Editing Irminsul (section)

===Widukind of Corvey===
Clive Tolley has argued that [[Widukind of Corvey]] in a passage of his ''[[Deeds of the Saxons]]'' (c. 970) is in fact describing an ''ad hoc'' Irminsul erected to celebrate the Saxon leader [[Hadugato]]'s victory over the [[Thuringians]] in 531. Widukind says the Saxons set up an altar to their god of victory, whose body they depicted as a wooden column:
<blockquote>
When morning was come they set up an eagle at the eastern gate, and erecting an altar of victory they celebrated appropriate rites with all due solemnity, according to their ancestral superstition: to the one whom they venerate as their god of Victory they give the name of Mars, and the bodily characteristics of Hercules, imitating his physical proportion by means of wooden columns, and in the hierarchy of their gods he is the Sun, or as the Greeks call him, Apollo. From this fact the opinion of those men appears somewhat probable who hold that the Saxons were descended from the Greeks, because the Greeks call Mars Hirmin or Hermes, a word which we use even to this day, either for blame or praise, without knowing its meaning.<ref>Raymund F. Wood, ed. and trans., ''The Three Books of the Deeds of the Saxons, by Widukind of Corvey: Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography'', PhD diss. (University of California, Los Angeles, 1949), pp. 178–79.</ref>
</blockquote>

Widukind is confused, however, about the name of the god, since the Roman Mars and the Greek Hermes do not correspond. Tolley supposes that the name Hirmin, of which Widukind does not know the meaning, is not to be related to Hermes, but to Irmin, the dedicatee of the Irminsul.<ref>Clive Tolley, "Oswald's Tree", in Tette Hofstra, L. A. J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds., ''Pagans and Christians: The Interplay Between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe'' (Groningen: 1995), pp. 151–52.</ref><ref>[[Carole M. Cusack]], ''The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations'' (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 137–38.</ref>