed feats, ignore any higher speed arguments, stick only to Heracles shooting the sun, and then calc Odin’s feats to ridiculous numbers using real world measurements on top of that. If they did all of that, then I can see them arguing that Odin blitzes and stomps Zeus. (Let’s just set aside any arguments related to regeneration or resurrection.) The speed advantage would be massive.
Okay, so, let’s try and calc one of the throwing feats. We don’t exactly know what stars Thiassi’s eyes or Aurvandil’s toe were believed to be. The last thing I need to do is go on another tangent, so let’s just do a lowball and take the closest star to Earth (that isn’t the Sun, obviously). That would be Proxima Centauri, which is 4.246 light years away. Let’s lowball even further and say that it took 10 whole minutes for Thiassi’s eyes or Aurvandil’s toe to fly up and become a star. Even with this absolutely deranged lowball, Odin would still be around 223,322 times faster than light, over 2,000 times faster than what DB would tentatively be giving Zeus.
But I don’t know, I don’t think the show will do this. It just doesn’t really seem very… Death Battle-y to me, y’know? In that scenario, Odin’s getting a major concession in how they’re using a measurement for his speed calc that makes little sense to include. Zeus isn’t exactly getting his fair shake. Again, equal leeway, they’ve emphasized the importance of it before. If you’re gonna be generous and ignore both the Norse cosmology and how the vikings probably wouldn’t have pictured the stars as being lightyears away from Earth, then why are you being so strict with Zeus’s stuff? If you’re tossing out the entire Norse worldview and their whole concept of what stars were just to give Odin a big number, at that point, why not throw out all the stuff that suggests Zeus isn’t omnipresent and go with that one Aeschylus line? It makes about as much sense to do.
Overall, I still think they’re not going to be very specific about speed. If they do wind up doing numbers, they’ll probably do something like I did above, but for both characters. They’ll just scale Zeus to Athena’s dragon-chucking feat from the Astronomica, or use it as supporting evidence for his own constellation creating feats being applicable for speed.
I don’t think they’ll bank too much on like, trying to claim one is faster cause they made a star that’s further from Earth than the other. I’m pretty sure the general view in these cultures was that fixed stars were all around the same distance away? That’s what the Norse “Ymir’s skull” model suggests, and it’s also what the various Greek “celestial sphere” models suggest as well, that fixed stars were just all embedded into the same surface. But then you just get into the whole “using cosmology versus using real world measurements” argument again. At a certain point, it’s just kinda like, come on guys. Potentially deciding the winner through a “who made the furthest celestial object” pissing contest is the least interesting direction you could possibly take this fight.
A few things I left out
Couldn’t really think of a way to phrase this one as a question. There’s a number of things for Zeus that I found, but I decided against including in the blog for one reason or another. They’re all really minor, and I just felt like putting them somewhere at least.
First is that he possibly can use sleep manipulation, same as Odin can with his sleep-thorns. In the Odyssey, Athena is repeatedly able to cast sleep upon mortals, bringing them into a deep slumber. The gods all generally show very similar abilities: shapeshifting, transforming others, using magical mist, manipulating items, affecting the mental states of mortals, etcetera, these powers are all displayed by a wide number of gods.
Since this power isn’t really really related to any of Athena’s known titles (Hypnos is the god generally associated with sleep) I think it could be fair to assume that it’s one of those universal powers all the gods seem to have and that Zeus could make use of it if he wanted. But I left this out since, well, I just didn’t really know if people would buy it or not. If you do count Zeus as being able to do this, then I’d say it just makes sleep-thorns “cancel out” like the other powers the two gods have in common.
Similarly, multiple godly beings show the ability to heal others. In the Iliad, the Titan Dione was able to heal Aphrodite’s wound, and Apollo was able to heal the mortal Glaucus after he was wounded by an arrow. I think this could be what’s happening in the scenes where Zeus is vaguely described as “warding away death” from mortal warriors that I mentioned in the main blog. But yeah, since Apollo is sometimes associated with medicine, and Dione is a Titan, I again figured people wouldn’t really buy it.
The last thing is something I left out for formatting reasons. In the verdict, I mentioned how there’s nothing saying that Zeus’s hypothetical future son from the prophecy will kill him, and how it’s more likely he’d just overthrow and imprison Zeus like how Uranus and Cronos were both treated. Well, there’s actually more evidence supporting this conclusion than I covered in the blog. In Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound, the prophecy is brought up, and Zeus being killed is never mentioned, while him being imprisoned or made into a slave is. I left this out of the blog because… well, it made the paragraph a bit too chunky for my liking. I know, that’s a weird reason, but I just didn’t like how that paragraph looked with this included.
On the contrary, I didn’t really leave anything good out for Odin. I tried to really present him as generously as possible since I kinda went in knowing he’d be the loser. There are some quotes that suggest Thor is the physically strongest of the Aesir, and so all of the ones that say Odin’s the mightiest could potentially just be talking about his position of leadership. But I’d say that doesn’t really affect much of anything.
Alright, that’s about everything I have to say. Honestly, I was expecting a lot more criticism than I wound up getting, I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t have more to cover here. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Anyways, I closed up the poll in the original blog, and the winner is, by a pretty considerable margin…
I was totally not expecting the amount of responses I got on the poll. Over seventy people voted on it, and a bunch of people left pretty cool suggestions for future blogs as well. I think I might make a post talking about all the matchups that got submitted, or at least the ones I liked. But if I do, I’ll probably just put that out the same day as Nemesis VS Delta as a bonus.
So yeah, expect that blog to be out soon enough. Remember, I’ve got another one coming out before it, but I’m still keeping it a secret. And just because this one won the poll doesn’t mean the others won’t happen. I still think I’ll probably do a Marty and Doc VS Bill and Ted blog at some point.
Yet Another VS Blog 