Rages versus Tantrums

When I was researching ancient mythology in order to construct a believable pantheon for the world of the Stone Island (The Wanderer series), I was struck by how Odin is always described by writers as having “rages,” whereas Freya is always described as having “tantrums.”

Interpreting Mythology

It’s easy to take these judgments at face value and to respect the authority, so to speak, of Odin’s rages, and to presume that Freya’s tantrums are naturally childish and hardly worthy of notice.

Rage versus tantrum. One is an adult experience, the other toddler behavior.

But when you dig deeper into the myths, you can see that Odin’s rages and Freya’s tantrums are very similar in what they look like and how they’re motivated. The consequences of either can be serious, unjust, and dangerous. Yet we give far more weight to Odin’s rages than to Freya’s tantrums merely because of the way the emotion has been described.

The sexist nature of ancient history and mythology isn’t always in the history or the myth itself but is often located in the person describing it.

What if Odin had tantrums and Freya had rages?

Well, we still probably discount Freya’s emotion—women’s anger is still seen as problematic all these hundreds of years later. But at least we wouldn’t be equating her actions with those of a toddler.

Creating My Own Mythology

One of the joys of writing The Wanderer series was in being able to decide how I wanted to present the gods, whatever their gender. If I wanted characters to be terrified by a god, I wrote the god that way. If I wanted characters to be dismissive towards a god, I wrote a god that could be dismissed (I deliberately chose to call them all “gods” instead of “gods and goddesses.”). But I tried very hard to avoid gendering these decisions and I’m pretty happy with how the pantheon turned out.