The Modern Pantheon: Odin

As I mentioned in my last post, I will confine my comments to the movies with which I am familiar since it would take, oh, maybe a lifetime to get caught up on the original comics.

Image credit: Disney Marvel
Image credit: Disney Marvel

The character of Odin (as played by Anthony Hopkins) was the first to impress me when I watched Thor at the urging of a niece who was visiting us one Easter weekend. Understand that I originally thought I would not care for this movie, but was won over by the quality of the screenplay (Ashley Miller, Jack Stentz, and Don Payne), the story (J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich), the directing  (Kenneth Branagh), and the acting by a superb cast.

The scene which intially grabbed my was the one near the beginning where Odin, after rescuing the baby Loki, holds and transforms the foundling from a frost giant into his own son.

Baby_Loki_Frostgiant

Images from Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh
Images from Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh

Though the characters Odin and Loki are borrowed from Norse mythology, I was impressed by the parallels of this scene with a basic theme in Christianity: that of renewal and transformation by the hand of God. Please note that I am not claiming that there was any deliberate effort by anyone involved in the making of this movie to promote Christianity, but it would not surprise me if they were deliberately borrowing from Christian as well as Norse mythology. Lest I offend any of my fellow Christians, I must also add that in one of my earliest posts, I stated that calling something a myth is not necessarily the same as pronouncing it to be untrue.

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