Freyja

• 1. The Lady Of The Slain

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  Freyja weeps tears of red gold. Her husband, the god Óðr, travels for long stretches, and in his absence she searches for him under assumed names, crying over his absence. In Norse mythology she is a goddess bound up with love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr, the magic for seeing and influencing the future. Her name, in Old Norse, simply means lady or mistress.

  She owns a necklace called Brísingamen. She rides a chariot pulled by two cats, travels beside the boar Hildisvíni, and keeps a cloak of falcon feathers that lets her shift into the shape of a falcon. Half of those who die in battle come to her. The other half go to Odin. How a single goddess came to hold all of this, and why rural Scandinavians still spoke her name centuries after their conversion to Christianity, is a question the old texts answer in fragments. Her father is Njörðr, her twin brother is Freyr, and she belongs to a group of gods called the Vanir.

• 2. A Name That Means Lady

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  Freyja transparently means lady or mistress in Old Norse. The name descends from the Proto-Germanic feminine noun frawjōn, and it is cognate with Old Saxon frūa and Old High German frouwa, the latter surviving in the modern German Frau. It sits close to the name of the god Freyr, which means lord. Scholars treat the theonym as an epithet in origin, a title that replaced a personal name now lost.

  Gef, meaning the giver, is one of many alternative names the goddess carries, generally linked to the goddess name Gefjon. Richard North theorizes that Old English geofon, Old Norse Gefjun, and Freyja's name Gefn may all descend from a Germanic goddess connected with the sea whose name means giving. The name Hörn appears in the Swedish place names Härnösand, Härnevi, and Järnevi, traced back to a reconstructed place name meaning Hörn's vé. Sýr means sow, fitting because the pig was an important symbol of the Vanir and the sacrificial practices called blót associated with the group.

  Vanadís, meaning the dís of the Vanir, gave its name to a chemical element. Vanadium was named after this name of Freyja because of its many beautiful colored compounds. The honorific title for noble ladies, fruvor, is said to derive from her name, and a woman who is mistress of her property could be called freyja.

• 3. Fólkvangr And The Fallen

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  In the poem Grímnismál, Odin, disguised as Grímnir, tells the young Agnar that every day Freyja allots seats to half of those slain in her hall Fólkvangr, while Odin owns the other half. Within Fólkvangr lies her hall, Sessrúmnir. The same arrangement is repeated in chapter 24 of Gylfaginning, where the figure of High says that whenever Freyja rides into battle she gets half the slain.

  Britt-Mari Näsström interprets Fólkvangr as the field of the Warriors, and translates Sessrúmnir as filled with many seats. She notes that, just like Odin, Freyja receives slain heroes who have died on the battlefield, and posits that her dwelling likely fills the same function as Valhalla. Näsström asks why there are two heroic paradises in the Old Norse view of the afterlife, suggesting it might reflect different forms of warrior initiation, one part belonging to Óðinn and the other to Freyja. She concludes that Freyja was a war-goddess who even appears as a valkyrie, literally the one who chooses the slain.

  Siegfried Andres Dobat comments that in her role as the chooser of half the fallen warriors for her death realm Fólkvangr, Freyja emerges as the mythological role model for the valkyrjar and the dísir.

• 4. The Stolen Necklace

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  In Sörla þáttr, a late 14th century narrative from an extended version of the Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar found in the Flateyjarbók manuscript, Freyja passes by an open stone where dwarfs lived. Four dwarfs were smithying a golden necklace, nearly done. They thought Freyja most fair, and she thought the same of the necklace. She offered silver and gold and other valuables, but the dwarfs said the only price was a night with each of them. Whether she liked it better or worse, she agreed, spent a night with each of the four, and took the necklace home as if nothing had happened.

  Loki, in the service of Odin, found out and told him. Odin ordered Loki to steal the necklace, and would not let him return until he had. Unable to enter Freyja's bower against her will, Loki turned into a fly, squeezed through a tiny hole at the gable-top, then turned into a flea and bit Freyja on the cheek so she would stir and expose the clasp. He undid the collar and brought it to Odin.

  When Freyja woke and found her necklace gone, she confronted Odin over the theft. He said she would only get it back on a terrible condition. She had to make two kings, each ruling twenty kings, battle one another, and cast a spell so the fallen would spring up and fight again eternally, until a Christian man of particular stature ended it. Freyja agreed. The god Heimdallr is elsewhere called Loki's enemy, recoverer of Freyja's necklace, hinting at another lost myth of the same Brísingamen.

• 5. Borrowed Feathers

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  In Þrymskviða, Thor wakes to find his hammer Mjöllnir missing, and goes with Loki to the court of Freyja. Thor asks to borrow her cloak of feathers so he may search for the hammer, and Freyja agrees freely, saying she would give it though it were of gold. Loki flies away in the whirring cloak to Jötunheimr, where he finds Þrymr on a mound. Þrymr has buried the hammer deep and will return it only if Freyja is brought to him as his wife.

  When Thor tells Freyja to put on a bride's head-dress and drive to Jötunheimr, she is furious. The halls of the gods shake, she snorts in anger, and the necklace Brísingamen falls from her. She refuses, saying she would be known as the lewdest of women if she went. Heimdallr then proposes dressing Thor himself as the bride, complete with bridal dress, jingling keys, jewelry, and Brísingamen. The disguise works. The jötnar are fooled, and Thor seizes his hammer by force.

  In Skáldskaparmál, Freyja's falcon shape serves another rescue. After the jötunn Þjazi abducts the goddess Iðunn in the form of an eagle, Loki asks to use Freyja's falcon shape to fly north and retrieve her. Freyja allows it, and through a furious chase by eagle-Þjazi, Loki brings Iðunn home. The poem Hyndluljóð shows Freyja in a different mood, turning her servant Óttar into the boar Hildisvíni and using flattery and threats of death by fire to pry ancestral knowledge from the jötunn Hyndla.

• 6. Daughters And Tears Of Gold

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  By her husband Óðr, Freyja is the mother of two daughters, Hnoss and Gersemi. In the Ynglinga saga of Heimskringla, a euhemerized account says that these two daughters were immensely beautiful and gave their names to our most precious possessions. The same saga tells that Freyja introduced the practice of seiðr to the Æsir, which had previously been practiced only by the Vanir, after Odin appointed Freyr and Njörðr as priests over sacrifices.

  Freyja's weeping became a standard way for skalds to refer to gold. Because she sheds tears of red gold for the absent Óðr, kennings such as Freyja's tears and Freyja's weepings stand in for gold, attested in works by skalds including Skúli Þórsteinsson and Einarr Skúlason. Einarr Skúlason also uses the kenning Óðr's bedfellow's eye-rain to mean gold. Poetic phrases for the goddess herself include daughter of Njörðr, sister of Freyr, wife of Óðr, mother of Hnoss, and possessor of the fallen slain.

  In the Ynglinga saga Freyja outlives her brother Freyr and the rest of the Æsir and Vanir, keeping up the sacrifices and becoming famous. Because of her fame, all women of rank came to be known by her name, frúvor, and a woman who owns an estate could be called húsfreyja, lady of the house.

• 7. The Goddess The Church Could Not Erase

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  Christianization sought to demonize the native gods, and Freyja's erotic qualities became an easy target. In the new religion, where an asexual virgin was held up as the ideal woman, holy men and missionaries called Freyja a whore and a harlot. Many of her everyday functions, such as protecting the vegetation and supplying assistance in childbirth, were transferred to the Virgin Mary. Plants once named for her, such as Freyja's tears and Freyja's hair, the species Polygala vulgaris, were renamed in Mary's honor.

  Freyja did not disappear. In Iceland she was called upon for assistance through Icelandic magical staves as late as the 18th century. As late as the 19th century she was recorded as keeping elements of her role as a fertility goddess among rural Swedes. The poem Þrymskviða lived on in folk song, becoming Þrylur in Iceland, Thor af Havsgaard in Denmark, and Torvisan or Hammarhämtningen in Sweden, where Freyja became the fair Frojenborg whose blood burst from each of her fingers.

  Johan Alfred Göth recalled a Sunday in 1880 when a man named Måns in Karryd said, Now Freyja is out watching if the rye is ripe. Göth also remembered old Proud-Katrina telling him that sheet lightning was only Freyja making fire with steel and flintstone to see if the rye was ripe. In Värend, Sweden, Freyja was said to arrive at Christmas night and shake the apple trees for a good harvest, so people left some apples for her, but it was dangerous to leave a plough outdoors in case she sat on it and ruined it.

• 8. Buried Wands And Painted Walls

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  A priestess was buried around the year 1000 with considerable splendour at Hagebyhöga in Östergötland. She was buried with her wand and with great riches, including horses, a wagon, and an Arabian bronze pitcher. A silver pendant showed a woman with a broad necklace, the kind worn only by the most prominent women during the Iron Age, which some have interpreted as Brísingamen and the figure as Freyja herself.

  A 7th-century phalara from a warrior grave in what is now Eschwege in northwestern Germany shows a female figure with two large braids, flanked by two cat-like beings and holding a staff-like object, interpreted as Freyja. The 10th century Oseberg ship burial held a ceremonial wagon, one side of which depicts nine cats, linked by scholars to Freyja's cat-led chariot. A 12th century wall in the Schleswig Cathedral in Schleswig-Holstein shows a cloaked but otherwise nude woman riding a large cat, theorized as Freyja, beside a similar woman riding a distaff theorized as Frigg.

  Those two goddesses sit at the center of a long debate. Scholars have asked whether Freyja and Frigg stem from a single goddess common among the Germanic peoples, a hypothesis Stephan Grundy calls a difficult problem made worse by the scantiness of pre-Viking Age references. The name Freyja is not attested outside Scandinavia, while Frigg is attested across the Germanic peoples and reconstructed as Proto-Germanic Frijjō. In 2026, Ukraine named one of its air and missile defense projects Freya, the goddess's name traveling far from the rye fields where farmers once watched her watch for the harvest.