Collective powers
Besides the named goddesses, the lore is full of female beings who act in groups: the Disir, the Norns, and the Valkyries. They govern the things that matter most, which are kinship, fate, and death.
The boundaries between them are not sharp. The poems sometimes call a Valkyrie a dis, or speak of Norns where we would expect Disir. That blurring is itself a piece of evidence. It suggests one very old idea, of powerful female spirits bound to human lives, which different times and places drew in different ways.
The Disir
The word dis means "lady." The Disir are female spirits attached to a family or a person, and most often they seem to be the family's own dead women: mothers and foremothers who continue to guard, guide, and sometimes warn their descendants. Freyja herself is called Vanadis, the dis of the Vanir.
The disablot
The sacrifice to the Disir, the disablot, is among the best attested of all heathen rites. In Norway and Iceland the sagas place it at Winter Nights, in mid-October, when the household gathered at the start of the winter half of the year. In Sweden it was held in late winter at Uppsala, together with a great assembly and market called the Disting, the Thing of the Disir. A fair of that name is still held there.
One saga mentions a hall of the dis, the disarsal, at Uppsala. Others describe disablot as a household feast, sometimes presided over by a woman of the family. Women's names such as Thordis, Asdis, and Vigdis keep the word alive to this day.
Mothers' Night and the Idisi
The idea is far older than the sagas and far wider than Scandinavia. Bede records that the heathen English kept the night before midwinter as Modraniht, the Night of the Mothers. A tenth-century German charm tells how the Idisi, a host of women, sat down upon a battlefield, some fastening fetters and some loosening them. And the Roman-period altars and stones to the Matronae, more than a thousand of them, show the Mothers being thanked by name, in stone, a thousand years before the sagas were written.
A warning from the sagas
The Disir are not always gentle. In one Icelandic tale a young man named Thidrandi answers a knock at the door during the Winter Nights feast and is cut down by nine women in black, who ride from the north before nine women in white, riding from the south, can reach him. The story was told by Christians to explain the change of faith, but it preserves a real belief: the Disir expect to be remembered, and they are powers to be treated with care.
Honoring the Disir is at the heart of what we do. Our own annual assembly is named Disting, and you can read about keeping Mothers' Night in The Distaff.
The Norns
The Norns are the shapers of fate. The poem Voluspa tells of three maidens, deep in knowledge, who come from the water beneath the world tree: Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld. They lay down laws, choose lives, and speak the fates of the children of men. Snorri adds that each day they draw water and clay from Urd's well to pour over the tree so that its branches will not wither.
The three names are often explained as Past, Present, and Future. That is close enough to be useful but tidier than the Norse. Urd is "what has come to be" and is the same word as the Old English wyrd. Verdandi is "what is coming to be." Skuld is "what is owed," that which must follow.
There are other Norns besides these three. Snorri says that Norns come to every child at birth, and he quotes an old poem which makes some of them divine kin, some of the elves, and some of the dwarfs. That, he explains, is why lives are so unequal. In one heroic poem they come by night to a newborn prince and twist the strands of his fate, fastening the golden threads across the sky. It is the clearest picture we have of fate as something spun.
The Norns did both good and ill. Great toil they shaped for me.
Runic inscription cut into the wall of a medieval Norwegian stave church
Not even the gods overrule the Norns. That thought, that there is an order older than any ruler, and that it is kept by women at a well, is one of the most striking in the whole of the lore.
The Valkyries
A Valkyrie is a "chooser of the slain." Valkyries ride to battle at Odin's bidding, decide who will fall, and bring the chosen to Valhalla, where they carry the horn and serve the ale. Small silver figures of women holding out a drinking horn, and scenes of the same kind on the picture stones of Gotland, are usually read as Valkyries welcoming the dead.
One of the starkest early pictures of them is not romantic. In the poem Darradarljod, preserved in Njal's Saga, twelve Valkyries weave the outcome of a battle on a loom strung with men's entrails and weighted with severed heads, beating the weft with swords. The image joins the two great female arts of the lore, weaving and the shaping of fate, at their most terrible.
The heroic poems give Valkyries names and wills of their own. Sigrdrifa, woken from an enchanted sleep by the hero Sigurd, does not fall into his arms. She teaches him: runes for victory, for healing, for safe childbirth, for calming the sea, and then a long counsel on how to live honorably. She is one of the great teachers in northern literature, and she is a woman instructing a man.
The fylgja and the hamingja
Two more beings belong here. The fylgja, or "follower," is a spirit that accompanies a person or a family. It may appear in dreams as an animal that reflects the person's nature, or as a woman, the fylgjukona, who protects the family and passes from one generation to the next. The hamingja is a family's luck, sometimes imagined as a female guardian who can be inherited or lent.
What this means for Heathen women
It would be a mistake to draw a simple line from these powers to the lives of real women in the past, which were often hard and unfree. But the pattern in the lore is plain. Where the old North imagined the guardianship of a family, the shaping of a life, and the passage into death, it imagined women. A religion with that at its roots has no ground on which to treat its living women as an afterthought.