In Search of the Gods.(Russian roots of Norse religion)(Brief Article)

Azov is hardly the kind of place where most people would look for adventure. Life is slow in this postcard-pretty Russian town on the delta of the muddy river Don. No one has bothered to tear down the statue of Lenin in the main square. Azov used to be a busy port. But that was before the river's channel shifted, leaving the town in sleepy solitude.

Until Thor Heyerdahl showed up. Half a world and more than half a century away from the route of his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, the Norwegian explorer is pursuing the most wildly ambitious quest of his life. Conquering the Pacific on a balsa raft was kid stuff. This time his goal is nothing less than to find Asgard, the fabled home of the Vikings' gods. Its remains, he believes, are here in Azov, buried eight meters or more underground. Most experts on Norse history stop just short of calling the whole idea insane. But Heyerdahl, 86, is so confident, he has put up $100,000 of his own money in search of Asgard.

His dream began when he was a schoolboy. Like all Norwegian youngsters, Heyerdahl had to read "Heimskringla" ("The Orb of the World"), an epic history of Norway by Snorri Sturluson, a 13th-century Icelandic poet and chieftain. The chronicle opens with a careful description of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Russia, a land of giants, dwarfs, "blue men" and "many kinds of stranger creatures." East of the Tanais (an ancient name for the Don), in the lost city of Asgard, lived a great conqueror named Odin. When the Romans invaded his land, he led a band of followers across Russia and Germany to the Baltic Sea, where he finally died, promising his warriors they would someday rejoin him in Asgard. "Then began [or rose anew] the belief in Odin, and the calling upon him," said Sturluson, who traced the lineage of Norway's kings directly from him.

Heyerdahl's critics say the 13th-century text proves nothing. "It's mythology, not confirmed by archeology," scoffs Even Hovdhaugen, a professor at the University of Oslo. His colleague Prof. Gro Steinsland, an expert on early Norse religions, agrees: "[It's] like digging for the Garden of Eden." But Heyerdahl insists the evidence all fits together. The saga's geography is basically solid, he reasoned; why not its genealogy? He made a few calculations. Sturluson is widely accepted as accurate after the year 800 or so, in the days of Hovdaun the Black. From there Heyerdahl counted 33 generations backward to Odin. He did some quick math and found himself in the first century B.C. That's exactly when the Roman generals Lucullus and Pompey conquered the Black Sea region.

Heyerdahl had to check it out. "This is not my theory," he says. "It's Snorri's. I'm just putting it to the test." Early this year he began digging for traces of Odin and his followers in Azov, on the east bank of the Don. Heyerdahl thinks Azov's name might hold an echo of the Norse word for deity: ass, as in Asgard, the garden of the gods. And the deep silt here is loaded with ancient artifacts. This is where Greek colonists built the region's ...