Freyja: The Norse Goddess of Love, War, and Magic Who Wept Tears of Gold

Freyja. The Norse Goddess of Love, War, and Magic Who Wept Tears of Gold

Long before the Greek gods took their seats on Olympus and long before the Romans gave love a golden arrow and a mischievous smile, the people of the frozen north were worshipping a goddess so complex, so contradictory, and so strikingly human in her passions that scholars have spent centuries trying to understand her fully. Her name was Freyja, and she was nothing like what you might expect from a goddess of love.

She was beautiful, yes. She owned the Brisingamen, a necklace of such extraordinary craftsmanship that she paid four nights with the dwarves who made it to own it, and she wore it without apology. But she also presided over Fólkvangr, her field of the battle-slain, where she took half of all warriors who died in combat, more even than Odin claimed for Valhalla. She practiced Seidr, the most powerful and most socially dangerous form of Norse magic, and she was the one who taught it to Odin himself. She flew on a falcon-feather cloak between the worlds. She rode a chariot pulled by cats. She searched the world for her vanished husband, weeping tears of gold that became amber where they touched the sea.

This book follows Freyja from her origins as a Vanir goddess, member of the older divine family that warred with and was eventually reconciled to the Aesir, through her emergence as the most celebrated feminine divine figure in the Norse world. It examines the major myths in which she appears: the acquisition of the Brisingamen, the Aesir-Vanir war and the divine hostage exchange, the Thrymskvidha in which the giant Thrym demands her as payment for the stolen hammer Mjolnir and she refuses with a fury that shakes the divine halls, the Hyndluljod in which she rides her battle boar to champion a human devotee.

It explores the divine attributes that make her one of the most complex figures in world mythology: her dual domain over love and war, the Seidr magic that operates through altered states of consciousness and the knowledge of hidden things, her relationship with the mysterious absent husband Odr and the golden tears she weeps for him, her role as Vanadis and her connection to the Disir who protect families across the generations. It traces the etymology of Friday back to her name, examines the scholarly debate about her relationship to Frigg, and follows her legacy from the pre-Christian Norse world into the medieval documentation of the tradition, the Romantic revival, and the contemporary world of Asatru, neo-paganism, popular culture, and feminist spirituality.

This is the story of a goddess who refused to be simple, who combined love and war and magic and grief in proportions that would have been impossible for a merely human figure to bear, and who has been returning, in new forms, to the world's attention ever since the day the Norse tradition first called her the Lady.