Hey Sexy

Question: In the Eddas, Uller was said to be handsome and beautiful by warrior standards. Would this not qualify him for Epic Appearance since there is equally little to go on for his other associations?

No. Not unless you want pretty much every single member of every single goddamned pantheon to have Epic Appearance. If a single line saying someone was beautiful was enough to get a god Ultimate Appearance, everyone in the Dodekatheon (except Hephaestus), Yazata, Tuatha and Anunna would have it, with generous helpings of extra gods in most other pantheons, too. Some cultures - many cultures, in fact - describe their gods as beautiful as a matter of course. It's not because they're trying to say that these are all universally irresistible beacons of insane sexiness, but rather because they're saying that they're gods, and their innate divinity puts them a cut above humanity in the looks department no matter what else they might be about. It's the same theory behind some hymns describing Thor as "wise" or some prayers praising Eshu as "merciful"; sometimes ancient cultures say nice stuff about gods without intending it to be one of their defining attributes, because it's appropriate to praise beings so much more powerful than yourself and it makes sense that they'd be better than humans even at the things they aren't the best at.

While it's true that we have to fudge a bit more for the Aesir sometimes thanks to the scarcity of their sources, even for them a single line usually doesn't do it for us, especially if it's for something as generally subjective as Appearance. The line from Gylfaginnig in question, usually translated as some variation on "He is beautiful to look at and he has all the characteristics of a warrior", is nowhere near the kind of clout we'd want for a full Ultimate Attribute, especially since it's never repeated or suggested in either other attestations of the god or the scraps of cult worship we've still got for him. Certainly, if Uller were so mind-numbingly beautiful, you'd think Saxo Grammaticus would have mentioned something about it in his description of the god, but in his account we get not even the tiniest whisper of what Uller looks like, which isn't doing much to suggest to us that he's all that.

We feel you on the lack of sources to go on for the Norse gods, we really do. It sucks. There are times when we despair over them, who have romping adventure stories but terrible character description even at the best of times, and we definitely sometimes have to take an association with meager attestations and run with it, for Uller as much as anybody. But while we've definitely held onto some of them by our fingernails before, in this case we just can't roll with it. We're comfortable with his Frost because not only does he have a story involving skiing across the ocean, he's also managed to survive as the patron god of skiing and winter sports in the modern day, and we're similarly okay with Psychopomp thanks to his stories always involving him traveling from or to faraway places. In the same passage in Gylfaginnig, we're okay with extrapolating his badassness at archery because it specifically says that he is unrivaled among the gods, whereas the attractiveness is pretty standard, generalized god description, and further he is associated with archers and archery in various other fragmentary mentions throughout Norse literature.

Uller's likely to have a few dots of Epic Appearance, but he ain't no Freya. To be honest, he's thin enough that if we didn't make exceptions for these darned Norse gods and their lack of sourcing, he probably wouldn't have remained on the roster (although he was probably pretty important in his day, and since everyone's on a pretty equal level of who knows here, we decided to keep him). If we were going to add anything, we'd consider Justice first, thanks to the anecdotal mentions in Norse sources of oaths being sworn on his name or ring, and his stint as king of the Aesir (and of the Vanir, too, if you believe that crazy Swede Rydberg!).