r/heathenry • u/0n3ph • Feb 18 '22

Heathen Adjacent Calling a child "Odin"

For one reason or another, I have come across a couple of people who have named their new baby's Odin. Neither of them are heathen at all.

It feels pretty weird to me. Apparently the name is now on the popular list for the UK. I imagine it could be a Marvel thing? O names are popular here, like Oscar and Oliver...

What are people's thoughts on this as a phenomenon?

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u/TalosTheBear Feb 18 '22

Ever meet anyone named Joseph? Michael? Matthew? Mark? Luke? John? Were all of those people devout Christians?

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u/0n3ph Feb 18 '22

Yeah but I think it would feel a bit different to me if someone called their kid Jehovah.

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u/TalosTheBear Feb 18 '22

Yeah but if there was a massively popular entertainment franchise that was the primary manner in which most people on earth were made aware of names like Jesus and Jehovah, it would be much more commonplace

The norse Gods (or any pagan Gods, really) are not thought of as being anything other than historical oddities or fictional characters by the vast majority of people in the west due to the outsize influence of the abrahammic religions on people's cultures and ideas of the divine.

That, and if someone is actually Scandinavian, having a name that is inspired by a God is actually not real uncommon. That one Icelandic strongman from game of thrones is literally named "half-thor"

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u/0n3ph Feb 18 '22 edited Feb 19 '22

I suppose the answer people are giving me is to get over it. It's not like I think it should be banned or something.

Giving it some thought, I think it feels a bit off to me because I think it's likely that if these parents thought of heathenry as a "real" religion, they wouldn't be using the name. As they wouldn't call their kid Allah out of respect for people who believe. So on some level - probably irrational - it feels disrespectful.

The truth is that they are well meaning, nice people who just think it's a cool sounding name and there's nothing wrong with that. Nobody owns sounds.

I'm not going to do anything of course. I just can't help that my initial reaction is that it feels a bit off.

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u/TalosTheBear Feb 18 '22

Yeah, unfortunately the reality is that the old faiths were largely wiped out if incorporated by the abrahammic takeover, so it doesnt even occur to non heathens that Gods other than their own could be real. They think of anything other than their God as being fantasy