Idun

Idun is keeper of the apples that keep the gods eternally young. The Prose Edda tells the one story in which that arrangement nearly ends. Loki, forced by the giant Thjazi to lure Idun outside Asgard's walls, tricks her into stepping beyond its protection with her apples by claiming to have found finer fruit in a nearby wood worth comparing to her own. Thjazi, transformed into a giant eagle, swoops down, seizes her, and carries her back to his home in Jotunheim, apples and all. Deprived of Idun's fruit, the gods begin to age immediately and visibly, growing grey and stooped within what the text treats as a short span, a crisis severe enough that the assembled gods threaten Loki with death unless he undoes what his trick caused. Loki borrows Freyja's falcon shape, flies to Jotunheim, turns Idun into a nut to carry her more easily, and races Thjazi, now in eagle form again, back to Asgard, where the gods kill the pursuing giant at the wall the instant he crosses it. The episode is the clearest statement anywhere in the corpus of exactly how dependent the gods are on Idun specifically, rather than on youth as an abstract quality they simply possess.

The atlas records Idun's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and in her case the honest concrete finding is an absence rather than a site or a rite. Unlike Thor, whose idol Adam of Bremen describes standing at the center of the temple at Uppsala, or Freyr and Frigg, whose worship left place names and archaeological traces across Scandinavia, no temple, votive object, place name or personal name compound tied to Idun survives anywhere in the corpus. Rudolf Simek's standard reference dictionary of Northern mythology, surveying the evidence directly, records no cult of Idun attested in any source, textual or material. That silence is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over, because it sits inside a mythology whose central story about her makes the gods themselves dependent on her for their continued youth, a dependency the myth states in the strongest possible terms without any corresponding evidence that anyone outside the myth ever worshipped her for it. Scholars have offered no settled account of why a figure so structurally essential to the gods' survival left no trace of her own devotion, and the gap is recorded here as a genuine unresolved absence rather than as a claim that no cult ever existed.