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Odin and Asgard
Who were the Norse gods, where did they live, and when?
We looked through the written traditions, the esoteric sources, the channeled material and genetic archaeology. The written tradition comes first.
Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic poet and chieftain, wrote down the Norse myths in the thirteenth century. He says the gods, the Aesir, were real people. Their city, Asgard, stood east of the river Don, which flows into the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea. Their leader, Odin, took them north through Russia and Germany to Sweden, and the people there worshipped them as gods. In 2001 and 2002 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl dug at Azov, looking for Asgard. Near the mouth of the Don he found belt fittings, rings and armbands of about the second century, closely matching objects found on the Swedish island of Gotland some eight hundred years later, and he read Snorri's Odin as a real king who led his people north when the Romans advanced into the region. Norwegian historians rejected his reading.
Archaeology also records a movement in the opposite direction in the same centuries. The Goths, whose own tradition placed their origin in Scandinavia, moved from the coast of the Baltic Sea south to the Black Sea in the second and third centuries, and they too could have carried northern objects to the Don.
One family of gods
The Norse gods and the Greek gods are most likely one family of gods under different names, and two kinds of evidence point that way.
The first is written history. The Romans matched the German and Norse gods with their own, god for god. They called Wodan, the German name of Odin, their Mercury; Donar, the German Thor, their Hercules or their Jupiter; and Tiw, the Norse Tyr, their Mars. The English days of the week still keep the match: Wednesday is Woden's day, Thursday is Thor's day and Tuesday is Tiw's day, while French, which comes from Latin, has mercredi, jeudi and mardi, the days of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars.
The second is linguistics, and it goes deeper. It traces the name of the Norse Tyr, the name of the Greek Zeus and the name of Dyaus, the sky god of the Vedas of India, to one word: the name of the sky father of the Indo-European languages. Those languages spread across Europe and into India with the Yamnaya, the herders from the steppe north of the Black Sea, about 5 KY (thousands of years) ago.
So the Norse and the Greek gods share one origin, and the record of language traces that origin back to the steppe.
The homeland of the sky father
Where did the family of the Norse and Greek gods begin, according to genetic archaeology?
In the same land where the Norse tradition itself put the home of Odin.
Recall what that tradition says. Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic writer who wrote down the Norse myths in the thirteenth century, said that Odin and the other Norse gods came from a city called Asgard, which stood east of the river Don. The Don is a river of southern Russia that flows into the Sea of Azov, the small northern arm of the Black Sea. So Snorri placed the home of the Norse gods in southern Russia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Genetic archaeology has now looked for the first speakers of the Indo-European languages, the family that includes the Norse languages, Greek and Sanskrit, and its answer can be followed step by step.
The work was done in the laboratory of David Reich at Harvard, the laboratory that has read more ancient genomes than any other, and published in 2025 in Nature, the most prominent scientific journal, by Iosif Lazaridis, Reich and colleagues. They read the DNA from the bones of 435 people who lived in southern Russia and the lands around it between about 8.4 and 4 KY (thousands of years) ago, and they worked out which of those populations descended from which.
The reasoning runs like this. Languages travel with people, as the chapter on the steppe showed for the Yamnaya, who carried the Indo-European languages across Europe and into India. The oldest recorded Indo-European language is Hittite, spoken in ancient Turkey. So the first speakers must be the people from whom both the Yamnaya and the Hittite speakers descend. The genomes found that people. The geneticists call them the Caucasus and lower Volga people. They gave about four fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and part of the ancestry of the ancient people of Turkey, and they lived about 6.5 KY ago in southern Russia: north of the Caucasus mountains, which run between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and across the lower courses of the two great rivers there, the Don, which flows into the Black Sea, and the Volga, which flows into the Caspian.
Now the two lines meet. The genomes locate a people, and their language held the name of the sky father, which survives as the Norse Tyr, the Greek Zeus and the Indian Dyaus, as the section One family of gods showed. So the earliest people known to call on the sky father lived in southern Russia around the Don, and that is where Snorri, writing in Iceland eight centuries ago with no genomes to guide him, placed Asgard, the home of Odin. The worship of the sky father and the Norse memory of the home of the gods point to one land.
The war of the gods
Do the Norse myths remember two peoples becoming one?
They tell of two families of gods. The Aesir, Odin's family, were gods of war and rule. The Vanir, among them Njord and his children Freyr and Freyja, were gods of fertility, the harvest and the sea. The two families fought a war that neither could win, and they made peace by exchanging hostages: Njord and Freyr came to live among the Aesir, and from then on the two families counted as one.
Scholars of myth read the war in two ways. Some read it as the memory of two peoples joining. Others, among them the French historian of religion Georges Dumézil, read it as a myth of how the warriors and the providers of food became one society.
Genetic archaeology shows such a joining in the same lands. About 5 KY (thousands of years) ago the Yamnaya warriors from the steppe reached northern Europe and mixed with the farmers already living there, as the section The steppe described.
In my view both readings ring true, and the story may hold a mixture of several memories. The Norse gods share their names with the gods of India, as the previous section showed. Population genetics dates the arrival of the steppe ancestry in India to about 3.5 KY ago, so the gods named in both places are at least that old, and the language family they belong to goes back further, to about 6 KY ago. India and Greece keep wars of the gods of their own: the devas against the asuras in the Vedas, first composed about 3.5 KY ago, and the Olympians against the Titans in the poem of Hesiod, about 2.7 KY ago. The Norse war was written down only about 1 KY ago. These dates and places fit a memory of the steppe warriors meeting the farmers of Europe, about 5 KY ago, so that reading stays possible.
Other sources place the gods far deeper in time, and I will turn to them in the sections that follow. The earlier volumes of this book placed Atlantis on land inside a dry Mediterranean basin, which the sea flooded about 5.3 million years ago, and the Greek and Norse gods may belong to that age. The Hyperborea chapter described northern lands that sank far earlier still: the buried land northwest of Britain, which went under about 55 million years ago, and the ridge under the North Pole, whose top lay near the surface as a line of islands about 50 million years ago. The gods may reach back even to that age.