Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears as the heaven-god--all-embracing--the father of gods and men, like Zeus. ‘All-father Odin’ he is called, and his seat was on Air-throne; thither every day he ascended and looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth’s border. And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness upon the earth, that he set to rights; and he kept watch against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last--the race of giants--he could not utterly subdue and exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods themselves. But of this myth, which was half-Christian, we have not space to speak at length here.
In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to that of the ‘wide-seeing’ Zeus. ‘The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all,’ says one poet; or again, as another says, ‘Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, and that which is over all.’
Behind Odin stands Tyr--of whom we have already spoken--and Thor and Balder, who are, or originally were, two different embodiments of the sun; Thor being also a god of thunder. He is in character very closely allied to Heracles. He is the mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agriculture,[84] and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which represents not only cold and darkness, but the barren, rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, Thor is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, ‘faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants),’ as the Eddas often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs three labours, which may be paralleled from the labours of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking from a horn; this is the sun ‘sucking up the clouds’ from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and Peneus, which Heracles performs. Then he tries to lift (as he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the underworld. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old woman, and is worsted; but in reality he has been wrestling with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off the victor. So we read in Homer that Heracles once wounded Hades himself, and ‘brought grief into the land of shades,’ and in Euripides’ beautiful play, _Alcestis_, we see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with Thanatos, Death himself. In these labours the Norse hero, though striving manfully, fails; but the Greek is always victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the character of the two creeds.