Ran is a goddess of the sea in its most dangerous aspect, wife of the sea-giant Aegir, who draws drowning seafarers down with a great net and gathers them into her hall beneath the waves. To be lost at sea was to go to Ran, and the Eddas name her nine daughters, the waves. Norse poetic convention drew on her: gold was called the fire or light of Ran or of Aegir, from a story in which the sea-giant lit his hall with gold, and a drowned man was said to be feasting in Ran's hall. Her net even serves the gods, who borrow it to catch Loki when he hides in the form of a salmon. Between Ran the drowning deep and Aegir the ale-brewing host, the Norse imagined the sea as at once a devouring danger and a hall of dark hospitality.
Ran's name is generally derived from an Old Norse root meaning "robbery" or "theft," fitting a goddess whose defining act is seizing the drowned rather than receiving them as an offering, and some scholars connect her conceptually, though not by name, to a wider Germanic sense of the sea as a hoarding, jealous power. Beyond the net that catches Loki and the kennings for gold, Ran has left no trace of formal cult, temple or place-name, so that, like her husband Aegir, she belongs almost entirely to the imaginative and poetic register of Norse tradition rather than to any reconstructable religious practice.