Saxo Faker Odin

7. 2. A certain Mithodin, a famous illusionist, was animated at his
departure as if by a kindness from heaven and snatched the chance to
pretend divinity himself; his reputation for magicianship clouded the
barbarians’ minds with the murk of a new superstition and led them to
perform holy rites to his name. He asserted that the gods’ wrath and the
profanation of their divine authority could not be expiated by confused
and mingled sacrifices; so he arranged that they must not be prayed to as
a group, but separate offerings be made to each deity. When Odin
returned, the other no longer resorted to his conjuring but went off to
hide in Funen, where he was rushed upon and killed by the inhabitants.
His wickedness even appeared after his decease; anyone nearing his
tomb was quickly exterminated, and his corpse emitted such foul
plagues that he almost seemed to have left more loathsome reminders of
himself dead than when alive, as though he would wreak punishment on
those guilty of his murderer. The citizens, overwhelmed by this evil,
disinterred the body, decapitated it and impaled it through the breast
with a sharp stake; that was the way the people cured the problem.

7. 3. When the subsequent death of his wife had enabled him to
recover his former celebrity and he had repaired, so to speak, his
godhead’s bad name, Odin returned from exile and forced all those
who had worn the marks of divine rank in his absence to resign them,
as though they had been borrowed, and he dispersed the covens of
sorcerers which had sprung up, like shadows before the oncoming of
his sacred brightness. He checked them with the command not only
to abandon their pretended holiness, but also to leave the country,
considering that those who had so profanely obtruded themselves into
heaven deserved to be thrust from that earth.

8. i. In the meantime Asmund, Svipdag’s son, engaged in battle with
Hadding to avenge his father; when he realized that his own son
Henrik, whom he loved even more than his own life, had fallen
fighting courageously, his soul yearned for death and he hated the
sunlight; this was the lament he composed:


- Gesta Danorum, Book I