Asgard and Odin: A few questions!

[Will.S]

Ok so I've read all of Roy Thomas & Mark Gruenwald's Thor: Celestials Saga and it's really good even if DENSE stuff. Previous to reading that I had read Mike Oeming's Thor: Disassembled Ragnarök story and it was also a fitting end to Thor.

Now we're given both Thor and Odin's earliest origins in Roy's Celestials Saga but there are some things that seem to conflict or maybe I don't have the full story of what happened in between that and Thor Disassembled.

So here are my questions:

1) In Celestials Saga, Odin came to be from a convergence of beings who survived the previous Ragnarök. In Thor Disassembled Thor (now with the wisdom of Odin) now sees the past and it shows Odin is already there with his brothers at his side. Is Thor merely seeing the legend as it was told instead of the reality?

2) Asgard in the Celestials Saga was already there from the previous Ragnarök as a big hunk of landmass when the beings who would become Odin resided on it after Ragnarök. In Disassembled Odin supposedly carves out Asgard from the body of Ymir the cosmic giant. Was this again part of the legend and not the actual happenings of Ragnarök? Is this and my first question actually the revelation of the very first Odin and the Asgardians before they were killed and the Kirby Thor ad Odin came to be?

3) In Thor Disassembled, Asgard has many places on what seems to be a world map. I thought Asgard was a big floating city rather than a big continent.

[Will.S]

Anyone, anyone?

Bueller?

[Thursaiz]

Good questions!

1) Probably one writer's view. In the old days, Odin and his brothers roamed around the continent of Asgard. If you refer to Thor #349, you will see Odin, Ve and Vili fighting the demon Surtur, and the two other brothers sacrificing their power to give Odin...well...with Odinforce.

2) What we see as traditional 'Asgard' is indeed the floating city. You can see here that there is a little more to it. Think of Asgard as the 'portal' to the rest of the continent. You have to cross Bifrost in order to get to it.

In traditional mythology, there was no first Ragnarok. There is only one, which comes at the end of all things. I think that is where they really separated the myth from the comic legend.

I couldn't find the scan of the Asgard continent, but there are several nations on it that appear in the various Thor stories over the comic-ages.

[DaeJi]

To answer the bulk of your questions about Odin's past: who knows. Really, I thought it was just a cool retelling of the actual Norse creation myth, nothing more; though it could have been a telling of how the first Odin created the land of Asgard, which was one of the nine lands in Norse mythology.

[Will.S]

Good questions!

Thanks!

1) Probably one writer's view. In the old days, Odin and his brothers roamed around the continent of Asgard. If you refer to Thor #349, you will see Odin, Ve and Vili fighting the demon Surtur, and the two other brothers sacrificing their power to give Odin...well...with Odinforce.

Hmm, so then does the Roy Thomas origin of Odin that came from Odin's discarded eye not count anymore? There seems to be some conflictions here since in the Roy Thomas one we have the two brothers of old Odin and the sons of old Thor as well as Balder and the rest who became the Odin we know today before Oeming's Ragnarok.

2) What we see as traditional 'Asgard' is indeed the floating city. You can see here that there is a little more to it. Think of Asgard as the 'portal' to the rest of the continent. You have to cross Bifrost in order to get to it.

Ah that clears things up. I must say, just.......WOW at that map.

Usually it looks like just some city but the interpretations seem inconsistent like Oeming's showing of Asgard looked way bigger and more epic LOTR style while in others it looked like some lone city with nothing else behind it and not even the tree of Yggdrasil. But with this everything makes sense although its odd how everything is so far apart but interesting that it's pretty well connected by the roots of Yggdrasil.

JMS's Thor should be interesting, it looks more grounded than this but he's still building the mythology.

In traditional mythology, there was no first Ragnarok. There is only one, which comes at the end of all things. I think that is where they really separated the myth from the comic legend.

Yeah I mean so far at this point there seems to have been 2 different Ragnaroks in the comics with a few false starts or delays thanks to Odin. There's the Ragnarok that happened to the Odin and the Aesir of old and was probably the myth version in comic form. Then that led to the Odin, Thor, and the Asgardians we know of before Mike Oeming's Ragnarok story came true where Thor (with the Odin Force and the Runes) stopped the cycle and we have the Thor we see now.

I couldn't find the scan of the Asgard continent, but there are several nations on it that appear in the various Thor stories over the comic-ages.

I'll see if I can scan the one from the Dissembled trade, that looked pretty impressive although it looked like a large landmass separated by rivers and borders.

[Magneto Rocks]

It's also worth noting that in "The Reigning" we find that when Thor moved the city of Asgard to Earth above New York, the continent of Asgard withered and effectively died, most of those races on it dying out without the Odinforce to sustain it.

Of course, that's not a worry now since that continent is long dead until Thor chooses to return there.

[Van Custo]

Read Walt Simonson's run. It's the best Thor.

*necessery plug*

[Trey]

Asgard is not a physical place, per say. You can't travel to it in space.

It's a dimension, which the only way to get there is with dimensional travel capabilities.

[Will.S]

Here's another thing I found odd.

While this isn't tied to Odin or Asagard neccessarily it has to do with Roy Thomas's origin of Fafnir. It seems as if most of Roy Thomas's big story by Odin's eye has either been ignored or retconned since the Fafnir that appears in Simonson's Thor has a different origin and looks different from the way Kevin Pollard drew him.

[StoneGold]

Asgard is not a physical place, per say. You can't travel to it in space.

It's a dimension, which the only way to get there is with dimensional travel capabilities.

It's a little of both, actually. Kind of like how New York is both a city and a state.