Everyone thinks he’s talking about Odin. But how do we know this? We use late Icelandic sources for comparison as proof but don’t really consider how problematic that is.
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Tacitus was writing in the first century AD. Snorri Sturluson was writing in the thirteenth. There is an issue here. Snorri May have represented truths about Odin but this should not be accepted without discussion.
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Only book I’ve seen criticise this is in German.
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Mercury may well have been Odin in Tacitus' Germania, but since he never went there, we don't know his German sources.
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On top of that, he is directly quoting Caesar, who was actually talking about Gauls worshipping Mercury, not Germans. So Tacitus may be way off the mark here and had no clue.
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Basically, the theory is this: Mercury was a psychopomp (leader of the dead to the afterlife) and a god of commerce. Odin in the later sources is ID'd with the dead and one of his epithets is the god of cargoes. But again, HUGE time diff between this info.
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There are earlier mentions of Odin/Woden (still several centuries removed from Tacitus) but these are more vague. There is one (ONE) source from the 7th c that equates Odin and Mercury. Again, written long time after, and by an Italian Christian monk composing a saint's life.
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Specifically, Jonas of Bobbio writing the life of St Columbanus.
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What would the source be for this? Maybe Jonas was thinking of the days of the week (dies Mercurii and Woden's Day)? The middle day of the week was not necessarily so named because the two gods were thought to be the same.
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But even if by the 7th c. Christian authors believed them to be the same, it doesn't mean that Tacitus meant that either.
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Always be critical of your sources, folks.
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