This is a great post and wonderful work. I wish I had found it earlier to Co tribute my little up vote.
I love your discussion on representation. I was doing a spot of reading on Odin and his ravens yesterday. One discussion I came across talked about early depictions of Jesus being portrayed with a dove on his shoulder. Believed to have been created to replace image of Odin, whose ravens would return to him each evening and report the day's events.
Thanks, a comment is as good as an upvote :)
The road to Christianity in Scandinavia was very much a political game, as opposed to the forceful religious battles that had shaped the religion almost 1000 years earlier. So the strictest dogma of the Abrahamic religions, that you can only have one God, was pretty much a victim of the old Scandinavian tradition of compromise.