Honestly, a lot of people throw around “Odin” and “Yggdrasil” connections without actually looking into the history of Tarot, playing cards in Europe, or much else.
Playing cards came into Europe through trade with the Islamic world around the 1200s. Back then the decks were basically what we’d now call the Minor Arcana or the pips. By the 1500s you start seeing trump games like the Minchiate and Tarot, mostly made in Italy and France for a wider European audience. Sure, Vikings existed centuries earlier, but by then most were Christian and Norse myth wasn’t mainstream enough to shape card design. If we ever found a hand-painted Nordic aristocracy deck maybe then we could talk about runes, but we haven’t.
About the Hanged Man being upside down: look at older decks. Card 12 is often shown holding two bags. The inverted hang was actually a torture or execution method for thieves in the late Middle Ages, and was reportedly used on traitors earlier on. Some executions were staged to be extra dramatic, sometimes involving dogs and all that.
The trumps were basically allegories or scenes from everyday life, the kind of stuff you’d see in carnival parades. Remember, executions were public events and served as a kind of grim entertainment for towns for a long time.
So yeah, Odin isn’t the only one who’s been hanged from a gallows.
