Freyja's Field, and the Half of the Slain

Folkvangr, Old Norse for the "Field of the People" or "Field of the Host", is the afterlife meadow of the goddess Freyja in Norse mythology, and it complicates the popular assumption that all the battle-slain go to Odin. The Poetic Edda (in the poem Grimnismal) and Snorri's Prose Edda both state plainly that Freyja rides to every battle and claims half of the slain, the other half going to Odin in Valhalla; within Folkvangr stands her own hall, Sessrumnir. This division is one of the intriguing puzzles of Norse religion, because the sources say almost nothing about what her half of the dead do there or why the fallen are split between two deities, an obscurity that has generated much scholarly speculation about Freyja's archaic role as a goddess of death as well as of love, fertility, and the seer's magic (seidr). Folkvangr is a reminder that the Norse afterlife was more various than the Valhalla-centred picture suggests: a warrior might as readily be gathered to the goddess's field as to the god's feasting-hall, and the great female deity of the Vanir held a claim on the dead equal to Odin's own.