A persistent difficulty, both for medieval audiences and modern readers, is the overlap between Freyja and Frigg, Odin's wife. Both are great goddesses; both are linked to love, marriage and foreknowledge; the giant in Thrymskvida demands Freyja as a bride, while Frigg is the queen of the Aesir. Scholars have long debated whether the two were once a single goddess who split into two figures, or two figures who drew together. The sources themselves are not perfectly consistent, and this atlas keeps them as distinct entries while noting that the ancient tradition did not always draw the line cleanly.
Part of the tangle is linguistic. Frigg and Freyja come from different roots, Freyja means simply the Lady, a title as much as a name, the feminine of Freyr, the Lord, which is one reason a goddess so central can seem to shade into others.
Freyja's worship, unlike Loki's, has real traces: place-names across Scandinavia carry her name, marking sites once dedicated to her, and the Vanir fertility cult she belongs to appears to have been widespread and old. As with all the Norse gods, though, the fullest stories reach us through thirteenth-century Icelandic Christians, and are read with that distance in mind.