Freya

Freyja (anglicised Freya) belongs not to the Aesir, the family of Odin and Thor, but to the Vanir, a second group of gods associated with fertility, wealth and the sea. Norse myth remembers an early war between the two families, ended by a truce and an exchange of hostages; Freyja, her twin brother Freyr and their father Njord came to live among the Aesir as part of that settlement. She is therefore a goddess of the older fertility powers, brought into the martial world of Asgard rather than born to it.

Her attributes are rich and specific. She owns the necklace Brisingamen, wept tears of red gold, drives a chariot drawn by cats, and possesses a cloak of falcon feathers that lets its wearer fly. She is the goddess most associated with love, desire and fertility, but also, strikingly, with death and battle: half of those who fall in war go not to Odin's Valhalla but to Freyja's hall Sessrumnir in the field Folkvangr. She takes first choice of the slain.

She is also the great practitioner of seidr, the Norse sorcery of prophecy and influence, and the myths say it was Freyja who first taught this magic to the Aesir, including, in some accounts, to Odin himself.

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.