What does this mean? Well, like everything else in God of War, it shows that the folks behind the game know their stuff. We’ll adopt some of your practices.” Multiple scholars believe that the source of Athena’s strange birth straight from the cracked-open head of Zeus is derived from myths surrounding Inanna. Instead, they went, “Oh, I bet they’re the same god in a different aspect. In the ancient world, if the Greeks worshipped a warrior/creator goddess, say, Athena, and noticed that their neighbors worshipped war and creation goddesses like Ishtar or Inanna, they didn’t start yelling about how their goddess was better.
But with Mimir’s and Kratos’ wanderings, the game actually mimics the way real mythological concepts can spread. Still, God of War’s take on Norse mythology is somewhat loose - although not as loose as some others’. Norse sources can be surprisingly thin, especially if you’re used to the comparatively robust records we have of what and how the Greco-Roman peoples worshipped, for example. This also explains why Mimir has a Scottish accent: He’s from the British Isles. Kratos’ migration from the domain of the Greek pantheon to the Norse isn’t an outlier - deific migration is just part and parcel of the wider God of War world. And that means that, just like Kratos, he’s originally from another mythological pantheon, and another land. If you’re a Shakespeare buff, you’ll know him as a crafty servant of King Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a dead ringer for another mythical figure: Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, a mischievous but sometimes helpful sprite in English folklore. The vital bit here is what Mimir says he was called in his younger days. Then one day he was not amused, and I saw fit to move on.” We’d get up to all manner of mischief, making fools of the local mortals, but as long as our lord was kept amused, we were spared the consequences. Goodfellows, they called us - knavish sprites to the last. By night, my mates and I had the run of the forest. “A faerie king’s errand boy and unofficial jester. “I couldn’t have been much older than you when I started,” Mimir tells Atreus. If you live long enough to do this many times over, you might end up as far north as this place.”īut that’s just a tidbit compared to Mimir’s tale of the first lord he served, before Odin, from whom he says he learned “the enduring power of wit.” “Lad,” Mimir drawls, “there’s a time in every man’s life when he changes his name and heads north to make a new start. It’s an easy detail to miss, unless you’re me, a well-known completionist, and you play so much God of War that Mimir finally runs out of stories. You might not have heard this conversation where Atreus asks Mimir how he came to be in the Norselands. The way Kratos swings his ax.īut one detail in particular tickled me, for the insight it gives into how God of War thinks of its pantheons how they aren’t cemented deities, but evolutions of beliefs that existed long before them, but in a different corner of the world. There are a lot of good details in God of War : the sheer sense of scale to the World Serpent.