War gods compared across eight traditions

What this office actually is, tradition by tradition

The single most useful distinction in this list is between a god who fights and a god who governs war, and the Greeks drew it explicitly. Ares is battle as it is actually experienced — noise, panic, blood, a god the Iliad is openly contemptuous of. Athena is war as strategy and as the defence of a city, and the poem gives her every victory in their direct encounters. A tradition can have one of those and not the other, and reading a pantheon that only has the second kind as if it had the first produces nonsense.

Then there is a third office that is not fighting at all: choosing the slain. Odin's interest in battle is not victory, it is recruitment — he needs the einherjar for a fight at the end of the world, and he is therefore quite willing to lose a battle to get the right dead men. The Morrígan does something related and distinct, appearing over a battlefield as a crow to signal an outcome rather than to cause one. Neither is a war god in the sense Ares is, and the Roman weekday equation of Týr with Mars is about an entirely different thing again: Týr's real domain is the oath, and the wolf bites his hand off because he gives a pledge in bad faith.

Rome is where the flattening is easiest to see. Mars is not a relabelled Ares — he is one of the three most important gods of the Roman state, with agricultural functions the Greek god never had, a month named for him, and a priesthood; Ares had almost no cult worth the name. When a source calls Mars the Roman Ares it is describing an equation two millennia of scholarship has repeated, and the equation loses the thing that made Mars matter to Romans.

How the grid above was built

Nobody decided by hand who belongs on this page. Each figure’s entry carries a list of what the ancient sources named on that page record them as governing, and a figure appears here when one of those phrases falls inside this office. Their own wording is printed beside the name, so you can check the filing rather than trust it. Tapping any two names computes what the two figures actually share — and whether any ancient writer ever equated them, which is a different question and usually has a different answer.

Where a tradition is absent from the grid, no figure in this encyclopedia holds this office in it. That is a statement about eight bodies of surviving material rather than a gap in the research: several traditions genuinely have no god of a given thing, and saying so is more useful than promoting the nearest approximation into a column so the table looks complete.

The other eleven offices with a page of their own: Sea gods, Gods of wisdom and writing, Smith gods, Love and desire gods, Harvest and fertility gods, Healing gods, Moon gods, Messenger gods, Gods of justice and the oath, Gods of magic and prophecy, Fire gods. The full tool, with all 29 offices, is at the cross-pantheon comparison, and the pairings argued out at length in prose are in the written comparisons.