Goddesses of the North

More goddesses than you were told

Popular accounts of Norse myth name three or four goddesses and move on. The sources name dozens.

The thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson, in the Prose Edda, insists that the goddesses, the Asynjur, are "no less holy and no less powerful" than the gods. He then lists more than a dozen of them by name in a single passage. Outside Iceland, well over a thousand altars and votive stones from the Roman-period Rhineland and the North Sea coast are dedicated to female powers who appear in no myth at all.

What we lack is not goddesses but stories. The men who wrote down the myths were Christians working centuries after conversion, and they preserved far more about Odin and Thor than about Frigg or Sif. The honest response is to say what survives and to resist filling the silence with invention.

Frigg

Frigg is the wife of Odin, foremost of the Asynjur, and mistress of the hall Fensalir. In the poem Lokasenna it is said of her that she knows the fates of all, though she does not speak them. She alone shares Odin's high seat, from which the worlds can be seen. Her great myth is the death of her son Baldr: she takes oaths from all things not to harm him, and grieves when one small plant, overlooked, is used to kill him.

Her worship is old. The Lombards told how Frea, as they called her, outwitted her husband Godan to win a victory and a name for their people. A tenth-century German charm calls on Frija and her sister Volla. Friday is her day in English. Swedish country people called the stars of Orion's belt Frigg's distaff, a memory that links her to spinning.

Freyja

Freyja belongs to the Vanir, the divine family that came to live among the Aesir after a war between them. She is the most vividly drawn goddess in the sources and the most often flattened into a single role. She is a goddess of love and desire, certainly. She is also a goddess of the dead: the poem Grimnismal says that she chooses half of those slain in battle each day for her field Folkvang, and Odin has the other half.

She is the first teacher of seidr, the magic of the seeress. She owns the necklace Brisingamen and a cloak of falcon feathers, rides in a chariot drawn by cats, and weeps tears of red gold for her lost husband Od. Her name simply means "Lady." We have written more about her in The Distaff.

Idunn, Sif, and Skadi

Idunn keeps the apples that hold off old age from the gods. When she is carried away by the giant Thjazi the gods grow gray, and they do not rest until she is brought back. Without her there are no gods to tell stories about.

Sif is the wife of Thor, known for her golden hair, which Loki cut and the dwarfs remade in real gold. Little else is told of her, though many suspect a goddess of the grain field behind that image.

Skadi is a giant's daughter who becomes a goddess on her own terms. When the gods kill her father Thjazi she arms herself, walks into Asgard alone, and demands compensation. She receives a husband, chosen by his feet alone, and it turns out to be the sea god Njord. The marriage fails: he cannot bear her mountains, and she cannot sleep for the gulls on his shore. She goes home to hunt on skis with her bow. Place names in Sweden and Norway suggest that she was once widely honored.

Hel and Ran

Hel rules the realm of the dead that bears her name, where most people go who die of sickness or age. Snorri paints her grimly, half dark and half pale. The older poems are more neutral, and many Heathens today regard her as a stern but fair host to the ancestors.

Ran is the goddess of the deep sea, who gathers the drowned in her net. With her husband Aegir she has nine daughters, the waves.

The wider company of the Asynjur

Snorri's list gives a glimpse of a divine household in which each goddess has her own office. Most are known from his few lines alone.

Goddesses beyond the Norse sources

Nerthus

Tacitus describes a goddess he calls Nerthus, "that is, Mother Earth," honored in common by a group of peoples near the Baltic. She had a sacred grove on an island and a wagon covered with a cloth that only her priest might touch. When he sensed her presence she was drawn through the land by cows. Those were days of rejoicing: no one went to war, and all iron was locked away. Afterward the wagon was washed in a hidden lake by slaves who, Tacitus says, were then drowned. It is one of the oldest and most detailed accounts of Germanic worship that we possess, and it does not spare us the cost.

Nehalennia

More than a hundred and sixty altars to Nehalennia have been recovered from the coast of the Netherlands, most of them set up in the second and third centuries by merchants and ship captains giving thanks for a safe crossing of the North Sea. She is shown seated, with a basket of fruit, a dog at her side, and often a ship's prow beneath her foot.

The Matronae

Well over a thousand votive stones and altars from the Rhineland and beyond are dedicated to the Mothers, the Matronae or Matres, many with Germanic names. They are nearly always shown as three seated women holding fruit or bread. They were honored by soldiers and farmers, women and men alike, and they are very likely kin to the Disir of the later North. See Disir, Norns, and Valkyries.

Eostre and Hretha

The English monk Bede, writing in 725, says that the Anglo-Saxons named two spring months for goddesses: Hrethmonath for Hretha, and Eosturmonath for Eostre, whose feasts were kept in that month. That one passage is our only direct witness. It has been doubted, but the name is old and has relatives in other languages, and a group of Rhineland inscriptions to matrons with a similar name lends it support. The English and German words for Easter come from her month.

Tamfana, Baduhenna, and others

Tacitus mentions a temple of Tamfana destroyed by Roman troops during an autumn festival in 14 CE, and a grove of Baduhenna in Frisia. A German charm names Sunna, the Sun, and her sister Sinthgunt. Later German folklore tells of Holle and Perchta, who reward diligent spinners and lead the spirits in the nights of midwinter. Whether these two descend from heathen goddesses is debated, and we treat them as folklore that deserves respect on its own account.

Honoring the goddesses today

Modern Heathens honor the goddesses in blot, at household shrines, and in the conduct of ordinary life. Frigg is often thanked for the order of the home and the keeping of confidences; Eir is called on in illness; Skadi is honored by those who love winter and wild country; Freyja by those who need courage as much as by those in love.

Two misunderstandings are worth clearing away. First, the goddesses are not reserved for women, nor the gods for men. Women have always been devoted to Odin and Thor, and men to Freyja and Frigg. Second, the goddesses are not interchangeable expressions of one feminine principle. Each is herself.