White horse (mythology) Poseidon was also the creator of horses, creating them out of the breaking waves when challenged to make a beautiful land animal. In Norse mythology, Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, "the best horse among gods and men", is described as grey. Sleipnir is also the ancestor of another grey horse, Grani, who is owned by the hero Sigurd. In Slavic mythology, the war and fertility deity Svantovit owned an oracular white horse; the historian Saxo Grammaticus, in descriptions similar to those of Tacitus centuries before, says the priests divined the future by leading the white stallion between a series of fences
Odin of the runic alphabets, and the gloss a continuation of the practice of equating Odin with Mercury found as early as Tacitus. The poem is additionally in the style of later Old Norse material featuring Odin, such as the Old Norse poem , featuring Odin and the engaging in a deadly game of wits. The 7th-century , and Paul the Deacon's 8th-century derived from it, recount a founding myth of the Langobards (Lombards), a Germanic people who ruled a region of the Italian Peninsula. According to this legend, a "small people" known as the were ruled by a woman named