Frigg is the wife of Odin and the foremost of the goddesses (Asynjur), queen of the Aesir and patroness of marriage, motherhood and the household. Snorri says she knows the fates of all though she herself declares them to no one, a quiet, formidable attribute that makes her a counterpart to her all-seeing husband, with whom she shares the high seat Hlidskjalf from which the whole of the worlds can be surveyed. She has been the subject of long scholarly discussion for her resemblance to Freyja: the two goddesses share so many traits that many argue they descend from a single earlier goddess who split in two, a question the surviving sources cannot settle.
Frigg's name descends from a Proto-Germanic root meaning beloved, cognate with the Sanskrit priya, and one of the earliest datable references to a goddess plausibly linked to her lies outside the Norse sources altogether: the Lombard origin legend recorded by Paul the Deacon in the eighth century tells how Frea, wife of Godan (Odin), tricks her husband into granting victory and even a new name, the Langobards, to her favoured tribe, a story that shows a cunning, influential wife-goddess attached to the chief god already current among continental Germanic peoples centuries before the Icelandic Eddas were written down. In Snorri's later account she keeps a retinue of attendant goddesses, among them Fulla, who carries her chest and shoes, and Gna, who rides her errands across the worlds.