The Death of Baldr, and a Name in the Calendar

Frigg's most moving myth is her attempt to save her son Baldr. Warned by dreams of his death, she extracts an oath from every thing in the world not to harm him, but overlooks the mistletoe as too young to swear, and it is a dart of mistletoe, guided by Loki into the hand of the blind god Hod, that kills Baldr, setting in motion the events that lead toward Ragnarok. Her grief and her failed effort to have Baldr released from the underworld are among the most poignant passages of Norse myth. Frigg's name survives in the English weekday Friday (Old English Frigedaeg), by which the Germanic peoples rendered the Roman dies Veneris, the day of Venus, a small linguistic trace of how her cult was matched to Rome's goddess of love and marriage.

Unlike Thor with his hammer or Odin with his ravens, Frigg has left no clearly identified image in surviving Norse art; no rune-stone or amulet is confidently read as depicting her alone, and what is known of her comes almost entirely from the poetic and prose texts written down in Christian Iceland generations after the conversion. Comparative mythologists have long placed her alongside other Indo-European sky-father consorts, such as the Greek Hera and the Vedic Prithvi, as a queenly goddess whose main narrative role is grief and foreknowledge rather than independent adventure, a pattern some scholars read as evidence that Frigg and Freyja preserve two faces, wife and lover, of one older Germanic goddess later split between the Aesir and Vanir families of gods.