The Sea-God of Wealth, and the Marriage That Failed

Njord is a Vanir god of the sea, seafaring, fishing, wind and the wealth that comes from them, who, like his children Freyr and Freyja, came to the Aesir as a hostage sealing the peace after the war of the two divine families. Sailors and fishers invoked him for fair winds and calm water, and a Norse phrase for a rich man was that he was as wealthy as Njord. His best-known story is the failure of his marriage to the giantess Skadi, a goddess of mountains and skiing: the two cannot agree where to live, she unable to sleep for the crying of gulls at his shore-home Noatun, he unable to bear the howling of wolves in her mountains, and they part. Scholars have connected Njord's name with that of the goddess Nerthus, an earth-goddess described by the Roman historian Tacitus nine centuries earlier, raising the possibility of a change of sex or a splitting of an ancient Germanic deity over time.