The Physician Among the Goddesses

Eir is a Norse figure associated with healing and medicine, named among the goddesses in Snorri's list and called the best of physicians. Beyond that, the record is genuinely thin, and the sources pull in more than one direction: elsewhere Eir appears as one of the valkyries, and in the poem Fjolsvinnsmal an Eir is named among the maidens who attend the goddess Menglod on the healing hill Lyfjaberg, the mountain of medicine.

Scholars have debated whether these are one figure or several who share a name, and whether Eir is best understood as a goddess, a valkyrie, or a personification of the healing art itself. What can be said with confidence is that the Norse associated the name with the curing of wounds and sickness, in a culture where healing was closely bound up with women's knowledge. It is honest to add that we know little more: like several minor figures of the northern pantheon, Eir survives as a name and a domain rather than as a developed character with her own stories.