Frigg

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.

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.