Woden

The king of the Anglo-Saxon gods was Woden, a German version of the Scandinavian god Odin, who had two pet wolves and a horse with eight legs. Other gods were Thunor, the god of thunder; Frige, goddess of love; and Tiw, the god of war. No detailed account of Woden and his mythic adventures survives from the Anglo-Saxon era; nevertheless, this ancestral figure remains present in the cultural imagination of the English people even centuries later. The famous ecclesiastical historian Bede is the first known Anglo-Saxon author to describe this mythic genealogy in Book I, apitula 15 of his Historia claiming:  Duces fuisse perhibentur eorum primi duo fratres Hengist et Horsa….Erant autem filii Uictgilsi, cuius pater Uitta, cuius pater Uecta, cuius pater Uoden, de cuius stirpe multarum prouinciarum regium genus originem duxit,  “From the first, their leaders (the Anglo-Saxons) were held to be two brothers, Hengest and Horsa….They were sons of Wictgils, whose father was Witta, whose father was Wecta, whose father was Woden.”