Both sit atop their pantheons, yet they could not differ more: Zeus rules a sunlit Olympus by thunderbolt; Odin trades an eye for wisdom and hangs nine nights on the World Tree for the runes. One is a god of power, the other a god of price — set side by side, they show what Greeks and Norsemen each believed the world to be.
He overthrew his child-devouring father Cronus, then drew lots with his brothers for the world and won the sky — kingship by coup and by chance.
With his brothers he slew the primordial giant Ymir and built earth, sea and sky from the corpse — kingship by creation itself: this world is one he assembled with his own hands.
Power was his birthright: thunderbolt in hand, he never had to pay to grow stronger. Zeus’s troubles were never a lack of strength — only an excess of appetite.
His wisdom was all purchased: an eye pledged to Mimir’s well; nine nights hanged, "myself sacrificed to myself," for the runes. The Norse high god pays more than anyone else in his own mythology.
There is none. Zeus is deathless; Olympus has no expiry date — the Greek cosmos leaves its ending open.
His ending is already written: at Ragnarök the wolf Fenrir will devour him — all his hunting of wisdom is preparation for a war he knows he will lose.
In Zeus’s story the question is how power gets used; in Odin’s, whether you still act knowing you are doomed. One mythology writes its gods as magnified humans, the other as beings marching toward a foretold death — the base colors of two civilizations.