AuldDragon's AD&D Blog

The Norse Pantheon is one of the more detailed for which we have information, although like the Finnish pantheon a lot of what we know about it comes from a single person’s editorialized writing on the matter. Closely connected to the fairly well-documented Norse mythos, however, is the continental Germanic and Anglo-Saxon mythoi. Neither are well documented, and the one attempt to bring the Anglo-Saxon pantheon (in Dragon #263) created much of it from whole cloth. Of course, that’s pretty necessary with such sparse information.

There are many other characters in the various Norse sagas who could potentially be deities, and many of them are giants. Many of them, like the wives of the male deities, should be near-divine immortal beings; others such as Skadi and Aegir are full deities but whether they should be included in the giantish pantheon or not is something I will need to consider. Treating them in much the way Nathair Sciathach is handled may be best. In addition, for the purposes of the D&D multiverse, a tie-in to the Greek Gigantomachy might also be worthwhile. In addition, the Vanir is very lightly detailed in Norse mythology; some scholars hold it as a merging of pantheons from different groups, but considering the lack of comparative battle in what we know of Anglo-Saxon and Continental Germanic mythology while also having clear analogs of some of the Vanir deities, that seems unlikely. However, there’s enough of them to sketch out an ephemeral pantheon, while also describing the rest as highly reclusive and mysterious.

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One of the most interesting mythologies to me is that of the peoples of Mesopotamia, chief among them being the peoples of Sumer and Akkad. The Sumerians pioneered writing, and as such their language persisted as a liturgical tongue throughout the region as their religion persisted in the descendants of the region, Assyria and Babylon. One of the strange things in the early D&D material is the splitting of the Sumerian and Babylonian mythoi, which are not truly separate faiths, just temporally separated versions of the same religion. Of course, like all religions that span centuries or millennia, significant divergences occur at various points, especially as cities with their own take on the faith rose and fell; this is the reason the Babylonian and Assyrian versions of the Enuma Elish creation myth place their primary gods Marduk and Assur in the leading roles respectively. As with the Egyptian pantheon, describing different ways of setting up the pantheon would be integral to properly describing the pantheon.

I have a large number of sources for this mythos, but I have misplaced some of them right now, so this list is based on some of my old notes. There are literally thousands of known deities, many of which have little solid information, or are local versions of other gods, or deified concepts of minor locations or things. I’ll just be listing major ones here. There are other culturally related or influenced mythologies that I will mention in a later post, that may be most appropriately integrated into this mythos.

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Another of the mythoi in AD&D that I don’t know that much about and would need to learn a lot more about before trying to write up is the Japanese mythos. What little I do know has mostly been picked up through the lens of anime and games and, again, I would need some solid sources to work on this pantheon.

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Indian mythos is another of the pantheons that I do not know enough about to tackle, especially considering Hinduism is a very large modern faith. I would want to emphasize the more ancient aspects that may not hold in the faith today, to better separate it from any sort of apparent value judgements on the modern faith.

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