In my language the ordinary word for a woman, Frau, is at root the same word as her name. Freyja means the Lady. It is a title of rank, and it should make us suspicious of every book that introduces her as "the Norse goddess of love and beauty" and leaves it there.
She is a goddess of love. The sources say so. But they say a great deal more, and when we stop at love we lose most of her.
She takes half the dead
The poem Grimnismal describes the halls of the gods one by one. Of Freyja's it says that her field is called Folkvang, that there she decides who shall sit where, and that each day she chooses half of those slain in battle; Odin has the other half.
The warriors' paradise that popular culture knows as Valhalla is, on this evidence, only half the story. An equal share of the battle-dead belong to her, and in the wording of the poem it is she who chooses.
Nor is her hall for warriors alone. In Egil's Saga, when the old poet Egil has shut himself away to die of grief, his daughter Thorgerd is sent for. Asked whether she has eaten, she answers that she has had no supper and will have none until she sups with Freyja. A woman of tenth-century Iceland, speaking of her own death, expects to go to the Lady.
She is the mistress of seidr
Snorri tells us that it was Freyja who first taught the Aesir seidr, the art of the seeress. Odin, the great seeker of knowledge, learned it from her. Whatever we make of the mysterious Gullveig in Voluspa, burned three times and three times reborn, many scholars see Freyja behind her as well.
So the most powerful magic in the Norse world has a source, and the source is a goddess.
She refuses
A pattern runs through the myths that is easy to miss. Again and again, giants try to get hold of Freyja. The builder who offers to raise the walls of Asgard names his price: the sun, the moon, and Freyja. The giant Thrym steals Thor's hammer and will return it only in exchange for Freyja as his bride. Another giant, drunk in Odin's hall, boasts that he will carry her off.
She is, in other words, what the enemies of the gods most desire: with the sun and moon, the thing without which the world would not be worth having. And she is never handed over. When the gods suggest that she really might marry Thrym to get the hammer back, her fury shakes the hall and bursts the great necklace on her breast. It is Thor who has to put on the bridal veil.
This is a goddess whose consent matters, to put it mildly.
She is slandered, and it tells us something
In the poem Lokasenna, Loki insults each of the gods in turn, and what he says of Freyja is that she has taken every god and elf in the hall as a lover. A late and hostile Christian tale goes further, with a story about how she paid for her necklace.
A good deal of the modern "love goddess" rests on these two passages. Notice what they are: an accusation made by the gods' chief slanderer, and a story written nearly four centuries after conversion to show the old gods as shameful. Notice too that Loki accuses the male gods of cowardice and unmanliness, and the goddesses, almost without exception, of sex. Insults reveal the values of those who use them.
That she was taken seriously as a holy power is shown by an incident at the Icelandic assembly in the summer of 999. A Christian named Hjalti recited a mocking little verse there that likened Freyja to a dog. He was prosecuted for blasphemy and outlawed.
She is honored
We have one precious glimpse of her worship. In the poem Hyndluljod, Freyja helps a young man named Ottar to learn his ancestry, and explains why she favors him. He built her an altar of heaped stones, she says. The rock has turned to glass, and he has reddened it again and again with the blood of offerings. Ottar, she adds, has always trusted in the goddesses.
Her name is also written across the map of Scandinavia, in dozens of farms, fields, and groves. People do not name their land for a figure of minor importance.
Why it matters
I do not want to trade one narrow picture for another. Freyja is desire, and gold, and the tears she weeps for her lost husband as she searches the world for him. Love is not a lesser thing than war, and I would not take it from her.
But when a goddess who rules a hall of the dead, who taught Odin his magic, and whom no power in the nine worlds can compel is summed up as beautiful, something has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong in a familiar way. We do it to goddesses for the same reason we do it to women. She deserves to be seen whole. So do we.
For more on Freyja and her company, see Goddesses of the North.