Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

In the Edda poem Oddrunargratr Frigg is named together with Freyja as a goddess to be invoked by women in labour. She appears also in the opening chapter of Volsunga Saga as concerned with the birth of children. King Rerir and his wife besought the gods for a child, and it was Frigg who heard their request and asked Odin to grant it. In view of this association with the family it is interesting to note that the day of this goddess, Friday, was long considered in Germany to be a lucky one for marriages.

It seems probable that there was some connexion between Frigg and her influence over the begetting of children and a group of supernatural women who were long remembered in north-western Europe for their power to determine the destiny of the new-born child. In the eleventh century Bishop Burchard of Worms had to rebuke women for their continued belief in three women known as the Parcae, who could affect a child’s future; he stated that it was a common custom to lay three places at table for them.¹ There are stories of such women in Old Norse literature; sometimes they were called the Norns. Saxo (VI, 181) has a tale of Fridleif, a Danish king, who took his three-year-old son Olaf into the house of the gods to pray to ‘three maidens sitting on three seats’. The first two granted the boy the gift of charm and generosity, but the third decreed that in spite of this he should be niggardly in the giving of gifts.

Inscriptions are known from Roman times in Germany, Holland, and Britain in honour of groups of female beings, generally known as ‘the mothers’. Sometimes alone, but often in groups of two or three, they are shown standing, or seated on chairs or stools, sometimes with loose flowing hair, holding fruit or horns of plenty. They are occasionally accompanied by figures in cloaks and hoods, the Genii Cucullati, or ‘hooded ones’. Carved stones in their honour were set up from the first century A.D. Many are in the Rhineland, but some are further afield, and a few were erected in northern England on Hadrian’s Wall. The names given in the inscriptions emphasize the power of giving which these beings possessed; names or titles such as Gabiae, meaning ‘richly giving’, and variations like Alagabiae, Dea Garmangabis are found. Female deities of this kind seem to have been worshipped by both the Celts and the Germans, and they were evidently associated with fertility and with the protection of hearth and home. In some form they were known to the Anglo-Saxons, for Bede mentions them in De Temporum Ratione (13), where he tells us that the night before Christmas was known in heathen times as Modraniht, ‘the night of the mothers’. There seems little doubt that they were closely connected with the birth of children.

It will be remembered that the fertility goddess Nerthus was said to have had a sanctuary on an island. A possible centre for the tribes Tacitus mentions as her worshippers would be Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen stands, and on which Leire, the seat of the Danish kings in early times, was built. A twelfth-century place-name, Niartharum (later Naerum), supports this. Sjaelland (Zealand) was associated with a goddess in Viking times, for Snorri tells us the story of how it was formed by Gefion, whose sanctuary stood at Leire, and who ploughed round the island and separated it from Sweden (see page 45). She seems to be a Danish goddess connected with the plough and with agriculture, who married Skiold, or Scyld, one of the traditional god-kings who came across the sea bringing peace and prosperity to Denmark (page 104). She shows resemblances to Freyja, one of whose names was Gefn, and the names Gefion and Gefn bear a significant likeness to the names of the Mothers in the Roman period, linking up with their powers of giving. Gefion, like Freyja, had a necklace said to have been given to her by a fair youth in exchange for her favours, and she was thought to have some links with the dead, since Snorri stated that unmarried girls went to her after death.

The memory of a goddess who was open-handed in her gifts to men, associated with the earth, survived in Anglo-Saxon England, and has left traces in an old English charm to make the land fertile. This poetic charm is long and complicated in the form in which it was written down, and has obviously been subjected to Christian editing. The following passage however remains as part of the invocation:

I stand facing the East; I pray for favour.

I pray to the Great Lord; I pray to the Mighty Ruler;

I pray to the Holy Guardian of Heaven.

I pray to Earth and High Heaven.

At this point incense, fennel, hallowed soap, and salt were directed to be rubbed on to the wood of the plough, and seed (to be obtained from a beggar-man) also placed upon it. The chant then continues:

Erce, Erce, Erce, Earth Mother,

may the Almighty Eternal Lord

grant you fields to increase and flourish,

fields fruitful and healthy,

shining harvest of shafts of millet,

broad harvests of barley…

Hail to thee, Earth, Mother of Men!

Bring forth now in God’s embrace,

filled with good for the use of men.

Here the symbol of marriage between heaven and earth is an effective poetic image, and one that seems likely to be based on an earlier, half-remembered religious tradition. Attempts have been made to interpret Erce as the name of a forgotten earth goddess, but the word may be no more than a cry of invocation. Thus while there is no direct evidence for rites like those of Nerthus and Freyr in heathen England, there are hints that they were not wholly forgotten. The name Gefion seems to be linked with Old English geofon, used in poetry as a name for the sea.

Although the conception of the mother goddess remains a shadowy one, and Frigg in particular is an obscure figure, it is no longer customary to dismiss her as of little importance, and to explain her away as a purely literary creation. As Odin’s wife and queen of Asgard, she plays a consistent part in the poetry, and lack of detail about her in the myths and the failure to find places named after her may be due to the fact that she was remembered under other titles. She has become overshadowed in Snorri’s pages by the more evocative figure of Freyja, and we must now consider why this is so.

5. The Goddess Freyja

When Snorri first introduced Freyja into his account of Asgard, he declared that she was the most renowned of the goddesses, and that she alone of the gods yet lived. This implies that he knew something of her worship continuing into his own day in Scandinavia, and it is well known that fertility cults die hard, particularly in remote country districts. The impressive list of places called after Freyja, especially in south Sweden and southwest Norway, shows that Snorri’s estimate was no idle one. There is no case for assuming her to be a mere invention of the poets.

Freyja was called the goddess or bride of the Vanir, and one of Loki’s scandalous assertions was that she had love-dealings with her brother Freyr. Snorri puts the matter differently: he tells us that brother and sister marriages were customary among the Vanir, and that Freyr and Freyja were the children of Njord and his unnamed sister (possibly Nerthus). Freyja was associated with love affairs between men and women, and it was said to be good to call on her for help in such cases. Loki accused her of taking all the gods and elves for lovers, while the giantess Hyndla taunted her with roaming out at night like a she-goat among the bucks. A similar insulting comparison was made by an early Christian poet in Iceland, who coupled her name with Odin, and called her a bitch. However, no stories of unseemly behaviour by Freyja have survived, with the exception of a late account in Flateyjarbok of how she won her necklace by sleeping one night in turn with each of the four dwarfs who forged it. There are several cases of giants who wanted to carry her off, but she does not seem to have given them any encouragement. However, the jokes made in ?rymskvi?a about Freyja’s eagerness for the bridal night, which, according to Loki, had given her an amazing appetite and burning eyes, fit in with the general picture, and confirm the idea that ritual marriage formed some part of the rites of her cult.

Freyja is not concerned only with human love. She seems to have had some authority in the world of death. In Egils Saga the hero’s daughter, a young woman called Thorgerda, threatened to