Bragi was the god of poetry, husband of Idunn, the eloquent and bearded one whom the Eddas describe as the wisest in language and the surest in knowing the right word. He had little extended mythology of his own — he is principally a figure of office rather than of narrative, the divine personification of poetry itself — and modern scholars have variously suspected that he was originally an actual 9th-century Norwegian skald (Bragi Boddason, the earliest skald whose work survives in fragments) who was mythologically promoted after his death. The two figures — the human poet and the divine Bragi — are difficult to disentangle, and may from the start have been the same.
Before thisIdunn
Next on the wallVidar
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Snorri's Gylfaginning 25, Skáldskaparmál 1; the historical skald Bragi Boddason's surviving work is in the Skáldskaparmál's quotations and in scattered manuscript-fragments. The question of priority — divine Bragi first euhemerized into a historical poet, or historical poet first deified — has been variously argued; the philological evidence permits both readings.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
- Consort ofIdunn
Bragi was the god of poetry, husband of Idunn, the eloquent and bearded one
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Norse and Germanic Gods. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- 2nd–1st millennia BCE
- Indo-European language dispersals and regional Bronze Age cultures provide a remote comparative background, not a recoverable common canon.
- c. 500 BCE–1 CE
- Iron Age material culture, names, sanctuaries, and classical ethnography offer early but external evidence for Celtic and Germanic religions.
- 1st–4th centuries CE
- Roman inscriptions and provincial cults preserve many Celtic, Germanic, and local divine names.
- 4th–8th centuries CE
- Migration-period and early medieval conversion transform ritual institutions while heroic traditions continue.
- 8th–11th centuries CE
- Viking Age poetry, runic evidence, archaeology, and Scandinavian conversion form the core context of Norse myth.
- 9th–12th centuries CE
- Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic traditions enter chronicles and missionary accounts, often through hostile observers.
- 11th–14th centuries CE
- Irish, Welsh, and Icelandic manuscripts preserve major narrative corpora in Christian literary environments.
- 12th–16th centuries CE
- Saxo, saga compilers, Baltic chroniclers, and later antiquarians systematize or reinterpret older material.