Greek vs Norse Mythology

Greek and Norse mythology are the two best-known mythologies of Europe, and the internet never tires of setting them against each other: Zeus vs Odin, Thor vs Hercules, Loki vs Prometheus. This page, written from the Greek side, lines up the gods and stories most often compared and says where a comparison works and where it is only a modern habit. The two traditions grew up separately, centuries apart: Greek myth took nothing from Norse myth, or Norse from Greek, apart from late Roman and medieval overlays. What they share is a distant Indo-European ancestry and a taste for the same kinds of story.

Two Traditions, Two Kinds of Source

The Greek myths were written down by Greeks who still believed in them. Hesiod composed the Theogony, the story of the creation and the rise of Zeus, around 700 BC; Homer's Iliad and Odyssey belong to the same period. The oldest layer is about 2,700 years old.

The Norse myths are known mainly from Iceland and were written down much later, by Christians. Snorri Sturluson composed the Prose Edda around 1220, more than two centuries after Iceland converted to Christianity; the Poetic Edda, the anonymous poems such as Voluspa and Havamal, survives in a manuscript of about 1270, though many poems are older. Snorri wrote as a historian, and in his prologue he even makes the Norse gods immigrants from Troy and Thor a descendant of King Priam: a medieval guess, not a Norse belief.

The oldest attempt to match the two pantheons is Roman. In chapter 9 of his Germania (AD 98) Tacitus says the Germanic peoples worship Mercury above all, and also Hercules and Mars, usually read as Odin (Wodan), Thor (Donar) and Tyr. Tacitus calls the Germanic thunder god Hercules, yet Thursday, Thor's day, is a Germanic rendering of dies Iovis, Jupiter's day. Roman matching was never consistent, and every "Norse equivalent" below should be read with that warning in mind.

Creation: Chaos and Gaea vs Ginnungagap and Ymir

Hesiod begins with Chaos, a yawning gap, out of which came Gaea the Earth, Tartarus and Eros, then Erebus and Nyx. Gaea bore Uranus the Sky, and together they produced the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires. Uranus imprisoned his children, so Cronus castrated him; Cronus swallowed his own children until Zeus overthrew him in the Titanomachy. The Greek world is not made from anything. It grows, generation by generation, and the story is really about the succession of three divine kings (see The Creation and The Creation II).

Snorri's Gylfaginning also begins with a gap, Ginnungagap, between a world of ice, Niflheim, and a world of fire, Muspelheim. Where they met, melting ice formed the first giant, Ymir, and the cow Audhumla, who licked the salty ice and uncovered Buri, the first god. Buri's son Bor married the giantess Bestla, and their sons were Odin, Vili and Ve. The brothers killed Ymir and built the world from his body: his flesh became the earth, his blood the sea, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky. His blood drowned almost all his kin, much as Zeus' flood later drowned humankind in the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha.

In both, then, the ruling gods take power by violence against an older generation; but the Greek gods imprison their elders, while the Norse gods make the world out of one. In the Greek story Prometheus shapes humans from clay; in the Norse story three gods find two trees on the shore and make them the first man and woman, Ask and Embla.

The King of the Gods: Zeus vs Odin

Zeus and Odin are quite different. Zeus is the sky itself, god of thunder and rain, and the thunderbolt forged by the Cyclopes is the weapon that wins him the throne. He guarantees oaths and kingship and fathers heroes and gods on a long list of lovers, Leda, Danae and Semele among them. He wins by strength and keeps what he wins.

Odin, the Allfather, is a god of war and of the dead, but above all of wisdom, poetry and magic, and his power is bought with sacrifice. He gave an eye for a drink from Mimir's well, and in Havamal he describes hanging nine nights on the world tree Yggdrasil, wounded with a spear, "given to Odin, myself to myself", to win the runes. He wanders the world as a one-eyed old man in a broad hat, and he knows that at Ragnarok the wolf Fenrir will swallow him. Zeus disguises himself as a bull or a swan to reach a woman; Odin's disguises are mostly for learning something.

That is why the Roman equation of Odin with Mercury, the Roman Hermes, is less odd than it looks: like Hermes, Odin is a traveller with hat and staff, and a god tied to the dead. And the Greek figure who arguably comes closest to his hunger for secret knowledge is Prometheus, who foresees the future and pays for what he knows.

The Thunderer and the Hero: Thor vs Zeus and Heracles

Thor is the Norse god of thunder, son of Odin and of Jord, the Earth. He carries the hammer Mjolnir, which returns to his hand. His job is to defend gods and humans against the giants, and most of his myths are fights: he fishes up the world serpent Jormungandr, recovers his stolen hammer by dressing as the bride Freyja, and in the adventures told in Gylfaginning he visits the giant Utgard-Loki, who tricks him into trying to drink the sea and wrestle Old Age herself.

As a thunder god he is compared with Zeus, and Thursday is Thor's day in the Germanic languages, a rendering of the Roman day of Jupiter. But Thor never rules. He is a son and a bodyguard, a red-bearded, hot-tempered working god, while Zeus is the sovereign. In temperament and in his stories Thor is far closer to Heracles. Both are the strongest of their kind and solve problems by hitting them; both spend their lives killing monsters and giants; both are tricked, humiliated and made to wear women's clothes. The Labours of Heracles and Thor's giant-killing are the natural pair. The great difference: Heracles is a mortal who earns a place on Olympus, while Thor is a god fated to die, killing Jormungandr at Ragnarok and taking nine steps before the venom brings him down.

The Tricksters: Loki vs Prometheus and Hermes

Loki is the son of the giant Farbauti and the blood-brother of Odin. He is a shape-shifter; he gets the gods their treasures, Odin's spear and Thor's hammer among them, through bets with dwarf smiths, and nearly loses his head over it. His worst act is the death of Balder, arranged by guiding the blind god Hod's hand to throw a dart of mistletoe. For that the gods bind him to three rocks with the entrails of his own son, a serpent dripping venom onto his face. At Ragnarok he breaks free and leads the dead against the gods.

The bound trickster recalls Prometheus. He too deceives the king of the gods, dividing the sacrifice at Mecone so that Zeus takes the bones, and he too is bound in chains, an eagle eating his liver, until Heracles frees him. But the resemblance stops there. Prometheus steals fire for humankind and suffers for his generosity; Loki is punished for murdering a god.

Hermes is a different kind of match: a thief on the day he is born, stealing Apollo's cattle, and like Loki quick, clever and able to go anywhere. The difference is the ending. Hermes becomes the trusted messenger of Olympus; Loki turns from companion to enemy. Greek myth has no god who is both an insider and the agent of the end of the world.

Love and Marriage: Freyja vs Aphrodite, Frigg vs Hera

Freyja, daughter of Njord and sister of Freyr, is the Norse goddess of love, beauty and desire, and the obvious partner for Aphrodite. Freyja is promised to giants, the builder of Asgard's wall and Thrym in the story of the stolen hammer; Aphrodite wins the golden apple in the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris Helen. But Freyja is also a goddess of magic, who taught the Aesir the sorcery called seidr, and a goddess of battle who takes half of the slain to her hall Folkvangr. In the Iliad Aphrodite is wounded by Diomedes and sent home in tears. Freyja belongs to the Vanir, a second family of gods of fertility and wealth, who fought a war with the Aesir that ended in a truce and an exchange of hostages. Nothing like that happens in Greek myth.

Frigg, Odin's wife and the mother of Balder, pairs with Hera as queen of the gods and goddess of marriage; Friday renders the Roman day of Venus and is usually taken as Frigg's day (some scholars say Freyja's). Hera is jealous, vengeful and formidable, the persecutor of Zeus' lovers and of Heracles. Frigg is quiet and foreseeing: in Lokasenna (29) she is said to know the fate of all beings and say nothing, and her great myth is grief for Balder.

The Pairs Table: Who Is Compared with Whom

The Norse gods most often matched with Greek ones, with a note on how far each comparison goes. "Often compared" is the right phrase; none of these is the same god.

Some Norse gods have no useful Greek partner: Freyr, Freyja's brother, a god of harvest and peace; Heimdall, the watchman, compared to Argus Panoptes by modern readers but by no source; Odin's parents Bor and Bestla, who appear only in the creation story. Often there is simply no Norse version of a Greek god, or the reverse.

The End of the World: Ragnarok vs the Ages of Man

The sharpest difference between the two mythologies is that the Norse one ends. At Ragnarok, told in Voluspa and retold by Snorri, Fenrir breaks loose and swallows Odin; Thor kills the world serpent and dies of its venom; Loki and Heimdall kill each other; the fire giant Surtr burns the world and the earth sinks into the sea. Then it rises again, green, Balder returns from the dead, and two humans who hid in a wood, Lif and Lifthrasir, repopulate the earth. The gods know all this in advance; Odin collects warriors in Valhalla even though he knows it will not be enough.

Greek mythology has no apocalypse. Its great wars, the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy, are in the past and were won; Zeus' reign is secure. The nearest Greek idea is Hesiod's Ages of Man in the Works and Days: a Golden race under Cronus, then Silver, Bronze, the race of Heroes, and the present Iron race, which Zeus will one day destroy too. That is a story of human decline, not of the death of the gods. The Greek gods are immortal in the strict sense; the Norse gods are only long-lived, and need Idun's apples to stay that way.

The Afterlife: Hades vs Valhalla and Hel

In Greek myth almost everyone goes to the same place. The dead are ferried by Charon across the Styx into the kingdom of Hades, past the dog Cerberus. In Homer they are all shades, apart from a few favoured heroes sent to Elysium and sinners such as Tantalus and Sisyphus punished in the depths of Hades; later sources make Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus judges of the dead and add a moral sorting, with Tartarus for the wicked.

In Norse myth the sorting is by the manner of death. Warriors who fall in battle are chosen by the valkyries for Odin's hall Valhalla, where they train for Ragnarok, or for Freyja's Folkvangr. Those who die of sickness or old age go down to Hel, the realm of Loki's daughter, the fate even of Balder. Elysium is a reward for virtue, Valhalla a reward for dying well.

Greek vs Norse in Popular Culture

Much of the demand for these comparisons comes from games and films. The God of War series moved its hero from the Greek world to the Norse one in 2018, where he fights Baldur, and in the 2022 sequel Thor and Odin themselves. Marvel's Thor, created in 1962 and on screen since 2011, made Loki Thor's adopted brother; in the sources Loki is Odin's blood-brother and a giant's son. Clash of the Titans (1981) and its remake gave the sea monster that threatens Andromeda the name of a Scandinavian beast, which is why many people place the Kraken in Greek mythology. In the Greek story that monster is Cetus, sent by Poseidon and killed by Perseus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Thor stronger than Zeus?

There is no answer, because they never meet. Thor is the strongest of the Norse gods, but a son and a defender; Zeus is the king of the Greek gods and the ruler of the sky. The question only makes sense in a comic or a game.

Did the Greeks and the Norse share any gods?

No. Neither tradition borrowed the other's gods. They share a distant Indo-European ancestry, which is why Zeus and Tyr have the same root name. Most of the "equivalents" repeated today go back to the Romans matching Germanic gods to their own.

Which is older, Greek or Norse mythology?

The Greek written sources are far older. Hesiod and Homer date from about 700 BC; the Eddas were written in Iceland around 1220 to 1270, by Christians recording a religion that had already died.